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I really like the illustrations drawn by Tolkien himself.
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Feb 5, 2013 20:14
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Nessus posted:Reading this summary, what I want to know is how he justified or explains Sauron creating the Ring, then. Or for that matter how the wonderful and scientific and rationalistic and all those other good things empire deals with being led by an entity from outside of the world who was, specifically, present at the creation of the world by God, although I expect they just never come up. I also wonder if he noticed that the Elves ditched early in the Fourth Age (other than the ones who never got their asses over the mountains). To be fair most of that poo poo is in the Silmarillion - except the last part. And, let's be fair, even in the most favorable possible reading, Tolkien is bourgeois as gently caress. You can mount a fairly valid reading of Bilbo Baggins as an idealized avatar of western class privilege. I can totally understand why a non-western, non-capitalist, non-english-speaking author might have a fairly radical reaction to the Lord of the Rings. Don't get me wrong here -- I had several episodes over the holidays where people asked me innocent questions like "what did you think of the new Hobbit movie?" and half an hour later I realize I've just given a roomful of people an extended presentation on Rhadagast, the Two Blue Wizards, exactly how Aragorn and Elrond are related, and the surprisingly weak validity of Aragorn's claim on the throne of Gondor. But. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Feb 20, 2013 |
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Feb 20, 2013 16:11
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Nessus posted:Sam is certainly the real hero, but Sam also plods along looking stupid for large sections of the book (even if he also kills an orc without even a magic sword, yet), calls Frodo 'Master,' and the way in which he shrugs off the allure of the Ring has definite airs of 'Well shucky darn I know my place in the world and it sure ain't as a king.' I do think the archetype of Sam is strongly rooted in the turn of the century British/English society of Tolkien's day and was, in that context, understood and certainly lacked the coercive elements that - say - American slavery had. I think this is a really good way of framing the discussion, yeah. At the same time and in the same nation where Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings, P.G. Wodehouse was achieving wild financial success with the Jeeves and Wooster stories, which basically portray the British upper class as total nincompoop incompetents utterly reliant on their "masterful" servants. The discussion of social class and Tolkien can get really interesting in a lot of different ways. Like the race issue, there's a surface reading that's can be taken as deeply offensive if you look at it from the wrong angle, but there are opportunities for much more nuance. Unlike the race issue, though, you don't have to just go "welp, Tolkien knew Orcs=Evil was bad and he was working on fixing it, also, Sam has sympathy for a Southron once" -- Tolkien writes a lot about class, clearly has an idealized vision of class relationships of mutual support, clearly had his opinions of class interaction shaped deeply by his trench experiences; at the end, Sam inherit Bag End, after all. It's all right there in the text, without resorting to authorial-intent arguments or esoteric letters. edit: I'm not endorsing the "tolkien was a racist" or whatever -- I just think that line of argument is boring. Yes, there are racist elements in the text, yes, Tolkien tried to fix and limit them, the argument is over whether he failed or succeeded. The class issues are more complex, subtler, more interleaved throughout the text (from "Proudfeet" on), and I think more a matter of Tolkien's subconscious than conscious mind. With race, Tolkien was consciously putting in passages like Sam's sympathy for the Southron because he knew someone would call him a racist if he didn't; with class, Bilbo just mouths off one-liners like "Of course he does, he's a Baggins!" and the text rolls right on without a thought. There's just so much there! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Feb 21, 2013 |
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Feb 21, 2013 04:40
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Seaside Loafer posted:Just a product of his time I guess. Yeah, I'm not trying to ding Tolkien for this stuff. I think it's pretty clear that he was trying to wrestle with class on a fairly deep level, or there wouldn't be so much about class in the text; Sam wouldn't be the ultimate hero of the book & move into Bag End at the end if Tolkien hadn't had some fairly long thoughts about what an idealized British class structure would look like. Nessus posted:What is of some note is that Sam is the only 'common' hobbit. The Bagginses seem mostly remarkable because of Bilbo, and even then it's clear they're related to the Tooks, who are the badass boss hobbits, so it's just that Frodo comes to it by his mother, who seems to have been noteworthy enough for Gandalf to notice. Merry and Pippin by contrast were definitely in the hobbit aristocracy, even if that aristocracy mostly meant that their house was bigger and they probably stood more rounds of beer than had stood for them. Yeah, that's a good catch; now that you mention it, but Merry and Pippin are "princelings" of the Hobbits. Bilbo's basically the top of the middle class; it's never really clear where his initial family money actually comes from, before the Smaug gold, but it's clear that Bag End is the nicest, best, most finely-appointed, best-located hobbit hole in all of Hobbiton, and Hobbiton is the most economically developed town in the Shire. He's the hobbit equivalent of a Vanderbilt descendant. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Feb 21, 2013 |
