Yay, I am thinking too much about fandom again!

[oloriel]

This is again mostly for the Tolkien fans (or the incurably curious) on my flist - the rest may want to skip this for major weirdness. Not for the faint of heart. May contain zombies and other dead people.

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So I have started to write my first story for the Akallabêth in August project.

As per usual I can't help but having waaaay to much backstory. And questions.

The story deals with the "growing Númenorean obsession with death, longevity, and preservation", and is tentatively titled "The Embalmer's Apprentice". And I have to decide just how to interpret the bit in the Silmarillion about "Yet they achieved only the art of preserving incorrupt the dead flesh of Men".

So!
[Poll #1425973]

The Zombie question is random and has nothing to do with the story; it just popped up in my brain while researching what little we know of Númenorean preservation techniques (that were supposedly born out of the attempt of finding a way of bringing the dead back to life, though I find it more logically to place the two research fields parallel to each other instead of making one the result of the other).
The first question is really a bit of a bother. I mean, "incorrupt" is a big word. And if the purpose is basically to keep the bodies from rotting until some alchemist finally finds a way of bringing the dead back to life, something like the Egyptian mummies would be totally impractical (who'd want to be brought back to life into a brittle hull without brains and hearts and all that). Personally I tend towards the "Lady Dai" variant, because THAT would be really bloody good conservation. I mean, she's been dead for 2000 years, but she's in the state of the shortly dead - she's still got blood in her veins, and her joints still work, AFTER 2000 YEARS! Now that's a body to be reincarnated in (well, aside from the herniated disc and the gall stones...)!
Trouble is, nobody really knows just why exactly she was preserved so well. When she was buried, people apparently went to immense amounts of trouble, but it's hard to say just which part of the puzzle is the relevant one, which was just random, and why it all worked. If I wanted to use that for a story, shitloads of research would be necessary. In the middle of thesis preparation.
On the other hand, the much easier "remove the organs and dry the rest" is so unsatisfying. Even if it probably is what Tolkien had in mind, for lack of feasible alternatives at the time. (Then again you never really know.)

Blah.
Let's see what you think.

Comments

[ladyelleth.livejournal.com]

How did zombies come into the world, then, out of curiosity? That is, which tradition of zombies are you going by, the African/Caribbean one, the (SE)European one, the popular culture one? That arguably is doing a lot of mixing and matching in all three mythologies, sometimes adding sparkles, but then that (the mixing, not the sparkles) is by no means a new thing - after all there are some vampire traditions that grant the undead/revenants the ability to shapeshift into wolves (hah!), for example. I'd argue that there is quite a difference between the bites of vampires (which make me think of a voluntary, somewhat calculated act that didn't always result in 'turning') vs. a werewolf attack (which was essentially just that, an animal attacking a person, happening to bite and transmit a curse/virus/whatever) that was probably modelled on real-life rabies transmission, which I always thought of the source of both werewolves and the popular culture zombie virus, if quite independently of each other. But you're the Ethnologist here, and if you're saying that the zombies plagiarized the vampires and werewolves, alright... ;)

But then that is quite a bit removed fom Númenor.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Obviously not the popular culture one, because that would be perfectly congruent with the "zombie virus" business. I was rather thinking of the African/ Caribbean version, really, seeing how that's where the name comes from.
The European revenant tradition allows for brainless half-rotten corpses as well, it is true - but these were originally no special kind of "zombie", but basically part of the vampire family. As I said yesterday, the turn towards vampires as attractive (whether or not they sparkle) and at least partly in charge of their own actions, capable of volition, is a Romantic notion. It is of course the more popular reading today.
I am assuming that the closer-to-the-original vampire mythology - disgusting, half-rotted creatures that come out of graves to stomp around brainlessly - merged with the exotic zombie mythology because of that Romantic development: If Vampires Are Sexy, The Ugly Undead Must Be Something Else. Zombies seemed to fit the bill. And thus the slave revenants that did only as they're told by whoever brought them back were turned into creatures that lust for brains like vampires lust for blood, and pass their zombie-ness on like vampires pass on vampirism or werewolves pass on lycanthropy (which, yes, may well have been an attempt to explain rabies, and which, yes, likely inspired the "virus" reading, but that was not the point, nor did I dispute it). They came in to fill the hole that was left when vampires stopped being half-rotted corpses and turned into suave counts with swishing capes. What they should rather be comparable to, in European terms, is golems.
The zombies, of course, do no plagiarising, lacking the free will necessary to do so. ;) Whether or not the pop-culture interpretation plagiarises the vampire/ werewolf genre is hard to tell; more likely it is feeding on ignorance of the origins of vampire stories and the conceived need for disgusting, dull humanoid revenant.
If that makes any sense.

It is! And we only got there because the "revived body that lacks free will of its own and thus makes a fine brainless slave"-zombie, poor thing, is being suppressed by the "BRAAAAAAAAINS" zombie horde...

[ladyelleth.livejournal.com]

Lyra erklärt die Welt, keine weiteren Fragen. ;)

Mixed approach with ignorance of origins aside, I still like the zombie virus. I suppose I'd also like it if they were the original vampires, if that is any consolation. And this was quite an enlightening conversation.

It is! And we only got there because the "revived body that lacks free will of its own and thus makes a fine brainless slave"-zombie, poor thing, is being suppressed by the "BRAAAAAAAAINS" zombie horde...

Poor original zombies indeed, and in that case it's only fair to give them a bit of a chance to shine. I admit that last night I was thinking only of pop-culture zombies, but in the way you put it I might just be able to accept the Númenorean kind of zombie. Or if you don't want to go quite so far (not sure how sophisticated you are imagining Númenorean medicine), people waking from apparent death and appearing as zombies due to the substances they were treated with in preservation?

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Ich hätte doch meinem Originalplan folgen und auf Lehramt studieren sollen... >_>


I figured as much ;)
But I think Númenorean medicine is certainly sophisticated enough to know whether or not someone is dead. No Romeo and Juliet bullshit in the Land of Gift! Whether or not fubu powder gets used to, um, motivate the poor slaves that had to row Ar-Pharazôn's fleet is of course a different question... but that is again waaay after the time I'm currently looking at. And again a different Zombie genre/theory, anyway.