[MUSIC] This week we're going to put the concept of remediation to work as we begin to compare the three modes; Novel, Movie and Game. By Mode, we mean simply the medium of presentation. Film is a mode, writing is a mode, painting, photography, sculpture are all Modes. Obviously, what's the oldest mode of storytelling that the human species has ever engaged in? >> Oral storytelling. >> Yeah, oral story telling. You know, people sitting around the fire telling stories of their adventures out slaying the wooly mammoth, no doubt. The Lord of the Rings continually celebrates. The old tales, which were, clearly, oral tales. And many of the sources that Tolkien based his work on, right, were originally oral tales like, the Elder Eddas, the Kalevala, the Finnish epic Kalevala and many other resources. He was a scholar of medieval literatures as we know, and he's very attracted to the, the great stories and so is one of his characters. One character in particular just loves the stories of dragons. And elves, He's particularly fascinated with elves, you remember who it is. >> Sam. >> Yeah, Sam, Sam does. And in the Two Towers, a novel that we're not reading for this course. But I hope many of you've read it already, and that you were so intrigued with Tolkien that if you haven't read it, that you're going to go out read the Two Towers, that's the second volume of the Lord of the Rings. Sam delivers a wonderful speech about the power of the great old songs and tales. Here's a quote from the novel. Sam says. I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We're in one, of course, but I mean, put into words you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with read and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say "Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring". And they'll say, "Yes, that's one of my favorite stories". Frodo was very brave, wasn't he, dad? Yes, my boy. The famousest of the hobbits. And that's saying a lot. Peter Jackson includes this scene in his film of the Two Towers. It's really amazing scene. Let, let's look at Peter Jackson's handling of it. [MUSIC] >> I wonder if we'll ever be put into songs and tales. >> What? >> I wonder if people will ever say. Let's hear about Frodo and the ring. And they will say, yes, this is one of my favorite stories. Frodo was really courageous, wasn't he dad? Yes, my boy. Most famouses of hobbits and that's saying a lot. >> The game, Lord of the Rings Online. It has less success remediating our own narrative. It does try. If you look at this slide here this, of the Storyteller in the Green Dragon. If you walk close to that NPC, a little bubble comes over his head and he says have you come to hear a story? It's a kind of gesture toward the traditional oral narrative. Or there's another way that games handle it. There's a part of the epic quest, you go down the river Anduin with three companions that you've been adventuring with and then you pause by the bank of Anduin. And one of the instances is that you hear each of them relate their story. Still, it's really artificial. You know? You have to go, you have to zone into an instance. And then there's nothing for you to do, except to sit there and listen. You can see I have my little character. Quilp in this case, seated on the ground as if he's one of the group listening. And, they dramatize the story. You see the kind of misty thing sitting behind it. So, that's another way that the game tries to remediate the scene of telling, of an oral medium. You can actually gain a title as a storyteller. In this case Essiniel, one of my kins-mates has a title, Chronicler of Twilight, because she's done a deed that require her to talk to ten different people and hear there stories. It's an artificial method for remediating oral story storytelling but you can see the aspiration is there. So Chelsea can you think of other examples of oral storytelling. >> Well I think that, I think that for the kind of oral storytelling that we're talking about that sort of adds to the richness of the Lord of the Rings universe. I think that the kind of storytelling that you sometimes get in games in the form of exposition that gives you the character's back story or why you need to go kill this person is is a little bit different. I would say that oral storytelling sort of adds to the, the culture of the world in a way that exposition sort of adds to the storyline. >> Yeah, that's a good distinction. Another way to phrase it is that the scene of a storyteller is part of the remediation process. LOTRO is really trying to imitate there, at the campfire by the river and trying to imitate the setting of an old telling. An exposition doesn't. It's a, it's a, it's a cinematic, it's a cinematic convention that games have adopted. Sometimes with actual cut scenes of cinema as exposition. So another form of remediation is the attempt to include paintings or sculptures in another medium. The film has a number of scenes where the camera lingers over a painting or a sculpture. It's actually much easier for a visual medium like film to remediate sculpture or painting than a verbal medium like a novel to do it. Again, as a visual medium, games are able to remediate sculpture and paintings quite naturally. Lord of Rings online is just full of ruined sculptures, sculptural freezes, paintings on walls. They're everywhere. For poetry, or the novel, it's a much harder task to remediate a visual object. Poets have always tried to do it, it goes back to Homer and no doubt well before him. The ambition to, to paint in words. The scene of a picture. We actually, we even have a special word for this technique in poetry. We call it Ekphrasis. And Ekphrasis is simply defined as the verbal description of a visual mode such painting or sculpture. I have here an example of Ekphrasis. From The Canto of the Faerie Queene that we're going to read later in the course. These are just a few lines of poetry in a passage that actually goes on for four stanzas where Spenser describes the tapestries on the wall of Malacaster's castle. and you can see that some of the words are spelled in older spelling forms, but when you hear me read it, I think it should become very clear what's, what these words mean. In which with Cunning hand was portrayed the love of Venus and her paramour, The fayre Adonis turned to a flowre. A work of rare device, and wondrous wit. So can any of y'all remember instances in Tolkien's novel of Affraxis? >> There's a nice one from sort of fairly late on in the Fellowship of the Ring about the sword of Elendill. It says, the sword of Elendill was forged anew by Elvish smiths, and on its blade was traced a device of seven stars set between the crescent moon and the rayed sun, and about them was written many runes, for Aragorn son of Arathorn was going to war upon the marches of Mordor. >> That's a great example. Thank you, Killian. And it, is a good way to. To close this session, we've established the main principle in today's session that the treatment of one mode and another mode is something that really characterizes. All kinds of artworks, and all forms of artwork's relation to the past. [MUSIC]