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Feb 21, 2013 05:00
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sassassin posted:Pretty sure it's mentioned at the start of the Hobbit that Bag-End was build out of the treasure from some previous Took adventure. I went and checked. quote:The exact date that Bag End came into existence is unknown, but we do know that it was excavated by Bilbo Baggins' father Bungo, after he had married Belladonna Took: 'Bungo, that was Bilbo's father, built the most luxurious hobbit-hole for her (and partly with her money)...'. The latest possible date for the building of Bag End is III 2926, the year of Bungo's death, but the context of the text quoted here seems to suggest that Bungo built it rather earlier than this. So the money for Bag End came from Belladonna Took. She was the eldest daughter of Gerontius, "The Old Took," shire-thain and great-nephew of "Bullroarer" Took. So basically yeah it's inherited wealth/nobility all the way down. Bilbo is distaff-side nobility, basically. I feel like it's vaguely implied somewhere that the owner of Bag End also owned (rented out as landlord?) the homes of Bagshot Row, but I can't really pin that down.
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Feb 21, 2013 22:22
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Levitate posted:I really need a super lightweight version of Fellowship to take with me while backpacking, that would be awesome Kindle?
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Oct 25, 2013 22:26
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Juaguocio posted:Tolkien was an innovator, and the majority of people who imitate him have no conception of what makes his works so deep and meaningful. Funny thing about this is that as recently as the 80's, if you looked Tolkien up in The Oxford Guide to English Literature and similar places, he'd be listed for his Beowulf scholarship but not for LotR at all. Just like with Beowulf, it took a surprisingly long time for critics to acknowledge the merits of LotR as a story and as literature.
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Oct 27, 2013 06:01
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Data Graham posted:If LotR isn't literature, then Beowulf isn't literature. Which is, comically enough and as I'm sure you are aware, exactly the argument that Tolkien made his academic reputation refuting. Before Tolkien Beowulf literally wasn't considered literature.
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Nov 9, 2013 05:22
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SHISHKABOB posted:He really is such a punk, and I really like this image from the previous page that someone else posted: Who's the artist on those? EDIT: nevermind saw link on prior page. They really remind me of Tolkien's art style. I just got a copy of the 75th anniversary Hobbit with Tolkien's illustrations, and I really love his art style. It has the same "a professional artist would think this is horrible work but somehow it's still profoundly evocative" thing going on, but visually instead of verbally.
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Mar 14, 2014 04:19
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Narmer posted:That's debatable. The published version of the Silmarillion gives the impression that Illuvatar and the Ainur were the only beings to exist prior to Arda, and that everything else was created as part of Arda. Remember though that the Silmarillion was pieced together by Tolkien's son from a whole lot of different texts that often contradicted each other. We don't know what his father's original intention was. Earlier versions of the creation story talk about pixies and faeries and other beings entering Arda from outside. I've always thought that spirits from outside Arda were still part of Tolkien's conception of middle-earth, even later on. In the Book of Lost Tales an alternate version of the Ungoliant story mentions that even the Valar don't know what she is, which wouldn't make sense if she's a Maiar. In Lord of the Rings after his fight with the Balrog, Gandalf encounters "nameless things" that Sauron doesn't know about and that are older than him that Gandalf doesn't even want to speak of. Again that doesn't sound like Maiar. My impression has always been that Tolkien always meant for their to be other "spirits" in the world separate from the Ainur and the Children. The History of Middle-Earth series gives us a lot of variations, and Tolkien's ideas were still evolving late in life. We don't know what he would have settled on if had lived to write the Silmarillion himself, a fact that his son has freely admitted. This is kinda where I fall. I think it "likely" that either 1) Eru created various "spirits," things, etc., before the Ainur, or else, alternatively, that the creation of Ea involved the contemporaneous creation of earth spirits, some of which we see as Bombadil, Ungoliant, etc.
