guest bloggers Nicholas Gentile and Aylin Orhan, on Eragon

Magic and the Environment

For those unfamiliar with it, the plot of the Eragon series is comparable with a medieval Star Wars. For those who have read it, this description does not do the story justice but it is fairly accurate. The story takes place in the land of Alagaësia, a land permeated with magic. While magic is present throughout the land, there is one location where it is greatest in concentration and effect: Du Weldenvarden – “The Guarding Forest,” home to a highly magical race of beings called elves.

   

 Du Weldenvarden

According to the legend, Du Weldenvarden was once a completely normal and unimpressive forest – not unlike many temperate forests in the real world. However, this changed drastically with the arrival of the elves. The elves are a humanoid race that inherently posses magical powers, and who can use this ability to shape and effect nature. When they moved into the region now known as Du Weldenvarden, they used magic to enhance the growth of the forest, causing it to spread and develop in every direction. Once the forest had grown, they placed enchantments all along its borders. The elves’ magic is conveyed through spoken word, and for that reason they sing to the forest in order to affect it. As Eragon’s elf companion Arya explains as they make their way through Du Weldenvarden en route to the capital city of Ellesméra:

“It is to keep the forest healthy and fertile. Every spring we sing for the trees, we sing for the plants, and we sing for the animals. Without us, Du Weldenvarden would be half its size.” As if to emphasize her point, birds, deer, squirrels – red and gray – striped badgers, foxes, rabbits, wolves, frogs, toads, tortoises and every other nearby animal forsook their hiding place and began to rush madly about with a cacophony of yelps and cries. “They are searching for mates,” explained Arya. “All across Du Weldenvarden, in each of our cities, elves are singing [this song]. The more who participate, the stronger the spell, and the greater Du Weldenvarden will be this year.” (Eldest, 214)

   

 Arya

The elves are a race that will never have to contend with a major environmental disaster. They coexist perfectly with the natural world, forming a perfect symbiotic relationship. Unlike societies that evolve apart from the natural world (such as our own), utilizing technology and taking advantage of the natural world strictly with our own gains in mind, they progress in direct relation to their environment.

In large part, environmental crises are a result of humanity's disconnection from the natural world, brought about not only by increasing technology but also by particularization; that is, a mentality of specialization that fails to recognize the interconnectedness of all things. – Thomas K. Dean

There are no poor elves, none starve, and there is little conflict in general. It is the closest thing to a utopian society, yet it is entirely natural. The only problem with this approach is the possibility of stagnation. Because they have reached a type of symbiosis with the environment, neither the elves nor the environment have any reason to change at all. This could be construed as either positive or negative, as it is essentially perfect but will never change without outside intervention. Coincidentally, the only real conflict faced by the elves is intrusion by “less natural” races from outside of their forest, specifically humans.

The interconnectedness of things is the key point of elvish philosophy. This mentality is most readily comparable to the original Native Americans. The feeling of connection with nature if what drives this nature focused ecological mindset.

Oromis whispered, “Open your mind Eragon. Open your mind and listen to the world around you, to the thoughts of every being in this glade, from the ants in the trees to the worms in the ground. Listen until you can hear them all and you understand their purpose and nature. Listen, and when you hear no more, come tell me what you have learned.’” (Eldest, 290)

While not actually human, the Elves represent an ideal relationship with the earth and environment. Modern society relies on second-hand knowledge, not knowledge gained from experience or interaction with the environment. There is an inherent knowledge gained from a connectedness with the earth. Elves are a representation of ancient people in the way that their knowledge was gained from nature. They learned from the animals and the trees and the patterns of nature and through that became an essential element within the natural system of the forest. Even though they aren’t real, there are still important lessons the elves can teach us.

Bibliography

 "Christopher Paloilini Biography." World Biography. Advameg, Inc., n.d. Web. <http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ow-Sh/Paolini-Christopher.html>.

Dean, Thomas K. "What Is Eco-Criticism?" What Is Eco-Criticism? The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, n.d. Web.

<http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/defining/dean>.

Paolini, Christopher. Eldest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Print.

Parkinson, Matthew. "BoxOfficeBoredom.com." 2012 :. N.p., 20 Apr. 2012. Web. <http://boxofficeboredom.com/2012/?w=16>.

guest blogger Katie Cavanaugh, on Durham, NC

Durham, North Carolina

Katie Cavanaugh

            Durham, North Carolina is a medium-sized city situated in the middle of the state. As of the 2010 census, it had a population of just fewer than 230,000 people. Not only is Durham famously the home of Duke University, it is also an important vertex of the Research Triangle (which also consists of Raleigh and Chapel Hill), demonstrating the high level of academics and intellect in the city. The Durham that I knew when I was growing up has changed significantly even in just the last decade. What were tobacco factories when I was five years old have now been converted into popular restaurants and stores. Going back even further, the change from the grasslands and mountains of the Piedmont region is astronomical. We think of cities of being unchanging; maps prove this perception wrong. People tend to assume what they see is what was always there. This essay attempts to illustrate how Durham is a “lost ecology” through this change, based on “the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it” (Glotfelty). Moreover, in re-discovering this reformation, one “cannot do the reforming, of course, but…can help with the understanding” (Glotfelty). Looking back over time, you can get to the point to what was there before the city even existed.

