Lord of the Rings

To be fair the Numenoreans also became corrupted just from being around Sauron. It's not like it just happened to the Haradrim and the Easterlings. Evil corrupting good things and people is a pretty big part of his work. One of his later stories actually attributes this to Tolkien's version of the original sin. All men carry some measure of corruption no matter how noble.

"[H]e lived in a somewhat less enlightened time" I see something like this often trotted out unchallenged as a sort of "common sense" assertion, and I think it is one that should be challenged. I think that anyone that reads broadly will discover that "modern" viewpoints turn up surprisingly often even in ancient texts.

Tolkien depicting the easterlings and Haradrim as "somewhat sympathetic" is, I might argue, actually the norm for good authors throughout history. Sure you have propagandistic authors who paint in strictly black and white, or hacks just selling a product who don't really care what they are saying, but it seems to me that serious novelists have always been aware that the people they were writing about were, well, people, and treated them as such.

Really, considering our own time to be obviously "more enlightened" is something I consider a rather provincial attitude. 30, 40, or 50 years from now our descendants will be shaking their heads just as hard at our obvious prejudices and excusing our excesses by saying "well, they were living in a less enlightened time."

Edited by Bense on Oct 17th 2018 at 8:56:04 AM

I think we are definitely more enlightened than the 30s and 40s, what with their widespread colonialism, racism, and eugenics, to say nothing of Nazis.

And you're absolutely right, 50 years from now, we will appear less than enlightened, as well. I am well aware that we do not live in a teleological universe that ends in the now.

And tropes like Fair for Its Day are tropes for a reason.

Even the Orcs are not entirely unympathetic. Sure there's not much you can do to reform an Orc, but the Silmarillion points out that "deep in their dark hearts the Orcs loathed the Master whom they served in fear, the maker only of their misery. This it may be was the vilest deed of Melkor, and the most hateful to Iluvatar."

I can't help but wonder at how self-defeating the creation of Orcs was for Morgoth.

He's the mightiest of the Valar, a force of nature unto himself, was able to curbstomp the Elven hosts that came to Beleriand single-handedly, if he willed so, since the rest of the Valar weren't supporting them.

But no.

Simple wanton destruction is not good enough for him. He's an artist, after all, he needs an audience. He wants power.

And so, not able to sway the Elves to his cause no matter how hard he tries, he creates a race that he has absolute power over, but only through the means of instilling fear into them. He is worshiped, revered, but without consent. And he shared his innate power with the Orcs while he was creating them, ultimately weakening himself.

I kind of doubt that he was actually enjoying his villainy. He was like a maelstrom, a black hole, sucking everything in to fill the void within itself.

Uhm. In total sincerity, do you follow current events? Because all those things are still huge, vicious problems.

Exactly. I think it's a mistake to assume that we're more enlightened just because we came later. Tolkien might argue the inverse. In his works it's always the earliest iteration of an idea that is the best. Aragorn is an enlightened king precisely because he is more like his ancient ancestors than his contemporaries.

Edited by Bense on Oct 17th 2018 at 9:41:57 AM

But we recognize them as problems. And you don't have to be a particularly enlightened or well-educated person to recognize them as such either; it's just part of the modern curriculum. The only time "Older is Better" actually rings true is during a dark age, but we aren't really in one. We haven't lost anything the recent past could offer us.

Tolkien probably wouldn't agree with such an assertion, and he'd be right not to. But the bigger point is that his mourning for things lost, or things passing, isn't uncomplicated.

The Shire of the Fourth Age will never be what it was before the Scouring, and can't be made to be. LotR suggests that it's okay for the Hobbits to regret the things that vanished, while still valuing the good that succeeded them. Lothlórien and Rivendell were never going to last forever ... and maybe it's even for the best that they didn't: Men were always going to have to fend for themselves in Middle Earth, and who knows? Maybe they managed better in the end without the Elves' weirdly impossible standards to live up to. But it's good that the latter were once around.

Valuable things are always being lost, but are also always waiting around the next corner. Maturity is to be capable of appreciating both. Tolkien's works are kind of an education in that theme.

