Links - 5th December 2019 (2) (Tolkien)

The People of Middle-earth: One Ring to Rule Them All - "From humble beginnings as a mere trinket bartered in a game of riddles (see the original Hobbit), the Ring grew in power and influence until it did indeed include all of Middle-earth in its simple band of gold. “One Ring to rule them all” wasn’t just meant to sound intimidating—it was hard truth. Even Sauron couldn’t escape the confines of its powers. It was his greatest weakness."

Tolkien was ‘racist’ to orcs?! Sci-fi author echoes dank memes, totally unironically - "Because everything is racist in 2018, a US sci-fi writer has blasted JRR Tolkien for his portrayal of orcs in the Lord of the Rings. He claimed they were simply misunderstood, comparing them to today’s migrants and refugees... Science fiction and fantasy author Andy Duncan, however, thinks this is all a bit... problematic.“It's hard to miss the repeated notion in Tolkien that some races are just worse than others, or that some peoples are just worse than others”... "I can easily imagine that a lot of these people that were doing the dark lord's bidding were doing so out of simple self preservation and so forth,” he added, ironically echoing the ‘just following orders’ defense that Nazi war criminals used at Nuremberg.Rather than drive Sauron’s armies back from the walls of Minas Tirith with sword and spear, Duncan argued that Gandalf the White (supremacist?) and the leaders of men and elves should simply have let them in. After all, the orcs probably brought great cuisine and some much-needed cultural enrichment to Gondor... Whereas President Donald Trump wants a wall to deal with border-jumpers and rock-throwers, the Denethor administration had to contend with armored war-trolls and trebuchets raining severed human heads down on Gondor’s terrified population.Still, if the modern media had been around during the War of the Ring, what would they have made of Tolkien’s heroes’ last stand against the Orcish horde of Mordor? Bigotry? Racism? Shameless elven supremacy?Bizarrely, Duncan’s argument actually sounds like the #orcposting memes - which use the world of Tolkien to mock the modern left - taken at face value. If liberal journalists existed in Middle-Earth, the orcposters joked, surely they would have pointed out that #notallorcs are responsible for acts of radical Orcish terrorism. There may have even been long-read  think-pieces justifying the orcs’ behavior as noble cultural traditions. This is not the first time Tolkien and his fantasy magnum opus have come under fire for “racism,” either. In 2002, amid the theatrical release of Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, cultural studies professor Dr. Stephen Shapiro wrote that “Tolkien's good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde.”Some Tolkien fans have responded to Duncan’s claims by arguing that the orcs were the actual racists, using Tolkien’s letters and the novels themselves as proof."

'Lord of the Rings' Slammed for Perpetuating Racism through Depiction of Orcs - "I think that it is important to point out that orcs are A) not people and B) not real, so starting some sort of social-justice movement over their treatment is probably the biggest, most idiotic waste of time that I’ve ever seen — and this is coming from an adult woman who spends time playing a game called “Pet Shop” on her phone... the only “dire consequences” that I can see coming from this whole debacle would be the consequences that any thinking like Duncan’s might have on the arts of fiction and fantasy. Think about it: If we’re going to say that the treatment of the orcs in Lord of the Rings perpetuates racism, then we’re also going to have to have a Wizard of Oz without flying monkeys. We’re also going to have to have a Beauty and the Beast without the wolves, a Lion King without the hyenas, and a Jungle Book without the vultures. The whole concept of a fantasy story with evil fantasy villains is actually put in jeopardy by this kind of stupidity. I may not know J. R. R. Tolkien personally (he never returns my calls, because he’s dead), but I can confidently say that he didn’t make the orcs completely evil creatures to advance the notion that some race of humans is completely evil. No, I’d guess that the much more likely scenario is he was trying to make his fantasy story as scary as possible, and he realized that the nature of fantasy gave him the freedom to do exactly that. After all, what’s more frightening than a large swarm of completely evil, irredeemable creatures? If the orcs were just misunderstood, if they had redeeming qualities and maybe volunteered at their local animal shelter in their spare time, then the story just wouldn’t be as frightening or captivating as it is when they’re completely evil"

Why does the Left hate Tolkien? - "It’s interesting that some of Tolkien’s earliest fans were the hippies of late 60s and early 70s. Their enthusiasm came as quite a surprise to the crusty old professor, but there is in fact a place where the borders of traditional conservatism meet those of the pacificist, anarchical Left – because both share a distrust of over-centralised, overbearing power.But perhaps that’s also why other elements of the Left dislike Tolkien. At key points in its history, when it could have embraced its anti-authoritarian, decentralising tendencies, the Left has gone the other way – replacing the hierarchies of the old order with an equally hierarchical new order. Whether it was the ‘democratic centralism’ of the communists, the well-meaning bureaucracy of the social democrats, or the foreign interventionism of the Blairites, the Left in power has always taken up the Ring… and tried it on for size."