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Mar 15, 2014 00:42
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TildeATH posted:So there's something that always troubled me with LotR, and that's the corrupting influence of the One Ring. Everyone is talking about "becoming Sauron" and I've always seen that represented as literally being dominated by Sauron, such that you have to give up the One Ring to old One Eye. But if that was the case, then it would be very foolish for Sauron to actively fight to get the One Ring back, because his best bet would be to hang out in Mordor and wait for the One Ring to do its job on Frodo/Aragorn/Gandalf/Galadrial, until the dominated wraith-slave ends up bringing the ring back to its master. The impression I have is that the ring "gives power according to one's station." So someone like, say, Bill Ferny, would just get the power to be invisible. Someone like that, though, could still be dominated by Sauron's will, and would eventually just get enslaved to the Ring and ultimately therefore to Sauron. Hobbits may have unusually strong willpower and could resist that process better than just about anyone else could, which is why Frodo, Bilbo, and even to an extent Gollum were "chosen, and not by the Ring's creator" to hold it for so long. Someone at the top end of the magical ability / willpower scale, like Galadriel, could probably resist the ring's direct domination, and might be able to turn into sort of a counter-Sauron using it and might even "win" against by using the Ring's power, such that Ring-Galadriel would be the new Lord of Middle Earth or whatever, but any such victory would be so tainted by the ring's influence that it would be just as bad as if Sauron had won directly. Basically, look at what happened to Saruman and imagine the same thing happening to Galadriel.
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Mar 24, 2014 01:13
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Yeah. Presumably if it were a Silmaril it would've been recognized as such by someone at some point and started a war. My personal pet theory is that the Arkenstone wasn't a Silmaril but was a gemstone crafted by Feanor, perhaps a practice-piece.
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Mar 24, 2014 03:43
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radlum posted:Did Tolkien ever write anything explaining the real life inspirations for some elements of Middle-Earth? I mean, Gondor is pretty much a version of Constantinople, but I'd like to know if Tolkien ever wrote about those parallels (I know he wasn't keen on allegory, but some similarities are more obvious) Yeah I don't think he ever spelled it out, but some similarities are obvious. The hobbits basically go on a tour backwards in time through England (Elrond's court as an idealized Norman England, Anglo-Saxon Rohirrim, Gondor as Roman Britain) and then Mordor has lots of obvious parallels with WWI trench warfare.
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Mar 24, 2014 14:40
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Ynglaur posted:I think Sauron was legitimately afraid of Aragorn wielding the Ring. While Aragon was no Elrond, much less Galadriel, still he had the blood of the Noldor in him (albeit distant) and, perhaps more importantly in Tolkien's view of magical things, he had the right to wield the Ring. It seems likely that Aragorn bested Sauron in their mental duel with the Palantir of Orthanc, so Aragorn's mental powers were formidable. Would he have been strong enough to make Sauron his slave? Who knows? But it's certainly plausible. Sauron had, in disguise, served the Númenórean kings in order to betray them and help bring about their downfall. I'm sure the thought of actually being their servant was abhorrent to a creature so accustomed to dominating the will of others. Don't forget that Gil-Galad and one of the Numenorean kings (Tar-Minastir ?) also straight up kicked Sauron's rear end. So Aragorn was likely benefiting from a sort of inverse three-billygoats-gruff situation, where even if he didn't look all that scary by himself, each of his elder brothers had successively kicked Sauron's butt. To a truly immortal being like Sauron that wouldn't feel like ancient history.
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Mar 24, 2014 18:38
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Ravenfood posted:I think that they would have served whoever bound them to service, using the Ring to do so. Nobody wielded the Ring in that fashion since Sauron, so they still serve Sauron. Yeah, that was always my assumption. It also provides a possible explanation for why the Nazgul run away from the Fellowship instead of just ganging up on Aragorn four-on-one or whatever. From the Nazgul's perspective, if Aragorn is there and the Ring is there, there's a real danger that if they press him too far, he might just grab the thing and seize their wills with it.
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Mar 24, 2014 19:16
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I think that ambiguity is somewhat deliberate on Tolkien's part, but it also goes back through history. Tolkien's ring has antecedents not just in Wagner's Ring cycle but even back like 4,000 years to the Ring of Gyges in Herodotus. So magical rings have always been a literary way of talking about abstracted Power, and since Tolkien is trying to write a Saga for England, he's using the same mechanism as in those old viking sagas and older myths and legends and so forth.
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Mar 24, 2014 19:29
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Ungoal posted:
Hey, for that he's got a case. If you look at Galadriel's history in the Silmarillion she's relatively shady. She was one of the leaders of the rebellious Noldor and thus as close to Feanor's guilt as anybody we surviving by the time of the events in LotR.
