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Tolkien

Who Was Tolkien?

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) was a major scholar of the English language, specialising in Old and Middle English. Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford, he also wrote a number of stories, including most famously The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), which are set in a pre-historic era in an invented version of our world which he called by the Middle English name of Middle-earth. This was peopled by Men (and women), Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs (or Goblins) and of course Hobbits. He has regularly been condemned by the Eng. Lit. establishment, with honourable exceptions, but loved by literally millions of readers worldwide.

Childhood and Youth

The name “Tolkien” was believed by the family to be of German origin; Toll-kühn: foolishly brave, or stupidly clever—hence the pseudonym “Oxymore” which he occasionally used; however, this quite probably was a German rationalisation of an originally Baltic Tolkyn, or Tolkīn. In any case, his great-great grandfather John (Johann) Benjamin Tolkien came to Britain with his brother Daniel from Gdańsk in about 1772 and rapidly became thoroughly Anglicised. Certainly his father, Arthur Reuel Tolkien, considered himself nothing if not English. Arthur was a bank clerk, and went to South Africa in the 1890s for better prospects of promotion. There he was joined by his bride, Mabel Suffield, whose family were not only English through and through, but West Midlands since time immemorial. So John Ronald (“Ronald” to family and early friends) was born in Bloemfontein, S.A., on 3 January 1892. His memories of Africa were slight but vivid, including a scary encounter with a large hairy spider, and influenced his later writing to some extent; slight, because on 15 February 1896 his father died, and he, his mother and his younger brother Hilary returned to England—or more particularly, the West Midlands.

The West Midlands in Tolkien’s childhood were a complex mixture of the grimly industrial Birmingham conurbation, and the quintessentially rural stereotype of England, Worcestershire and surrounding areas: Severn country, the land of the composers Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Gurney, and more distantly the poet A. E. Housman (it is also just across the border from Wales). Tolkien’s life was split between these two: the then very rural hamlet of Sarehole, with its mill, just south of Birmingham; and darkly urban Birmingham itself, where he was eventually sent to King Edward’s School. By then the family had moved to King’s Heath, where the house backed onto a railway line—young Ronald’s developing linguistic imagination was engaged by the sight of coal trucks going to and from South Wales bearing destinations like” Nantyglo”,” Penrhiwceiber” and “Senghenydd”.

Then they moved to the somewhat more pleasant Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston. However, in the meantime, something of profound significance had occurred, which estranged Mabel and her children from both sides of the family: in 1900, together with her sister May, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church. From then on, both Ronald and Hilary were brought up in the faith of Pio Nono, and remained devout Catholics throughout their lives. The parish priest who visited the family regularly was the half-Spanish half-Welsh Father Francis Morgan.

Tolkien family life was generally lived on the genteel side of poverty. However, the situation worsened in 1904, when Mabel Tolkien was diagnosed as having diabetes, usually fatal in those pre-insulin days. She died on 14 November of that year leaving the two orphaned boys effectively destitute. At this point Father Francis took over, and made sure of the boys’ material as well as spiritual welfare, although in the short term they were boarded with an unsympathetic aunt-by-marriage, Beatrice Suffield, and then with a Mrs Faulkner.

By this time Ronald was already showing remarkable linguistic gifts. He had mastered the Latin and Greek which was the staple fare of an arts education at that time, and was becoming more than competent in a number of other languages, both modern and ancient, notably Gothic, and later Finnish. He was already busy making up his own languages, purely for fun. He had also made a number of close friends at King Edward’s; in his later years at school they met regularly after hours as the “T. C. B. S.” (Tea Club, Barrovian Society, named after their meeting place at the Barrow Stores) and they continued to correspond closely and exchange and criticise each other’s literary work until 1916.

However, another complication had arisen. Amongst the lodgers at Mrs Faulkner’s boarding house was a young woman called Edith Bratt. When Ronald was 16, and she 19, they struck up a friendship, which gradually deepened. Eventually Father Francis took a hand, and forbade Ronald to see or even correspond with Edith for three years, until he was 21. Ronald stoically obeyed this injunction to the letter. In the summer of 1911, he was invited to join a party on a walking holiday in Switzerland, which may have inspired his descriptions of the Misty Mountains, and of Rivendell. In the autumn of that year he went up to Exeter College, Oxford where he stayed, immersing himself in the Classics, Old English, the Germanic languages (especially Gothic), Welsh and Finnish, until 1913, when he swiftly though not without difficulty picked up the threads of his relationship with Edith. He then obtained a disappointing second class degree in Honour Moderations, the “midway” stage of a 4-year Oxford “Greats” (i.e. Classics) course, although with an “alpha plus” in philology. As a result of this he changed his school from Classics to the more congenial English Language and Literature. One of the poems he discovered in the course of his Old English studies was the Crist of Cynewulf—he was amazed especially by the cryptic couplet:

Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast

Ofer middangeard monnum sended

Which translates as:

Hail Earendel brightest of angels,

over Middle Earth sent to men.