Master of his universe: the warnings in JRR Tolkien’s novels - "The narrative of The Lord of the Rings and the “legendarium” of The Silmarillion and other writings are presented as a set of imaginative structures in and through which people can think and feel with the same consistency, intelligence and growing wisdom as they did through the stories of Olympus, Troy, Asgard or the Arthurian cycle. This is not an entertainment. It has to take itself seriously – which explains why Tolkien had no time for his friend CS Lewis’s Narnia. Narnia was a world that characters could drop in or out of; it was cheerfully eclectic in its use of mythical and legendary raw material, and the stories were narrated with a good deal of the tongue-in-cheek waggishness of the great Edwardian children’s writers whom Lewis loved. For Tolkien, all this was embarrassingly trivial... the story repeatedly reminds us that all this is taking place in a post-heroic age: the great days of elves and humans are over, and the elves are on their way across the sea, never to return. For all the triumph of the king’s return, some things can never be restored. Straightforward fortissimo heroics are rare and often ineffectual. Back in the Shire at the end of the book, the young hobbits, Merry and Pippin, enjoy a grand reputation as champions against the forces of darkness; but the focal figure of Frodo (not, in the book, a youth at all but – like the exiled king, Aragorn – a taciturn middle-aged figure) fades from popular view and suffers physically and mentally as a result of his earlier struggles. Second, throughout the narrative, “noble” figures succumb to temptation, are corrupted by passion and ego, and have their judgement clouded by partisan loyalty... The dynamic of the relation between Frodo, his servant Sam, and Gollum – surely one of Tolkien’s most disturbing and original creations, at once monstrous and pathetic – is one of his subtlest achievements. He deals with complex emotional rivalries, with the “homosocial” intensities of patron and client, or master and servant relationships – which seem a long way from our contemporary social or sexual politics, but which still offer illuminations about power, projection and desire. In short, one thing that Tolkien does not do is to tell his story as though conventional heroics solved anything at all... not enough readers reflect on the fact that at the crucial moment of the story, Frodo himself fails: he gives way to temptation, a temptation of genuinely apocalyptic implications. We have seen him wrestling with the addictive power of the Ring, and can understand how smaller yieldings finally make this culminating disaster possible.... The work is ultimately a fiction about how desire for power – the kind of power that will make us safe, reverse injustices and avenge defeats – is a dream that can devour even the most decent... Some, including Michael Moorcock, have accused Tolkien himself of implicit fascism because the story ends with everyone going back home and order being restored. But this is a travesty of the narrative’s logic. The return home is a return to a bitter conflict with exploitation, malice and petty tyranny. And, as we have seen, the whole story is haunted by memories of loss, awareness of fallibility and, above all, scepticism about anyone’s fitness to wield absolute power. Tolkien’s work is indeed more than just “fantasy”"

JRR Tolkien’s orcs are no more racist than George Lucas’s Stormtroopers - "They are a metaphorical embodiment of wickedness – his equivalent of Star Wars’s Stormtroopers or the ghosts in Ghostbusters. Just as significantly, given Tolkien was an officer in the First World War, they are the manifestation of the nightmare of mechanised war... it wasn’t as if in the Lord the Rings he placed his “Westernised” characters on a pedestal either. The great warrior Boromir is unmasked as weak and opportunistic. The hobbits, early on in particular, are as much feckless as steadfast –and many retain to the end a selfish naivety. Saruman the White – the closest in the novels to a Merlin-like archetype –is revealed to have a soul as rotten as a barrel of apples left in the sun for a week.Nor should it be forgotten that one of Tolkien’s motives for writing Lord of the Rings was to furnish England with a national mythology of its own – the equivalent of the Norse sagas, the Irish tales of the Fianna and the bed-hopping and limb-lopping of Greek legend... Every myth cycle and box office brand requires heroes and villains and demands they be etched essentially in black and white. For all their pretence towards nuance, even the Marvel Universe and the Harry Potter saga ultimately abide by these same rules (Marvel’s Thanos might be a melancholy evildoer – but his heart is still as black as the void from whence he came). "