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Mar 25, 2014 00:32
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Are you sure you're reading the same book as the rest of us?
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You could maybe also make an argument that Frodo was the ultimate "lord of the rings" as he destroyed the One and broke their collective power. If there's a twist in the title's meaning I'd say that's it. I suspect somewhere there's a letter from Tolkien on this subject debunking that theory and just saying "It's Sauron" though.
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Mar 25, 2014 21:11
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Radio! posted:I actually ran into this same question once with another ebook in old GBS. The mod told me since the book was readily findable on google it wasn't a problem to link. If Hieronymous Alloy feels otherwise though I'll take it down. I ran this by the admins and, yeah, let's edit out the direct link. If it's readily findable on google you can just say "you can find a link to [thing] easily on google" and that's fine; if it isn't readily findable on google then we risk the forum turning into a warez site.
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Mar 26, 2014 04:14
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redshirt posted:Is there a gain/loss equation in Sauron's rings? Which seem like the opposites of Feanor's creations, in function. I don't think there's like a mathematical equation anywhere but I'm virtually certain it's stated in several places that Sauron put much of his own power into the One Ring, which is why he was so diminished when it was lost and would be essentially destroyed if it were destroyed.
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Mar 27, 2014 04:12
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There also seems to be a notion in Tolkien that artists have one "Great Work" in them and aren't endlessly creative. Feanor tops out with the Silmarils, etc.
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Mar 27, 2014 04:46
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I believe at some point Tolkien said elves were basically the equivalent of Adam before the apple.
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Mar 27, 2014 20:32
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I think my working assumption has been that there must be some orcish counterpart to the Halls of Mandos where orcs go when they die, then they just respawn. Which is why they're so murderous. Life is like a big video game to them.
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Mar 28, 2014 12:56
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Catsplosion posted:Not exactly fair on them. They never asked to be created that way. Well, maybe Eru will take that into account at the Judgment.
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Mar 28, 2014 15:05
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Hogge Wild posted:Are there more weapons with names than women? Decent question and surprisingly difficult to answer. I think the answer is "yes" if you're just talking about on-screen characters and on-screen weapons in the primary stories but "no" if you're counting appendices, etc. Also depends on how much screen time the woman needs -- Rose Cotton, for example, only gets a few lines, I think Frodo's mother gets mentioned once or twice but is never on screen, etc. Same issue as to whether or not you count the Entwives, who actually get a few solid pages of discussion and poetry in the text and more in the appendices but are never "on screen" as it were.
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Mar 28, 2014 20:18
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Nessus posted:I'm shocked it took this long to release it, wasn't it his life work, academically? His critical essay on Beowulf is what launched his academic reputation. This volume doesn't include that, though, just the translation.
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Aug 6, 2014 12:57
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Data Graham posted:Greetings Tolkienailures, does anyone have the requisite experience to advise me on how to deflect a friend's well-meaning and persistent recommendation to read The Wheel of Time? He's one of those "Tolkien's fine and all, but Robert Jordan was a real soldier and really understood how battles worked A more charitable response to the Wheel of Time would be that the Lord of the Rings was a fantasy response to the World Wars (one and two) written by an Oxford professor of ancient Anglo-Saxon literature, while the Wheel of Time is a fantasy response to Vietnam written by an American nuclear engineer. WoT is a good series in its own way but it's not Tolkien and not for everyone. Both LotR and WoT are, to some extent at least, about the experience of going to war and how that changes you. Anyone who claims WoT is better than LotR is dumb though. WoT is good in its own way -- if you like sinking yourself into a gratuitously huge series, it's great for that. It's very American in the same way that LotR is very English. TO illustrate with an example on the specific topic of battle scenes, both Jordan and Tolkien tend to use soldier's eye level narratives. Tolkien uses a more traditional style -- Big Event, Big Event, Big Event -- while Jordan tends to use sharp jumps between different points of view none of which fully understand what's going on at the time, followed up by flashback reconstructions until you get a full picture of what happened (again, compare, say, WW 2 cinema and Vietnam-era war cinema). You can tell both authors have seen real combat but Tolkien's style is more traditional and Jordan's more modern. Compare either of them to a modern writer who hasn't seen combat -- say, Brandon Sanderson -- and you can really see the difference. My guess is your friend more easily recognizes Jordan's writing as "real combat" because Jordan's more chaotic, snapshot-image style is more in tune with modern-era war movies. It's the other side of the coin with people who think Tolkien was bad at writing characters because they lack the literary background to recognize that he was deliberately writing saga archetypes most of the time. Anyway, all that said, I'd say give the first book a try and if you like it keep reading until you stop liking it; if you don't like it after you finish the first book the series isn't for you. The first few hundred pages of the first book deliberately echo Tolkien and after that it opens out a bit and gets more original. Books seven through ten are painfully boring and slow and people tend to quit the series then, but it gets good again with book 11. All that said, where are you finding the gratuitous sex in WoT? It's positively prudish by modern fantasay standards, especially the first couple books. I'm pretty sure all the main characters are virgins through to the third book or so at least, and it's somewhat vague for a while even after that for most of them. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 19:20
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" types. I've tried to give it a halfhearted go once or twice, but it's always struck me as some kind of Dune/Narn i Hîn Hurin mishmash with lots of gratuitous sex, but then again I haven't exactly been fair or gone about it in good faith.