(“Middangeard” was an ancient expression for the everyday world between Heaven above and Hell below.)

This inspired some of his very early and incohate attempts at realising a world of ancient beauty in his versifying.

In the summer of 1913 he took a job as tutor and escort to two Mexican boys in Dinard, France, a job which ended in tragedy. Though no fault of Ronald’s, it did nothing to counter his apparent predisposition against France and things French.

Meanwhile the relationship with Edith was going more smoothly. She converted to Catholicism and moved to Warwick, which with its spectacular castle and beautiful surrounding countryside made a great impression on Ronald. However, as the pair were becoming ever closer, the nations were striving ever more furiously together, and war eventually broke out in August 1914.

War, Lost Tales and Academia

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Tolkien did not rush to join up immediately on the outbreak of war, but returned to Oxford, where he worked hard and finally achieved a first-class degree in June 1915. At this time he was also working on various poetic attempts, and on his invented languages, especially one that he came to call Qenya [sic], which was heavily influenced by Finnish—but he still felt the lack of a connecting thread to bring his vivid but disparate imaginings together. Tolkien finally enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers whilst working on ideas of Earendel [sic] the Mariner, who became a star, and his journeyings. For many months Tolkien was kept in boring suspense in England, mainly in Staffordshire. Finally it appeared that he must soon embark for France, and he and Edith married in Warwick on 22 March 1916.

Eventually he was indeed sent to active duty on the Western Front, just in time for the Somme offensive. After four months in and out of the trenches, he succumbed to “trench fever”, a form of typhus-like infection common in the insanitary conditions, and in early November was sent back to England, where he spent the next month in hospital in Birmingham. By Christmas he had recovered sufficiently to stay with Edith at Great Haywood in Staffordshire.

During these last few months, all but one of his close friends of the “T. C. B. S.” had been killed in action. Partly as an act of piety to their memory, but also stirred by reaction against his war experiences, he had already begun to put his stories into shape, “… in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire” [Letters 66]. This ordering of his imagination developed into the Book of Lost Tales (not published in his lifetime), in which most of the major stories of the Silmarillion appear in their first form: tales of the Elves and the “Gnomes”, (i. e. Deep Elves, the later Noldor), with their languages Qenya and Goldogrin. Here are found the first recorded versions of the wars against Morgoth, the siege and fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond, and the tales of Túrin and of Beren and Lúthien.

Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, although periods of remission enabled him to do home service at various camps sufficiently well to be promoted to lieutenant. It was when he was stationed in the Hull area that he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and there in a grove thick with hemlock Edith danced for him. This was the inspiration for the tale of Beren and Lúthien, a recurrent theme in his “Legendarium”. He came to think of Edith as “Lúthien” and himself as “Beren”. Their first son, John Francis Reuel (later Father John Tolkien) had already been born on 16 November 1917.

When the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Tolkien had already been putting out feelers to obtain academic employment, and by the time he was demobilised he had been appointed Assistant Lexicographer on the New English Dictionary (the “Oxford English Dictionary”), then in preparation. While doing the serious philological work involved in this, he also gave one of his Lost Tales its first public airing—he read The Fall of Gondolin to the Exeter College Essay Club, where it was well received by an audience which included Neville Coghill and Hugo Dyson, two future “Inklings”. However, Tolkien did not stay in this job for long. In the summer of 1920 he applied for the quite senior post of Reader (approximately, Associate Professor) in English Language at the University of Leeds, and to his surprise was appointed.

At Leeds as well as teaching he collaborated with E. V. Gordon on the famous edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and continued writing and refining The Book of Lost Tales and his invented “Elvish” languages. In addition, he and Gordon founded a “Viking Club” for undergraduates devoted mainly to reading Old Norse sagas and drinking beer. It was for this club that he and Gordon originally wrote their Songs for the Philologists, a mixture of traditional songs and original verses translated into Old English, Old Norse and Gothic to fit traditional English tunes. Leeds also saw the birth of two more sons: Michael Hilary Reuel in October 1920, and Christopher Reuel in 1924. Then in 1925 the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford fell vacant; Tolkien successfully applied for the post.

