against-the-grain

/against-the-grain — Reading What the Text Doesn't Know About Itself

Love the Brunanburh poem. Distrust what the Brunanburh poem does in 1938. Write The Return of the King.

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Origin

This skill emerged from a speculation about Tolkien and the Battle of Brunanburh. The poem is magnificent — triumphalist, patriotic, full-throated in its celebration of English military victory. Tolkien translated it, performed it on radio in 1938. He loved it. And then he spent the rest of his creative life writing a different kind of victory — exhausted rather than exalted, elegiac rather than triumphant, shadowed by loss. The Return of the King is the anti-Brunanburh. Not because Tolkien rejected the poem but because he recognized what its emotional register does — how the beauty of triumphalism can be weaponized — and chose to redirect that energy.

The skill is the capacity to do what Tolkien did: hold admiration and suspicion simultaneously. Love the text's power. Question what the power enables. Write the counter-text that preserves the beauty while refusing the danger.

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Core Principle

The most important texts to read against the grain are the ones you love most.

It's easy to critique texts you dislike. It's easy to admire texts uncritically. The difficult and necessary posture is: I love this. I see what it does. I see what it does in the world. These are not the same thing. What would it mean to keep the love and redirect the doing?

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What "Against the Grain" Means

Walter Benjamin coined the phrase: to read history "against the grain" is to read it from the perspective of the defeated rather than the victors. But the operation here is broader than Benjamin's specifically political intervention. It's any reading that identifies the work a text does — its effects, its implicit ideology, its shaping of the reader's sympathies — and holds that work up for examination without dismissing the text that does it.

Key distinction: /against-the-grain does not claim texts are "problematic." It claims texts are powerful, and that power always has a direction, and the direction can be examined.