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Data Graham posted:I was probably getting it confused with Game of Thrones. I know "braid-pulling" is a thing though. Oh boy is it. WoT has a lot of verbal tics like that which get really annoying over a million words of text. In a short novel they'd be fine but by about book six or seven they have you . . pulling your hair out  Game of Thrones is Wheel of Time meets Glen Cook and "historical realism." That means lots of gratuitous sex, all the characters act like assholes, and if anyone does anything heroic they're gonna get brutally murdered within ten pages. (This is as unfair, but unfortunately somewhat accurate, a summary of GoT as the above quips were of WoT). The more charitable take is that where authors like Jordan are drawing on things like Dune and Norse mythology, Martin is drawing a lot more heavily on historical sources like the Wars of the Roses. Martin's also following the modern trend of turning the sex and violence dial up to 11. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Aug 20, 2014 |
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Aug 20, 2014 15:35
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Murgos posted:To follow the earlier topic of how the authors experience of war influenced the tone of their writing about combat Glen Cook was a Navy Forward Observer with USMC Force Recon in Vietnam (i.e. special forces type deep recon and direct action). Which I think shows itself very clearly in the way his characters converse with each other (gallows humor) and the way they interact with the world (us vs everyone) as well as his descriptions of combat. I.e. "A lot of poo poo just happened very fast, a lot of people died and what the hell is going on?" Oh, that's really interesting. I should've known Glen Cook had a military background (I knew his son was in the military) but I'd never pieced that together. I wasn't really being fair to Glen Cook with that comparison; I'm not a huge fan of lots of his stuff (I always give up on his Garrett series and go read Nero Wolfe instead) but the first three Black Company books, at least, are genre classics. I pretty much concur with your assessment of Martin :P
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Aug 21, 2014 21:00
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Levitate posted:Is there actually a difference between the original edition of the Hobbit and post-LOTR editions? I thought he meant to go back and re-write it to fit more closely with his middle earth mythos but didn't really get around to it, but I'm not sure if that's true. IIRC it certainly didn't start out as part of middle earth but when it got such positive reactions and the publishers were asking for a sequel, he realized he could write a sequel that was "part" of the Silmarillion and so it all kind of became part of the same world and history. My understanding is that yes the original version of the riddle-game at least is substantially different, and he made changes to the story to make it better fit in with the LotR. I could be wrong though, I don't exactly have a first edition Hobbit at hand to check.
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Sep 9, 2014 13:50
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Levitate posted:This probably sounds dumb but Tolkien's work always feels to me like laying out or painting this world in a way that makes it feel more natural, while most modern fantasy writers are caught up in describing everything in detail so you know exactly how everything is supposed to look but not how it really feels I don't think that's dumb at all. The funny thing about Tolkien is that according to all the classic rules of professional writers, he should be horrible; his imagery is all evocative and vague and nonspecific and the pacing is bizarrely stilted and the characters (appear) superficial and really his books should be a horrible mishmash-crash of bad. But instead of crashing they soar. His vague, evocative writing evokes, it commands an emotional response. His pacing isn't boring, it's meditative. His characters aren't wooden, they're archetypal. That's the mark of Tolkien's genius: in his hands, it all works, when it wouldn't in anyone else's. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Nov 14, 2014 |
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Nov 14, 2014 15:49
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Lord Dunsany did some of the same things in terms of creating his own mythologies, fantastic worlds, etc., but Tolkien made it mainstream.