Professor Tolkien, The Inklings and Hobbits

In a sense, in returning to Oxford as a Professor, Tolkien had come home. Although he had few illusions about the academic life as a haven of unworldly scholarship (see for example Letters 250), he was nevertheless by temperament a don’s don, and fitted extremely well into the largely male world of teaching, research, the comradely exchange of ideas and occasional publication. In fact, his academic publication record is very sparse, something that would have been frowned upon in these days of quantitative personnel evaluation.

However, his rare scholarly publications were often extremely influential, most notably his lecture “Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics”. His seemingly almost throwaway comments have sometimes helped to transform the understanding of a particular field—for example, in his essay on “English and Welsh”, with its explanation of the origins of the term “Welsh” and its references to phonaesthetics (both these pieces are collected in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, currently in print). His academic life was otherwise largely unremarkable. In 1945 he changed his chair to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, which he retained until his retirement in 1959. Apart from all the above, he taught undergraduates, and played an important but unexceptional part in academic politics and administration.

His family life was equally straightforward. Edith bore their last child and only daughter, Priscilla, in 1929. Tolkien got into the habit of writing the children annual illustrated letters as if from Santa Claus, and a selection of these was published in 1976 as The Father Christmas Letters. He also told them numerous bedtime stories, of which more anon. In adulthood John entered the priesthood, Michael and Christopher both saw war service in the Royal Air Force. Afterwards Michael became a schoolmaster and Christopher a university lecturer, and Priscilla became a social worker. They lived quietly in North Oxford, and later Ronald and Edith lived in the suburb of Headington.

However, Tolkien’s social life was far from unremarkable. He soon became one of the founder members of a loose grouping of Oxford friends (by no means all at the University) with similar interests, known as “The Inklings”. The origins of the name were purely facetious—it had to do with writing, and sounded mildly Anglo-Saxon; there was no evidence that members of the group claimed to have an “inkling” of the Divine Nature, as is sometimes suggested. Other prominent members included the above—mentioned Messrs Coghill and Dyson, as well as Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and above all C. S. Lewis, who became one of Tolkien’s closest friends, and for whose return to Christianity Tolkien was at least partly responsible. The Inklings regularly met for conversation, drink, and frequent reading from their work-in-progress.

The Storyteller

Meanwhile Tolkien continued developing his mythology and languages. As mentioned above, he told his children stories, some of which he developed into those published posthumously as Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, etc. However, according to his own account, one day when he was engaged in the soul-destroying task of marking examination papers, he discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer-book blank. On this page, moved by who knows what anarchic daemon, he wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit“.

In typical Tolkien fashion, he then decided he needed to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc. From this investigation grew a tale that he told to his younger children, and even passed round. In 1936 an incomplete typescript of it came into the hands of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin (merged in 1990 with HarperCollins).

She asked Tolkien to finish it, and presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, the then Chairman of the firm. He tried it out on his 10-year old son Rayner, who wrote an approving report, and it was published as The Hobbit in 1937. It immediately scored a success, and has not been out of children’s recommended reading lists ever since. It was so successful that Stanley Unwin asked if he had any more similar material available for publication.

By this time Tolkien had begun to make his Legendarium into what he believed to be a more presentable state, and as he later noted, hints of it had already made their way into The Hobbit. He was now calling the full account Quenta Silmarillion, or Silmarillion for short. He presented some of his “completed” tales to Unwin, who sent them to his reader. The reader’s reaction was mixed: dislike of the poetry and praise for the prose (the material was the story of Beren and Lúthien) but the overall decision at the time was that these were not commercially publishable. Unwin tactfully relayed this message to Tolkien, but asked him again if he was willing to write a sequel to The Hobbit. Tolkien was disappointed at the apparent failure of The Silmarillion, but agreed to take up the challenge of “The New Hobbit”.

This soon developed into something much more than a children’s story; for the highly complex 16-year history of what became The Lord of the Rings consult the works listed below. Suffice it to say that the now adult Rayner Unwin was deeply involved in the later stages of this opus, dealing magnificently with a dilatory and temperamental author who, at one stage, was offering the whole work to a commercial rival (which rapidly backed off when the scale and nature of the package became apparent). It is thanks to Rayner Unwin’s advocacy that we owe the fact that this book was published at all – Andave laituvalmes! His father’s firm decided to incur the probable loss of £1,000 for the succès d’estime, and publish it under the title of The Lord of the Rings in three parts during 1954 and 1955, with USA rights going to Houghton Mifflin. It soon became apparent that both author and publishers had greatly underestimated the work’s public appeal.