Edited by Jhimmibhob on Oct 17th 2018 at 2:56:30 PM

People recognized that racism, colonialism, eugenics, and especially Nazis were problems in the '30s and '40s too, and you didn't have to be particularly educated to do so. When discussing a publication of The Hobbit in Germany Tolkien (admittedly a well-educated individual) himself wrote a nifty letter to the Nazi government about how silly their obsession with "Aryan" racial purity was.

Each era has some issues that it handles better than the one before, and others that it handles worse. The argument that "obviously we're more enlightened than they were" only holds maybe on some specific topics, not as a general statement.

Those descendants I was talking about earlier will be just as short-sighted and parochial as we are, just about different things.

"We haven't lost anything that the recent past could offer us?" That is certainly a debatable statement, and I'm with Jhimmibhob that Tolkien would not agree.

Edited by Bense on Oct 17th 2018 at 1:54:14 PM

I agree that things look bleak today, but I also think we are in a better position to look at them. World War II gave us new perspectives on the wrongs that led up to it. I doubt a Western nation will ever fall quite so easily to Nazism ever again. Not even Trump's America. The worst Trump will manage is to start a bloody civil war. I don't think the country ever would let him become a dictator without one.

We do make similar mistakes over and over again, but we still strive to learn from the past. And I think in many ways we still do. I think Tolkien would also agree that the world will eventually be a better one. If not, the Ring would never have been destroyed.

Let's not turn this into a political thread, if we can avoid it.

Personally I think things are looking up from where they have been during much of my lifetime. We're not facing complete nuclear annihilation by the Soviets, for instance, and although there are tyrannies in the world, many of the ones that were around, like East Germany or other countries of the Soviet bloc, are gone, and apparently for good.

No, all things considered I wouldn't call today "bleak" at all. That doesn't mean I would consider today "more enlightened" than any other era before it on every subject.

Tolkien did not correspond with the government of the German Reich on the topic of The Hobbit. The correspondence was with a German publisher. Also, the letter Tolkien is usually quoted with, and which you are presumably referring to, was a draft he sent to his British publisher, Stanly Unwin, but which Unwin did ultimately not send to Germany. The letter that Unwin sent was an alternative draft by Tolkien, and has been lost.

Yes, I know, it was a German publisher, not the government. Except that publishers in Nazi Germany were under pretty tight government control. And yes, I know he didn't actually send the letter we have. Tolkien's UK publisher seemed to think it was a little too harsh and sent another draft that was presumably more diplomatic. It's still a good indication of his views at the time, and well worth a read.

Just wanted to make clear that Tolkien did not tell off Adolf Hitler.

Considering the upswing of Fascism on the world right now and the ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor, I wouldn't be so rosy and optimistic about these days of ours. Things are definitely looking bleak with Putin's Russia, Trump's America, Duderte's Phillipines and possibly Bolsonaro's Brazil before long. Tolkien himself wouldn't have been too good on this rise of authoritarianism in the world, given his political affiliations (as per the man himself) leaned more to a sort of pseudo-Anarchism.

Tolkien's POV seemed to be that he loved the past but he was also clear on the fact society must evolve or perish, but he just wanted society to actually evolve without trampling over the treasured aspects of the past. The Rings of Power themselves are sort of examples of this given their primary purpose was to stall the arrival of the Age of Man, but ultimately this is shown as a bad thing (despite the fact the narrative treats the end of that age of magic as a legitimately sad affair).

Pseudo-Anarchist? Interesting then, isn't it, that the re-establishments of monarchies in Erebor and Dale in The Hobbit and a monarchy in Gondor and Arnor in The Lord of the Rings are seen as happy endings by Tolkien. As far as we can tell they are absolute monarchies too, with no parliament to answer to.

Edited by Bense on Oct 17th 2018 at 3:22:35 AM

These things have always been around. And yes, they are worse than they were two years ago, but we are also far more aware of them. People aren't staying quiet when governments are racist and authoritarian any more. Hell, a lot of our current hot-button topics in America basically revolve around finally bringing up decades-old sexual assault cases. Which, again, were allowed to slide before.

I know things seem bleak, but that is primarily because these terrible things are being dragged out into the light. If you look at the statistics, crime is going down, sexual assault is going down, police brutality is going down. They feel like they're not, but they are.

