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Allegory is more than being able to draw symbolic parallels. It's an entire structure of writing a story.
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Oct 5, 2020 16:05
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I mean it was at one time it was a literal founding myth for English people
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Oct 5, 2020 16:05
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Data Graham posted:I was talking about Emeth, in TLB Oops. Anyway, Aravis' treatment pisses me off as much as Susan's does.
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Oct 5, 2020 16:20
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Aravis has got some gender flipped King of Tars vibes going on with her story.
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Oct 5, 2020 16:26
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:The issue with Tolkien is ultimately that while the text shows that white men can be bad, it never shows that men of color can be good. I agree that he does say that no men are innately evil, but the fact is that whatever implications or messages he thought he was communicating, we never see a character of color who isn't a literal Satan-worshiping bad guy. Combine this with other racialist bits of prose or turns of phrase, and his equation of the Uruk-Hai with Mongols, and yeah. He was living in a homogeneous European country in the 30-40s, he probably just wasn't as obsessed with race as the present day terminally online types are. That didn't kick into high gear until ~2012. Everyone he knew and interacted with was white and so was pretty much every character in the books, good or bad. I seriously doubt he foresaw that people could ever interpret things in that light, much less intend it as a message about the inherent superiority of white people.
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Oct 5, 2020 18:30
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Course the prevailing atmosphere of racial progressivism in literature in which he was writing was like, Kipling so
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Oct 5, 2020 19:00
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OctaviusBeaver posted:He was living in a homogeneous European country in the 30-40s, he probably just wasn't as obsessed with race as the present day terminally online types are. That didn't kick into high gear until ~2012. Everyone he knew and interacted with was white and so was pretty much every character in the books, good or bad. I seriously doubt he foresaw that people could ever interpret things in that light, much less intend it as a message about the inherent superiority of white people. He wrote big chunks of LotR while his son was serving in World War Two, I think racial theories were kinda a big part of that Also he was very clearly thinking constantly about race, he based his dwarves on Jews pretty directly, right down to their script and language being based on Hebrew. He wrote about different sub-races of Hobbits. Every different group of Men we meet has different ethnic traits. Ditto elves, some of whom have ethnic groups which are literally more enlightened than other groups. That said he *did* have an example of non-white Men who were morally good: the [edit: Druedain] who show up, help the Rohirrim, talk some justified poo poo to the rohirrim about hey maybe don't be such racist assholes in the future, then vanish again from the narrative. The overarching problem had is he was writing to lionize a northern, white, male, Aryan mythology and history and perspective that we've all collectively realized over the past century doesn't really need any further lionization (partly due to Tolkien's success). It is time for other perspectives. And that's fine. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Oct 5, 2020 |
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Oct 5, 2020 19:12
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OctaviusBeaver posted:He was living in a homogeneous European country in the 30-40s, he probably just wasn't as obsessed with race as the present day terminally online types are. That didn't kick into high gear until ~2012. Everyone he knew and interacted with was white and so was pretty much every character in the books, good or bad. I seriously doubt he foresaw that people could ever interpret things in that light, much less intend it as a message about the inherent superiority of white people. Data Graham posted:Course the prevailing atmosphere of racial progressivism in literature in which he was writing was like, Kipling And also Horton Hears A Who, a book Seuss wrote to make up for his anti-japanese propaganda.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:18
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OctaviusBeaver posted:He was living in a homogeneous European country in the 30-40s, he probably just wasn't as obsessed with race as the present day terminally online types are. That didn't kick into high gear until ~2012. Everyone he knew and interacted with was white and so was pretty much every character in the books, good or bad. I seriously doubt he foresaw that people could ever interpret things in that light, much less intend it as a message about the inherent superiority of white people. "there weren't any nonwhite people in 1930s england, and people didn't care about race before 2012" is one hell of a hot take. Need I remind you of the part of Fellowship where the heroes are suspicious of "squinty-eyed" people who they think might have impure bloodlines? Or that one letter where he says "I imagine orcs as East Asian people"? His tendency to think of nonwhite people as "other," and likely to work for "the Enemy," and not even think of that as racist just goes to show how hosed up a white man from the early 1900s's racial politics can be. He may not have consciously intended to put down on the page the idea that white people are inherently superior, but that idea made it from his brain to the page one way or another.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:22
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Tolkien's got issues but one thing that keeps vaguely annoying me is that everyone uses that "the orcs are huns or mongols" quote from his letters like extremely deeply out of context.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:28
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Everyone forgets the Wild Men of the Woods.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:31
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euphronius posted:Everyone forgets the Wild Men of the Woods. have they been in any adaptations?