The “Cult”

The Lord of the Rings rapidly came to public notice. It had mixed reviews, ranging from the ecstatic (W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis) to the damning (E. Wilson, E. Muir, P. Toynbee) and just about everything in between. The BBC put on a drastically condensed radio adaptation in 12 episodes on the Third Programme. In 1956 radio was still a dominant medium in Britain, and the Third Programme was the “intellectual” channel. So far from losing money, sales so exceeded the break-even point as to make Tolkien regret that he had not taken early retirement. However, this was still based only upon hardback sales.

The really amazing moment was when The Lord of the Rings went into a pirated paperback version in 1965. Firstly, this put the book into the impulse-buying category; and secondly, the publicity generated by the copyright dispute alerted millions of American readers to the existence of something outside their previous experience, but which appeared to speak to their condition. By 1968 The Lord of the Rings had almost become the Bible of the “Alternative Society”.

This development produced mixed feelings in the author. On the one hand, he was extremely flattered, and to his amazement, became rather rich. On the other, he could only deplore those whose idea of a great trip was to ingest The Lord of the Rings and LSD simultaneously. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick had similar experiences with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fans were causing increasing problems; both those who came to gawp at his house and those, especially from California who telephoned at 7 p.m. (their time—3 a.m. his), to demand to know whether Frodo had succeeded or failed in the Quest, what was the preterite of Quenyan lanta-, or whether or not Balrogs had wings. So he changed addresses, his telephone number went ex-directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, a pleasant but uninspiring South Coast resort (Hardy’s “Sandbourne”), noted for the number of its elderly well-to-do residents.

Meanwhile the cult, not just of Tolkien, but of the fantasy literature that he had revived, if not actually inspired (to his dismay), was really taking off—but that is another story, to be told in another place.

Other Writings

Despite all the fuss over The Lord of the Rings, between 1925 and his death Tolkien did write and publish a number of other articles, including a range of scholarly essays, many reprinted in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (see above); one Middle-earth related work, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; editions and translations of Middle English works such as the Ancrene Wisse, Sir Gawain, Sir Orfeo and The Pearl, and some stories independent of the Legendarium, such as the Imram, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun—and, especially, Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, and Smith of Wootton Major.

The flow of publications was only temporarily slowed by Tolkien’s death. The long-awaited Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, appeared in 1977. In 1980 Christopher also published a selection of his father’s incomplete writings from his later years under the title of Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. In the introduction to this work Christopher Tolkien referred in passing to The Book of Lost Tales, “itself a very substantial work, of the utmost interest to one concerned with the origins of Middle-earth, but requiring to be presented in a lengthy and complex study, if at all” (Unfinished Tales, p. 6, paragraph 1).

The sales of The Silmarillion had rather taken George Allen & Unwin by surprise, and those of Unfinished Tales even more so. Obviously, there was a market even for this relatively abstruse material and they decided to risk embarking on this “lengthy and complex study”. Even more lengthy and complex than expected, the resulting 12 volumes of the History of Middle-earth, under Christopher’s editorship, proved to be a successful enterprise. (Tolkien’s publishers had changed hands, and names, several times between the start of the enterprise in 1983 and the appearance of the paperback edition of Volume 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth, in 1997.) Over time, other posthumous publications emerged including Roverandom (1998), The Children of Húrin (2007), Beowulf (2014), Beren and Lúthien (2017), and most recently The Fall of Gondolin (2018).

Finis

After his retirement in 1959 Edith and Ronald moved to Bournemouth. On 29 November 1971 Edith died, and Ronald soon returned to Oxford, to rooms provided by Merton College. Ronald died on 2 September 1973. He and Edith are buried together in a single grave in the Catholic section of Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford. (The grave is well signposted from the entrance.) The legend on the headstone reads:

Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889–1971

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892–1973

Source

https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/biography/

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neyla9 · 7 years

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Masks & Capes Episode 14: Rose Thorns

Ao3 Version

It was late afternoon, around five pm. Dipper and Bill were having a late lunch / early dinner date at a local café. Last week, one of the gossip magazines Mabel read had published a picture of Pine Tree and the Illuminator kissing, along with an article talking about the possibility of the two dating. Naturally, since it wasn’t public knowledge that Dipper and the Illuminator had previously broken up, the article also posed the question if the Illuminator was cheating on Dipper.