            Looking back over time, we try to recover what was lost: to picture it in our minds, to understand life before us. We go back to the earliest point we can find, like this hand drawn map of Durham in 1863. The simplicity of this map alludes to the simplicity of the time and the little development of the city at the time. The amount of blank space of this map encourages the imagination. What was there? Yes, there are roads and rivers, but what about the people? The houses? The office buildings? The real part of what Durham looked like then is lost and up to the reader to decide. 

Figure 1. Before Durham. We cannot recover this, and it has not been documented in ways that we recognize today. Everything else is left to the imagination.

Figure 2. Lewis Blount. This Map of Durham as I Remember in 1867-1868. Drawn from Memory Entirely and No Attempt Made at Correct Angles or Measurements.

           

It’s amazing, frankly, at how drastic the change is from then to now. Obviously Durham has developed, but simply wrap your brain around the difference between the map in Figure 2 and Figure 3, what we have today. In the map in Figure 2, Durham seems almost like a fairy tale. No one today really knows what it was like back then. It’s based on imagination. Now, with the technology used in Figure 3, you can find your own street, your own house, and recognize that place where you walk your dog or where you went to high school. Trace it back and really understand the change. We go from this satellite picture of Durham back to European settlers, and then back to the photograph of the tree in the Piedmont. Every time there was development, some of the natural landscape was lost.

  

Figure 3. Google map.

Works Cited

Figure 1. Pardue, Donald L. Fields of Gold. 2009. Photograph. NCPedia, Chatham County, NC.

Figure 2. Blount, Lewis. "This Map of Durham as I Remember in 1867-1868. Drawn from Memory Entirely and No Attempt Made at Correct Angles or Measurements." 1923. Photograph. Digital Durham, Durham, NC.

Figure 3. "Google Map Maker." Google Map Maker. Google, 25 Oct. 2012. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. <https://www.google.com/mapmaker?ll=35.984118,-78.865356>.

Glotfelty, Cheryll. "What Is Ecocriticism?" The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, n.d. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. <http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/defining/glotfelty/>.

           

First post

Compared to a lot of Americans, I have not lived in very many places. After going to college in my home town (Buffalo, NY), I left in order to go to graduate school (first Washington, DC, and then Chapel Hill, NC). I then moved to the Boston area to take my first academic job. I lived in the western suburbs of Belmont and Arlington, and then moved to Cambridge five years ago. I move in small increments: all three places, it turned out, were within three miles of each other. I was, and continue to be, very attached to Buffalo—Kenmore, really—but it wasn’t until moving to Cambridge that I discovered a deep connection to place, to a home, a nest—and to a garden. My love of my place—a condo on the first floor of a two-family condo near the Fresh Pond Reservoir, proximity to which is a major reason for my settled happiness here—has spilled over into my academic life, and my academic life has spilled over into my love of place.

One of the results of this mix is this blog, which I dedicate to discussing what I call “lost and invented ecologies.” I’ll get to the more scholarly aspects of this project in later posts, but in this initial post, I want to lay out the territory—the metaphors of place come easily to hand, I must say—and describe what I hope to accomplish.

Look at the banner that Shannon Garner-Balandrin, one of my graduate students, designed for me—and who also deserves credit for setting up this blog in the first place. The banner is a low-tech simulation of my place through time: the first photograph is intended to invoke the tundra of the PaleoIndian period, 12,500-10,000 BCE; the second, the swamps and woodlands of c. 1630, of the contact period between the Massachusett and the first European settlers. The third photograph is of my front yard when I moved in (the yard was used as a doggie playground), c. 2007; the fourth, a photograph of my garden, c. 2010. My place, then, is both a lost ecology—no more swamps and ponds and woods crisscrossed by hunting trails and paths to the water—and an ecology more recently invented by those first settlers (and later “Americans”) who shaped this land over four centuries by plotting out main roads and streets and directing where houses and driveways and trees and lawns would take their places. (The streets in my neighborhood make dead ends and take odd turns around what used to be water, then swamp, now subsidized housing. I’ll tell this story, too.)

Wherever humans have been and are, one sees double: lost because invented; invented because lost. Time itself is also responsible for lost ecologies, of course; in this instance, turning that tundra into something else, then into something else again. In this blog place, however, I will focus on human interventions into the ecosystem—and I am mindful that the word intervention suggests that humans are somehow not part of a given ecosystem, which is not true, really. This is another story that many are telling, and that I hope to add to.

Invented also includes the sense of imagined, and thus I also hope to tell stories of imagined, created places and worlds—not cities or other built spaces, but landscapes and ecosystems, sometimes described in great detail, sometimes simply gestured at: Tolkien’s Middle Earth, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, Dr. Seuss’ landscapes of Trufula Trees, Atlantis, Avalon, the Earthly Paradise, heaven (lost?), hell, and many more invented places.

The next set of posts will be written by a group of guest bloggers: several of my undergraduate students. I am finishing a seminar in which the focus was my research on lost and invented ecologies, and I invited them to make their own brief forays into lost and invented places. Most of them were interested in imaginary places, and I learned a great deal from them.