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Oct 5, 2020 19:32
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ChubbyChecker posted:have they been in any adaptations? There statues (monoliths) were in the PJ movie. On the way to the paths of the dead.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:33
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I mean, he was a nerd who was doing observational science on the world through a linguistic lens. His whole deal was "All these cultures/races have all these different traits ... and that's so cool" Yeah it's  but it's a different flavor from "All these cultures/races have all these different traits ... and that's bad"
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Oct 5, 2020 19:53
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Data Graham posted:I mean, he was a nerd who was doing observational science on the world through a linguistic lens. His whole deal was "All these cultures/races have all these different traits ... and that's so cool" Yeah, the problem is that in the intervening century we've collectively realized that there's no such thing as non-toxic racism. He didn't know that at the time. It's just sortof a dead-end for discussion because, ok, Tolkien was racist, but he didn't have conscious bad intentions. What do we do with that information? Well, it informs our reading of his texts. Past that . . . it's something for new artists to be aware of when they write new works. Ok, that's happening (e.g., D&D 5e instituting new, more egalitarian racial stat bonus rules). Good. It's a flaw but all artistic works have flaws.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:59
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ChubbyChecker posted:have they been in any adaptations? I mean there was that Casey Affleck movie but it was wildly different from the source material.
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Oct 5, 2020 21:01
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The Dwarves are taken straight out of Norse mythology completely unmodified. Tolkien may have used Hebrew as inspiration for their language but they are no more Jews than the Elves are Finnish. It's that internalized racism that makes people associate a "bad" behavior with a minority when in fact all Minorities get ascribed all bad behaviors. Jews get accused of greed and selfishness because those are universally despised traits and as a minority Jews got saddled with them. It's like people who think the Ferengi in Star Trek are Jews despite the fact they are expressly meant to be White Americans to the degree the characters will turn to the screen and say "Boy these Ferengi sure are like 20th Century Americans aren't they?"
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Oct 6, 2020 00:44
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galagazombie posted:The Dwarves are taken straight out of Norse mythology completely unmodified. Tolkien may have used Hebrew as inspiration for their language but they are no more Jews than the Elves are Finnish. It's that internalized racism that makes people associate a "bad" behavior with a minority when in fact all Minorities get ascribed all bad behaviors. Jews get accused of greed and selfishness because those are universally despised traits and as a minority Jews got saddled with them. It's like people who think the Ferengi in Star Trek are Jews despite the fact they are expressly meant to be White Americans to the degree the characters will turn to the screen and say "Boy these Ferengi sure are like 20th Century Americans aren't they?"  No, that's not how any of that happened. To begin with, there's no such thing as "norse mythology completely unmodified." It's not like we have any "original" sources; all we have are the poetic and prose Eddas and those were written down hundreds of years after all written versions of the mythology had been explicitly purged. Then you have various folktales which were fairly often explicitly anti-semitic. Past that, the primary prior artist working with Norse mythology before Tolkien was Wagner, who was explicitly anti-semitic and who wrote the main villain of his Nibelungenlied, the dwarf Alberich, as rife with anti-semitic tropes and traits. quote:For decades, scholars have called Tolkien’s dwarf narrative – including its continuation in his “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy – a sort of “corrective rewrite” of German composer Richard Wagner’s famed “Ring cycle.” In that four-part opera, anti-Semites – including Adolf Hitler – found allegorical confirmation for their hatred of Jews, represented by the villainous dwarf Alberich. A lifelong anti-Semite, Wagner publicly called for a Jew-free Germany on many occasions. So when Tolkien was writing his stuff, the primary pre-Tolkien treatment of Norse mythology was Wagner, who was explicitly anti-semitic and who Hitler loved and praised as great because it had so much antisemitism in it. Tolkien hated that, writing quote:“Anyway, I have in this war a burning private grudge… against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler,” wrote Tolkien in a 1941 letter to his son. “[Hitler is] ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.” And past that, well, even Tolkien admitted it: quote:“I didn’t intend it, but when you’ve got these people on your hands, you’ve got to make them different, haven’t you?” said Tolkien during the 1971 interview. “The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic. The hobbits are just rustic English people,” he said. https://www.timesofisrael.com/are-tolkiens-dwarves-an-allegory-for-the-jews/ What Tolkien was (consciously or unconsciously) doing with his dwarves in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings was developing a positive, philosemitic version of the norse-mythology dwarf, which could stand in opposition to Wagner's anti-semitic dwarves. So you have a bunch of brave, hard-working, heavily-bearded outcasts wandering from land to land deprived of their birthright home, dealing in gold and metals, and speaking and writing a semitic language. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Oct 6, 2020 |
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Oct 6, 2020 01:07
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:What Tolkien was (consciously or unconsciously) doing with his dwarves in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings was developing a positive, philosemitic version of the norse-mythology dwarf, which could stand in opposition to Wagner's anti-semitic dwarves. So you have a bunch of brave, hard-working, heavily-bearded outcasts wandering from land to land deprived of their birthright home, dealing in gold and metals, and speaking and writing a semitic language. quote:There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much.