The couple was enjoying their food when a woman carrying a notepad and pen approached them.

“Excuse me,” the woman said, smiling like a cat that had a just caught a fat canary. “You wouldn’t happen to be Dipper Pines, right?”

“… I am…” Dipper responded hesitantly.

“I’m so sorry to interrupt, but I was just curious,” the woman placed the pen on the pad, ready to write down whatever was about to occur. “How do you feel knowing that the Illuminator cheated on you?”

“Uh, he didn’t,” Dipper shook his head.

“Oh, you mean you haven’t seen the picture?” the woman said with clearly fake concern while quickly scribbling a couple of notes. “I am so sorry you found out this way, but it seems your man has been seeing another Melior behind your back…”

“The Illuminator and I aren’t dating anymore,” Dipper replied deadpanned. “We haven’t been together for a while now.”

“Yeah, in case you didn’t notice, he’s been upgraded,” Bill added with a smirk only to receive a small kick from under the table and a glare from Dipper.

“Oh, so you broke up with him?” the woman asked in a very interested tone.

“No, he broke up with me,” Dipper quickly corrected her before she could ask another question. “It’s obvious that me dating him made me a target for villains, and he couldn’t bear to put me in danger.”

“He doesn’t seem too broken up about it,” the woman retorted, looking angry that her angle on the story had been ruined.

“Do you even know how long it’s been since they broke up?” Bill asked, raising an eyebrow, but before the woman had a chance to respond, the sound of faint screaming was heard in the distance. The sound grew louder as a wave of screaming people ran away from an unknown source.

“Ooh! A scoop!” the woman said excitedly and ran towards the screaming people.

“You think it’s a Melior?” Bill leaned over the table and whispered to Dipper.

“Judging from the size of the crowd, it’s likely,” Dipper shrugged. “Find a place to transform and try to scope out the situation. I’ll contact Mabel and tell her where to find us.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bill did as Dipper had told him and ducked into the nearest alley to transform. He used the rooftops to survey the area, running in the opposite direction of the fleeing crowd, hoping to find whatever had caused them to run.

He soon located a broken shop window, with five people lying on the ground in front of it. He jumped down from the roof and checked their pulse; they were still alive and seemed only unconscious. Oddly enough, there were small piles of golden sand around them.

He walked inside to investigate, only to find three more people passed out; one of them was the cashier, who had passed out on top of the cash register, and another one looked like a robber, having a bandana covering their mouth. There were also small piles of sand inside the shop.

Bill walked over to one of the piles and picked up a small amount; the grains of the sand were so tiny, the sand almost seemed more like a liquid with how smoothly it fell through his fingers. There was no doubt about it; this was the work of a Melior.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dipper sent Mabel a quick text explaining the situation, and telling her to meet him on the roof of the Scanderous office building nearby.

After sending the text, Dipper dived into a nearby alleyway and transformed, quickly making his way to the Scanderous office building.

While waiting for Mabel, Dipper began to hear some commotion in the office building. At first he ignored it, thinking it was just some disagreement between co-workers that had gotten a little out of hand, but when a chair was thrown out of the window, Dipper decided to intervene.

He climbed down and dived in through the broken window, to find a room full of unconscious people, a young woman who, judging from her cyan hair, was Melior, and a middle-aged man who was looking fearfully at the unknown Melior, whom herself looked afraid.

“Oh great!” the middle-aged man said, his voice quaking with fear. “Now there’s another one!”

“What’s going on here?” Dipper asked, looking from the man to the Melior.

“I-it’s not what i-it looks like!” the Melior was quick to say. “I was just hiding out here, when-“

“She attacked us!” the man yelled. “Look at my co-workers!”

“What happened?” Dipper asked the Melior calmly while slowly stepping closer.

“N-no, please stand back,” the Melior begged before she began coughing out small particles right into Dipper’s face.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After securing the area with the unconscious bodies, Bill returned to the café he and Dipper had been at. Dipper wasn’t there, probably out searching for the Melior behind this with Mabel.

Bill kept walking, hoping he would either run into them, or discover some kind of clue. Both things ended up sort of happening.

He found Mabel, fully-transformed, standing outside an office building; an office building covered in big, thorny vines.

“Hey, Illuminator,” Mabel greeted him, taking her eyes away from the vines for a moment. “Are we up against a Melior with plant powers? Pine Tree asked me to meet him here, but…”

“There weren’t any plants at the original scene of the crime,” Bill responded. “These vines probably belong to Pine Tree.”

“Is he inside?” Mabel asked. “Why would he grow thorns around the building? You can’t get in!”