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Dec 9, 2014 19:41
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Spoilers Below posted:I gotta agree there. I've been reading William Blake lately, and I do a double take whenever Orc shows up: "Oh, right, the Zoa, spirit of revolution and violence and change, not the race of evil people... Well, sometimes, but not the green skinned ones." The problem with doing a comparison of Tolkien's and Blake's cosmology is that Blake's fantasy worlds read a lot more like schizophrenic delusions than fictional artifice :P There's a reason everyone sticks with the Songs of Innocence and Experience. You start getting into things like the Book of Urizen and you're not that far away from The Story of the Vivian Girls. I realize I'm being kinda unfair to Blake here but I tried to read that stuff in college and just could not process it.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:24
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Oracle posted:Counterpoint: Percy Jackson, which is pretty mediocre. Steals from Harry Potter.
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Dec 17, 2014 16:25
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SirPhoebos posted:I saw the third Hobbit movie last night, and I just remembered something that's bugged me since I read the novels: Yeah, somewhere in Tolkien's writings he talks about how the Elves made lots of lesser rings while they were learning how to make the big ones. I suspect the issue would have been that to one extent or other all those prototypes may've been influenceable by the One Ring, though of course that wouldn't have been a big deal if the One remained lost.
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Dec 18, 2014 19:15
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Levitate posted:Gandalf also trusted Saruman at that time, and Saruman was held in regard as the authority on Sauron and his works. Sarumon was vehemently insisting at that point that the Ring was lost forever at the bottom of the ocean (swept down the river into the ocean when Isildur died ), so that played a large role in Gandalf being slow to put the pieces together. And, of course, Gandalf's love of the halfling's leaf had clearly slowed his mind.
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Dec 18, 2014 19:23
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Baloogan posted:Is anyone in middle earth gay? You mean besides Frodo and Sam? or Gimli and Legolas? quote:Were There Gay Elves? http://www.ansereg.com/what_tolkien_officially_said_abo.htm
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Dec 18, 2014 20:57
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SirPhoebos posted:Another movie-related question-Thorin somehow just knows that Bard killed Smaug. I assume that a line of dialogue got left on the cutting room floor, and it's not something stupid like Thorin having a network of animal friends or something. Hah. Funny you should say that! Well, in the book . . . An elderly talking raven, whose father remembered Thorin's father, comes and flies and tells Thorin. They left Ruarc son of Carc out of the movie? How on earth did they leave anything out at all with that running time?
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Dec 18, 2014 21:21
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HIJK posted:I always thought that too. There are lots of hobbits like Sam who have dark skin. I like to take those passages and point them out to people who try to tell me that Tolkien hated brown people. Every person I've shown it to got really mad. That's a great observation and not something I'd put together. Tolkien had his issues -- there is some inherent sexism and racism in the novels -- but he was generally both aware of and consciously working on them (he deliberately inserted Eowyn into the story so there'd be a stronger female role; he wrestled with the apparently innate evil of orcs all his life). Like a lot of us, he wasn't perfect but he was genuinely trying to be better.
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Dec 18, 2014 21:31
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End Of Worlds posted:
Is it really valid to compare Tolkien with Lovecraft? Tolkien had racist elements but there are also very clear elements that refute a simple racist reading. Lovecraft on the other hand was about as explicitly racist as you can get, right down to writing whole story sequences on the horror of miscegenation. I think people get defensive about Tolkien because the argument is usually couched in grossly oversimplified terms -- i.e., "Orcs are black people, Dwarves are Jews, and Tolkien was a horrible racist" -- and Tolkien's text is complex enough to be proof against such simplistic readings. Tolkien was definitely a product of his time, yes, but there's also evidence in the text that he was at least trying to rise above his inherent biases. For every "swarthy" Southron there's the counterpoint of Sam's reverie; for every elided woman (Arwen, Inhabiter of the Appendix) there's Eowyn out front swinging swords and complaining; for every classist denigration there's the counterpoint that Sam is the ultimate hero of the story. Now of course there's still the sophisticated argument to be made -- Eowyn is still defined utterly by her gender; the orcs are still inherently evil; we never see a positive non-theoretical Southron; Sam's ultimate heroism is still bound by the constraints of his social class. The classist, racist, and misogynist elements remain despite Tolkien's attempts to transcend them. But Tolkien's works show that struggle, in a way that, say, Lovecraft, just doesn't. Talking about race (or, for that matter, gender or social class) in Tolkien is an inherently complex topic if you're going to do it justice. Talking about race in Lovecraft is fairly straightforward.
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Dec 19, 2014 05:13
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