I think that also depends on what that absolute monarchy replaces. When Louis XIV, the Sun King, instituted an absolute monarchy, it was definitely an improvement over the feudal system with its warring landlords and endless civil wars.

I don't disagree with you, I just wouldn't be quite so bold as saying things are "looking up" in our lifetime. We're in the thick of the fight as the metaphorical army of Sauron is launching the attack on Minas Tirith. There is hope and the also heavily metaphorical Riders of Rohan are on their way but we're not out of the woods yet.

@Banse:

That's because Tolkien envisioned those as (deliberately) idealized monarchies, as a sort of grand "what if..." these systems could work.

He expands on his political opinions on Letter 52 of Letters of J.R.R Tolkien. I won't quote the entire letter because it's huge, but the most relevant quotes are:

To distill his long rambling thoughts in a short summary, it seems like his political ideal wasn't Gondor or Númenor, it was the Shire: a small, closely knit community where there's almost no true separation between the leaders and the people they rule, where leaders are more symbolic representatives of the people meant to organize and galvanize them more than actually "rule" in the true sense of the word.

In political parlance, he'd favor something akin to a very strange variation of Anarcho-Monarchism.

Edited by Gaon on Oct 17th 2018 at 3:02:30 AM

So from what I understand, he would divide humanity in a huge collection of small tribes, each isolated and self-governed.

What this political ideology ignores, however, is the needs of the people that stretch beyond the capacity of a small community to solve. Food, medicine, sanitation, infrastructure, all require a larger scale of organisation, especially in these densely populated times. There would be no internet, only limited trade from far away, no reliable electtrical grid or flowing water, etc.

And that's not even going into the possibilty of rogue elements. Without a large army, each community would be vulnerable to large groups of bandits roving from place to place. Without a coordinated police force, crime would be hard to punish as criminals can always flee and find a place where their crimes are unknown. Crime would be rampant, and coordinated law enforcement almost impossible, leading to mob justice and vigilantism. We would go back to a system of feuds and mercenaries.

It would hardly be the Shire. And Tolkien knew this, too. It took a large, coordinated group of Rangers just to protect the Shire as it was, and even they were ultimately not enough. When the likes of the Nazgul come knocking, you are in BIG trouble in the Shire.

I didn't say I agreed with him, and indeed there's a reason why Tolkien described this as his political ideal in a private letter to his son rather than some sort of political manifesto. Tolkien wasn't a policy maker after all.

I definitely can't blame a man (particularly one who suffered WWI under the bootheel of empires) for wanting a world with less vast expansive political empires and more closely linked communities with leaders that aren't some distant "Great Men" but more of a symbol for the people they represent. His opinion on large-scale government and authorities was already dim when he emerged out of the trenches and it effectively plunged with WWII. He was horrified by it to his very core. I can't blame him for reacting with a "perhaps we need less people in charge".

Important factoid: the aforementioned letter where he talks about how bad men are at ruling one another and tells of his political ideals was written and sent to his son in November of 1943.

I suspect Faramir was Tolkien figuring out what to do with Boromir after he already killed Boromir, because Faramir's story arc would have been so much more meaningful if it had happened to Boromir.

It was a foregone conclusion that one of the fellowship had to be corrupted by the ring, and of them all, it really could only be Boromir. I found the two to have quite distinct personalities. And if Boromir were to go through the same situations Faramir went through, he wouldn't have reacted the same, it would be out of character. Big time.

It's interesting to compare the two characters between the books and the movies. I found movie Faramir to be much more sympathetic than in the book and Boromir was more of an ass in the movies but wasn't all that bad in the book. Just misguided, and even more prideful than your average Middle-Earthian scion.

Looking at just the movies, it must be really weird thinking that Sauron and Gandalf are the same species. If they ever make a Silmarillion movie, who do you want to play and/or voice Melkor/Morgoth?

I've always wanted to call shenanigans to Eru for allowing evil to become a force instead of just "the thing that people can do". Sure, let evil exist because of free will and junk, but it seems like a bad idea that you let your Satan expy's naughty thoughts manifest as something that can distort nature and spread like a virus. When you're The Omnipotent you don't have an excuse for stuff like that

Edited by RJ-19-CLOVIS-93 on Oct 20th 2018 at 6:06:37 AM