“Maybe that’s the point,” Bill suggested. “Maybe he’s trying to prevent the culprit from getting in, for some reason.”

“That would mean they’re still at large somewhere,” Mabel nodded in agreement.

“I’ll stay here and get Pine Tree,” Bill said. “If nothing else, I can burn the vines down. You go out and tried to find our culprit; they’re Melior, seem to be able to send people into comas, and they leave piles of smooth sand behind.”

“Gotcha!” Mabel announced before running off.

“Alright, let’s try and do this,” Bill whispered to himself. He summoned a ball of fire in his hands and sent it towards the vines. At first, the vines seemed to burn normally, but then they kind of shook, and put the fire out. “What!?” Bill exclaimed in confusion. “Hey! Pine Tree! It’s The Illuminator!”

There was no response.

“He must be boarded up there,” Bill mumbled. If he couldn’t use his fire, he’d had to use his claws.

Bill began to cut the thick vines, but even though he managed to do some damage, the vines healed faster than he could slash. Bill let out a frustrated sigh and leaned against one of the vines, making sure to avoid the thorns.

“There has to be some way to- whoah!” he exclaimed when the vine he was leaning against moved from his weight. “I can push them?” Bill tried to forcefully push one of the vines, but it didn’t move. “I could move them just before!” Bill exclaimed, slapping the vine he had tried to push only for the vine to slap him back, leaving a small cut on his face.

Bill hissed at the sudden pain and began to think. What had he done differently when the vine moved? He thought for a few moments, walking back and forth as he did, until he got an idea.

This time, instead of forcefully pushing and pulling the vines, he gently stroked them. The vines followed his movement, even meeting his hand, which allowed Bill to lead them away and left him a way inside.

He rushed into the building and started looking for Dipper; he even called out to him, but got no answer. He ran up the stairs and explored the other floors, but all he found were more people passed out in piles of sand.

Finally, when he reached the final floor, he found Dipper.

Dipper was still in his forme, but he seemed to be passed out too. He was lying on an office couch with a pile of sand around him.

“Pine Tree…?” Bill whispered, using the name of his alter ego, just in case some of the other people in the room weren’t unconscious.

Dipper didn’t stir.

“I know you’re still awake, Pine Tree,” Bill continued somewhat annoyed. “Otherwise you couldn’t be using your powers… right?” he actually wasn’t too sure about that. In theory, Dipper shouldn’t be able to, but it could be that if he was having a vivid dream…

Bill reached out and shook Dipper, but he remained asleep.

“This is kinda like…” Bill paused. In his youth spent in IMP, he had had access to books, including fairy tales, one of which was… “Sleeping Beauty…”

It was a crazy idea, but maybe it’d work? Bill was willing to try, so he leaned down and pressed his lips against Dipper’s… nothing happened.

“Yeah, I guess it’d be too simple if that had worked,” Bill sighed, before a grim realization entered his mind; while the version of Sleeping Beauty that had the princess awaken with a kiss, another version that the IMP had, instead had the princess be awaken by… having her unconscious body raped by the prince…

Bill shook his head and almost felt like he was going to throw up. Sure, he wasn’t opposed to the idea of having sex with Dipper, far from it in fact, but… not like this! Never like this! Why had he even thought of that!? It wasn’t like it would work! But if it did… and if it was only way to awaken Dipper… that would be their first time… that would Bill’s very first time; raping his boyfriend’s unconscious body!

“No,” Bill said, slapping himself in the face for even thinking that. Maybe there was another way. Curiously, Bill used his fingers, carefully minding the claws, to pry one of Dipper’s eyes open. His pupil was moving, meaning that he was in REM, which meant he was dreaming.

Bill let go of the eyelids and lied down on the floor. If Dipper was dreaming, Bill should be able to enter his dreams. A less used part of Bill’s inherent powers, was the ability to instantly fall asleep and enter REM, which obviously didn’t have a lot of uses, so it didn’t take long for Bill to fall asleep, knowing that Dipper’s vines were protecting the building, and enter Dipper’s dream.

For an REM dream, it wasn’t particularly detailed; all it featured was a black void, along with a giant bush of thorny vines, similar to those outside the building.

“Dipper?” Bill asked, stepping closer to the bush.

“Bill?” Dipper’s voice gasped, and Bill was just able to see one of his brown eyes through a small hole between the vines. “I- What’s going on?”