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Oct 6, 2020 01:33
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Drakyn posted:Mind you, he stops to carelessly jam his entire foot through it in chapter 12 of The Hobbit with: But, like, if I create a race of greedy money grubbers who only dream about gold but I call them dwarves, but you see them as a Jewish stereotype, it's because you're the real racist, see, and furthermore
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Oct 6, 2020 03:29
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Imagined posted:But, like, if I create a race of greedy money grubbers who only dream about gold but I call them dwarves, but you see them as a Jewish stereotype, it's because you're the real racist, see, and furthermore
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Oct 6, 2020 13:20
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OctaviusBeaver posted:He was living in a homogeneous European country in the 30-40s, he probably just wasn't as obsessed with race as the present day terminally online types are. That didn't kick into high gear until ~2012. Everyone he knew and interacted with was white and so was pretty much every character in the books, good or bad. I seriously doubt he foresaw that people could ever interpret things in that light, much less intend it as a message about the inherent superiority of white people. The Virtuous Pagan and other examples of the Good Foreigner are story tropes that date back to at least the middle ages. The Matter of France and Arthurian Romance both contain numerous examples of good Saracens.
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Oct 6, 2020 14:11
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:The Virtuous Pagan and other examples of the Good Foreigner are story tropes that date back to at least the middle ages. The Matter of France and Arthurian Romance both contain numerous examples of good Saracens. remember the literal Good Samaritan
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Oct 6, 2020 15:06
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Samaritans were Jews too so they weren’t really an out group
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Oct 6, 2020 15:44
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I feel like it's less that Tolkien was unaware of race issues and more that he didn't see representation as important for its own sake the way we do today. At least, not in his fantasy epic of distinctly European inspiration.
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Oct 6, 2020 15:58
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euphronius posted:Samaritans were Jews too so they weren’t really an out group Technically they were descendents of the North Kingdom, so they were Israelites but not Jews. So sort of an out group.
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Oct 6, 2020 16:00
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The context of that story was that there had been a war with the samaritans relatively recently. So both out group and an enemy.
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Oct 6, 2020 16:12
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YaketySass posted:I feel like it's less that Tolkien was unaware of race issues and more that he didn't see representation as important for its own sake the way we do today. At least, not in his fantasy epic of distinctly European inspiration. There's a letter where he mentions people complaining that LOTR has "no women in it" and says that first of all that's not true, and second it's irrelevant. So I suspect it's this.
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Oct 6, 2020 16:14
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It's a very recent phenomenon for us to think of "black or normal", "woman or normal", "gay or normal" etc in a story as being a lovely kind of way to think about your story
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Oct 6, 2020 16:17
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Now, Tolkien is nowhere near as bad as many of his contemporaries (Lovecraft, Wells, Lewis, et al) and I don't feel he was malicious about it, but I think he's a little more problematic than "He just didn't think about it." Over and over and over again throughout his works we have white ("fair") skin explicitly mentioned and connected with qualities of kingliness, nobility, goodness, etc, and lots of icky stuff about white races lowering themselves by intermixing with "lesser" men. See Faramir's speech about "the high" and the "middle men", etc. Again, it's not the worst, considering it's coming from an upper class white British man at the height of the Empire, but it's a little more than "He just didn't think about our modern ideas of wokeness". Imagined fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Oct 6, 2020 |
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Oct 6, 2020 16:59
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This is a notoriously unsatisfying discussion to have and I hate to contribute to it. But while the above is true, the feeling I get from Tolkien's usage of racist tropes is far from one that sets me against real people on the basis of phenotype. Like I get the feeling from his framing that he could just as easily be writing some other story in which black people or short people are the "pure" race and tall white Nordic types are uncivilized barbarians, and that choice means nothing more to him than just the perspective he happens to have settled on for the narrative POV he's espousing. If he were writing something meant for racists to salivate over, he would have spent an uncomfortable amount of time talking down all the "undesirable" features of the "lesser" races and tried to get the reader to feel the same kind of revulsion toward them as, say, Lewis does with the Calormenes. But though Tolkien does make those distinctions, he doesn't linger on them in a gross way, as though he's using his fictional narrative as a vehicle for his own racist screeds as other authors might. The closest he gets is the Drúedain probably, and they're presented entirely sympathetically as the victims of colonialism and racism. The physical features aren't the important thing to him, they're the starting point for him to explore sociopolitical lines of thought, not an end in themselves.