“Dipper, you’re in a dream right now,” Bill explained. “The Melior who’s doing this, is putting everyone into comas, I think. And they got you too. I haven’t been able to wake you up, but I think if we can remove these vines-“

“I’ve already tried,” Dipper interrupted. “I realized that I was sleeping pretty quickly, and I’ve tried to remove the vines, but nothing works! I think… I think this might a physical-thing, rather than a mental-thing, if that makes any sense?”

“If it worked on the vines outside,” Bill mumbled to himself and tried to stroke the vines, but they didn’t move. Apparently these vines weren’t subconsciously controlled by Dipper.

“Do you have any ideas at all?” Dipper asked, sounding exhausted. “Because I’m open to pretty much anything.”

“I…” Bill hesitated for a moment, but continued despite his better judgment. “I do have one idea, but I don’t think you’re going to like it. In one version of Sleeping Beauty I read as a kid, the princess awakens when the prince… rapes her comatose body…”

“That… could work,” Dipper responded to Bill’s surprise. “I mean sexual arousal would both kick the brain and body in motion, so it’s not too farfetched.”

“You… You do realize what I’m saying here, right? I would have to… masturbate your unconscious body…”

“Well, isn’t it better that you do it?” Dipper asked. “I mean, you are my boyfriend.”

“But… we haven’t… yet…”

“No, but I’m kinda… out of commission right now, and our top priority is figuring out a way to stop this Melior. I trust you, Bill.”

“… Alright,” Bill said with a sigh. “I’ll… I’ll just return if it didn’t work…”

Exiting out of the dream world, Bill hesitantly got to work.

Since Dipper’s suit was a one-piece, Bill had to remove the entire thing, peeling it off down to the knees, exposing both Dipper’s chest and groin.

Bill started pumping Dipper’s member, looking away as he did so, still feeling utterly disgusted with himself for doing so, and even more so because a small part of him enjoyed it.

Surprisingly, as Bill stroked the dick, Dipper began to stir, even mumble, while drops of sweat started pouring from his body.

Bill kept pumping Dipper’s cock, feeling the blood pound beneath his fingers, until finally, Dipper climaxed, opening his eyes as he did so.

“W-well,” Dipper chuckled, sounding out of breath. “Guess it worked.”

“I guess,” Bill shrugged and looked away while Dipper got dressed. “But it’s not like we can go and masturbate every single person who’s fallen victim to this Melior…”

“Good point,” Dipper nodded, before sniffing the air. “… Do you smell something?”

“It’s probably your sweat,” Bill pointed out.

“It doesn’t smell like it though,” Dipper dried off a few beads of sweat on his brow and smelled it. “No, that’s definitely my sweat, but… Is it just me, or does it look kinda… yellow?”

Bill leaned over, examining not only the sweat Dipper had dried off on his fingers, but the sweat on his entire face. It did have sort of a golden glow to it, and the smell reminded him of… saltwater?

“… That’s the cure,” Dipper said with sudden realization. “You need to sweat it out!”

“Wish I had known that before,” Bill mumbled to himself.

“Can you use your pyrokinesis to increase the room’s temperature?” Dipper asked.

“That… should be plausible.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mabel felt like she had searched for hours, but the culprit was seemingly nowhere to be found. There were a lot more unconscious people around, but aside from that, no clue.

She turned and began to run back towards the building she left Bill at; she had to tell him that she hadn’t been very successful, but maybe Bill had had more luck.

Rounding a corner to take a shortcut through an alleyway, Mabel found a young woman, sitting with her forehead resting on the wall, crying. She was surrounded by more unconscious bodies.

“Hey, are you okay?” Mabel asked carefully, knowing that whoever the woman was, she was likely to get scared by the sight of a Melior.

“Don’t come any closer!” the woman sobbed.

“I’m not going to hurt,” Mabel assured her. “I’m not the one who did this-“

“I know,” the woman interrupted. “I am. Please, don’t come any closer.”

Mabel braced herself, ready for a fight if that’s what the woman wanted, but she stayed sitting there, focused on the wall.

“Aren’t you going to attack me?” Mabel inquired confused.

“I’m sorry,” the woman sobbed again, her sobs only interrupted by a few violently coughs. The coughs released small puffs of dust that floated in the air for a while, only to fall to the floor and becoming piles of sand-like substance.

“You… can’t control your powers,” Mabel stated.

“It rarely happens,” the woman swallowed loudly before continuing. “This is only the third time… But every time, I go to sleep, and when I wake up, I’m transformed, a-and I cough up this weird sand that puts people in comas, a-and I d-don’t know how t-to s-stop i-it! I-it had been five y-years since i-it last happened, s-so I m-moved to the city to pursue my d-dream, b-but now… Before I o-only hit t-two o-or three people, but this t-time I hit so many…!”

“H-hey, it’s alright,” Mabel placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder, trying desperately to comfort her. “How do you usually turn back?”

“I don’t know,” the woman cried. “S-since it’s only happened t-twice before, I haven’t discovered a p-pattern…”

Mabel knew badgering the poor woman wouldn’t get them anywhere, so she tried a different strategy.

“What’s your name?” Mabel asked.

“I don’t want to say,” the woman sobbed, and Mabel let out a sympathetic noise.

“What do you want me to call you, then?”

“… Somna,” the woman’s whisper was barely audible, but somehow Mabel was able to catch it.

“Alright, Somna,” Mabel smiled, even though Somna couldn’t see it. “What is your dream anyway? Why did you move to the city?”

“… I… I want to be a dancer,” Somna mumbled. “I go to a dance studio here in town.”

Mabel was about to respond when her cell phone buzzed, signaling that she had a message. Knowing that it could be Dipper or Bill, she discretely fished it out and checked it.

The message was from Dipper and read: “Where are you? We found cure to coma”

Mabel sent a quick text back saying where she would meet them.

“Hey, one of my friends just called,” Mabel told Somna. “He says he’s found a cure to your powers. We need to meet with him at a nearby café.”

“Are… are you sure he’s found a cure?”

“He wouldn’t lie to me,” Mabel assured her and helped her up. Somna was still cough and trying her best not to hit Mabel with the sand, but she was also willingly following Mabel to the café.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When Mabel arrived with the perpetrator, Dipper immediately recognized her, but he hadn’t expected that she would be coming willingly.

“Hey, this is Somna,” Mabel explained. “She… she can’t control her powers…”

“I’m sorry,” Somna sobbed, tears streaming down her face. “I didn’t mean for this to happen…”

“Don’t worry,” Bill replied. “We’ve figured out how to counteract your powers; people just need to sweat the sand out. We tried it on the way here using my flames, and it worked every time.”

“You mean… the people are alright?” Somna whispered, sounding relieved. Bill and Dipper responded with a simple nod, and Somna’s face broke out into a bright smile. “Oh, that’s… that’s so wonderful! Thank you!”

“Just doing our duty,” Dipper shrugged, blushing slightly at the gratitude, but his expression changed when he saw that Somna was fading away.

“What’s going on?!” Mabel exclaimed, trying desperately to grab a hold of Somna.

“I… I’m not sure,” Somna stuttered.

“This looks like…” Bill frowned. “Does your power activate when you go to sleep?”

“Sometimes,” Somna said, still fading away. “I mean, I don’t transform every time I go to sleep, but I only transform when I fall asleep, if that makes sense.”

“It’s astral projection,” Bill concluded. “Don’t worry; you’ll be fine. You’ll simply wake up where you last fell asleep.”

“Alright,” Somna nodded, but still looked scared. “I’ll trust you…”

And with that, she was gone.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The sun had set by the time the trio returned home.

Dipper and Bill went to their room to talk.

“So, uh… about today,” Bill started before letting out an awkward cough.

“Are you still feeling bad about it?” Dipper asked, a worried frown appearing on his brow.

“Honestly, I mostly feel stupid right now,” Bill sighed and sat down on the bed. “I should’ve been able to figure out the whole ‘sweating it out’-thing, then we could have just done that instead.”

“You know I’m not mad at you, right?” Dipper sat down beside Bill and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“I know,” Bill nodded and rolled his shoulders, shaking Dipper’s hand off.

Dipper could feel that Bill wasn’t entirely honest. He let out a dejected sigh, before he got an idea.

“You know,” Dipper smiled and gave Bill lust filled gaze. “We could always have our first time now~”

Feeling excited, Dipper crawled into Bill’s lap and started nuzzling his neck, but was disappointed when Bill didn’t react.

“Dipper… no,” Bill shook his head. “Not… not right now.”

“I understand,” Dipper nodded and crawled off Bill’s lap. “I love you, Bill. And it’s gonna take more than that to drive me off.”

“I know,” Bill gave him a small smile. “I love you too. I just… need to process all this…”

“Do you need to be alone?”

“No,” Bill said and pulled Dipper close.

A few weeks later the magazines were buzzing about a new talented dancer called “Candra Suresh”. Dipper couldn’t help but wonder if she was Somna.

#billdip #masks and capes #superhero au

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