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Oct 6, 2020 17:08
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Data Graham posted:This is a notoriously unsatisfying discussion to have and I hate to contribute to it. I do not think any fan of his work thinks Tolkien is an out and out racist, but if you want to really get into his work, it eventually will be a subject that gets addressed. I think he's an upper class white englishman who questioned and rejected some, but not all, of the very racist culture he was raised and lived in. If anything, it needs to be talked about, because the lazy read of "Tolkien was a racist" is too commonly tossed around casually in various places. I think its good to examine how good people can still have racist ideas, because that's part of how systemic racism affects us all. Tolkien has some racist things in the book, but he himself was not constructing it to advance racist ideas, quite the opposite, but no he did not create an intersectional work of anti-racist thought in the 1930s ahead of every major modern scholar.
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Oct 6, 2020 17:20
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Too late to edit but there’s also the Southron dude who dies in front of Sam and he’s like “whoa I bet this guy had a wife and kids” Which always struck me as something Tolkien must have tacked on upon realizing how his framing might be coming off to certain readers. We’ll never know of course but it seems like it bugged him.
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Oct 6, 2020 17:23
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Data Graham posted:Too late to edit but there’s also the Southron dude who dies in front of Sam and he’s like “whoa I bet this guy had a wife and kids” Yeah, it smacks of someone starting to grasp "hmm maybe taking some of this poo poo at face value is bad" because like I said, Tolkien was not a man who viewed other races as inferior, but at least in his fantasy world, he did see them as having innate qualities beyond physical characteristics, and seems like he started to back off that a bit and blunted it.
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Oct 6, 2020 17:27
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Yeah, it smacks of someone starting to grasp "hmm maybe taking some of this poo poo at face value is bad" because like I said, Tolkien was not a man who viewed other races as inferior, but at least in his fantasy world, he did see them as having innate qualities beyond physical characteristics, and seems like he started to back off that a bit and blunted it. Yeah, I think his Catholicism was part of it, same reason it really bothered him that his orcs were "innately" evil; in catholic cosmology, all human souls are equal and redeemable.
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Oct 6, 2020 17:30
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anyway, Lord Of The Rings was translated by Tolkien from the Red Book of Westmarch, so the real racists are Hobbits, as I always suspected
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Oct 6, 2020 17:32
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"I wonder if that dead enemy soldier was actually a nice guy and had a wife and kids" is a trope you'll find in every single memoir and novel about the first world war, along with the idea that the grunts on both sides have more in common with each other than they do with their own leadership. Very characteristic of WW1 veterans.
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Oct 6, 2020 19:29
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Everyone shut up about racism, we have an emergency on our hands. https://twitter.com/ComicBook/status/1313492127490494464?s=19 quote:Amazon may be adding some unexpected nudity to Middle-earth in its upcoming Lord of the Rings television series. The massive project resumed filming in New Zealand in September after a pandemic-induced halt. Now a casting call has gone out for various actors, including those "comfortable with nudity." The casting call from the BGT talent agency caught the eye of Lord of the Rings fansite TheOneRing.net. It reads, "Comfortable with Nudity? Up to $500 per day. Use reference NUDE. We need Nude people based in Auckland - age 18 plus, all shapes and sizes (Intimacy guidelines will always be followed on set)." The production also has an intimacy coordinator on its team, suggesting the series could include sex scenes. As expected, nerds are panicking.
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Oct 6, 2020 19:34
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Imagined posted:"I wonder if that dead enemy soldier was actually a nice guy and had a wife and kids" is a trope you'll find in every single memoir and novel about the first world war, along with the idea that the grunts on both sides have more in common with each other than they do with their own leadership. Very characteristic of WW1 veterans. Replace WW1 with every soldier ever. WW1 gets singled out because of the enormous amounts of wartime correspondence that we've managed to archive. Look at any accounts from a soldier and they often feel the same way. The Recollections of Rifleman Harris is one of the few accounts of a common infantryman in the Napoleonic Era that we have access to and if you remove the experiences from the time period it is very similar to other wartime accounts.
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Oct 6, 2020 19:36
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I bet it's an orgy in Numenor.
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Oct 6, 2020 19:36
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