The Great Tolkien Legendarium Thread

[zompist]

We could say that something else clearly was the project of a guy born in 1859

I'm missing that reference...

[hwhatting]

Back on topic, it also shows up in the relative absence of women in LotR (quick quiz: without looking it up, how many women in LotR have speaking lines?)

Taking the challenge - I think it's four (Galadriel, Eowyn, that old woman (Ioreth?) from the houses of healing, and Arwen (at least I think so - I am not sure what I remember her saying is in the Annexes or in the main text). If you count the Annexes, there at least is also Aragorn's mother.
But the fact that you can actually enumerate them makes your point.

[WeepingElf]

We could say that something else clearly was the project of a guy born in 1859

I'm missing that reference...

Took me a bit to find out, but:

More: show

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859.

[Raphael]

We could say that something else clearly was the project of a guy born in 1859

I'm missing that reference...

Took me a bit to find out, but:

More: show

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859.

Thank you! I tried to skim through this Wikipedia category https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1859_births to see whom alice might mean, but quickly decided that it it would be too much hassle.

[WeepingElf]

I'm missing that reference...

Took me a bit to find out, but:

More: show

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859.

Thank you! I tried to skim through this Wikipedia category https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1859_births to see whom alice might mean, but quickly decided that it it would be too much hassle.

It was mere serendipity on my part. I thought the same as you about going through that Wikipedia category, but had an intuition that Doyle could be of fitting age, and voilà! He was indeed born in 1859, thus I guessed that alice meant him.

On a different matter, the TV series Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power features not only a black Elf (Arondir), but also black hobbits (the Stoors of Rhûn) and a black Dwarf (Durin's wife). But I feel such figures don't really make much sense within Tolkien's creation, and as we have discussed here, Tolkien, though (probably unintended) influenced by his time's racial stereotypes, was not a racist. He spoke out against racism in several of his letters and on other occasions, and of the two "Nordic races" in his legendarium, one (the Númenóreans) falls because of their hubris, and the other (the Elves) is a dying race that retreats from the mortal world rather than ruling it. And his sympathies (and that of most readers) are with the small, humble hobbits. This is certainly not a world in which a "master race" is glorified!

[Raphael]

I haven't seen Rings of Power, but from what I've heard about it (mainly from Bret Devereaux's writings about it), there are many other things wrong with it that are a lot more urgent than that.

That said, I don't see why people keep denying that a white Western political right-winger who had been born in the late 19th century was racist. It would have been highly surprising if he hadn't been!

IMO, it makes a lot more sense to take a stance like "Yes, he was racist, and that's bad, but I myself see so many good and valuable things in him that I'm willing to let those good and valuable things outweigh the bad things. I can, however, understand it perfectly well if his racism or some other of his bad aspects are a dealbreaker for you, or for someone else."

Everyone has bad traits. To which extent those bad traits are dealbreakers for us, or not, is a decision we all usually have to make for ourselves.

[WeepingElf]

I haven't seen Rings of Power, but from what I've heard about it (mainly from Bret Devereaux's writings about it), there are many other things wrong with it that are a lot more urgent than that.

Yes, it treats what we know from Tolkien's writings about the history of Middle-earth very loosely. The making of the Rings of Power, the arrival of Gandalf and the Fall of Númenor don't happen at the same time, and there is a lot in it that has been just made up by the screenplay writers - it is in this way much worse still than the much-maligned Hobbit films. But then, the timeline of Middle-earth as found in the LotR appendices has its problems, too (especially, the events advance far too slowly), and the series works - and it is visually stunning and beautifully filmed.

That said, I don't see why people keep denying that a white Western political right-winger who had been born in the late 19th century was racist. It would have been highly surprising if he hadn't been!

He was what we in Germany call wertkonservativ 'value conservative', i.e. a conservationist. He surely wasn't a leftist, but I think he also disagreed with the Tories. I don't know whom he voted in elections; he may have abstained as to him, all the major parties were into industrialism and modernization, differing merely in which way the profits were to be distributed among the people.

IMO, it makes a lot more sense to take a stance like "Yes, he was racist, and that's bad, but I myself see so many good and valuable things in him that I'm willing to let those good and valuable things outweigh the bad things. I can, however, understand it perfectly well if his racism or some other of his bad aspects are a dealbreaker for you, or for someone else."

Everyone has bad traits. To which extent those bad traits are dealbreakers for us, or not, is a decision we all usually have to make for ourselves.

Surely, Tolkien wasn't perfect, and had his bad traits. As I said, he had succumbed to racial stereotypes and prejudices of his time, and the criticism that his good guys were more or less "Nordic" and his bad guys had traits in common with non-white "races" cannot easily be dismissed. Black-and-white thinking does not do justice to him, as usual.

[Man in Space]

Outside of Jesus Christ, my family, and my high-school band director, this thread has made me realize that J.R.R. Tolkien has had more of an impact on my life than anyone else. I got into linguistics because of conlanging, and my current career I owe in large part to the skills I acquired during my higher education.

[WeepingElf]

Yes, Tolkien was a huge influence on my writing and conlanging, too - obviously! My main conlanging and world building project is about "Elves" who have much more in common with Tolkien's Elves than with either flower fairies or Santa Claus's little helpers (though they are quite different from Tolkien's), and the Albic languages are strongly influenced by Tolkien's Elvish languages. Without Tolkien, all that would be virtually unthinkable; also, the role-playing games I used to play for many years would be, if they existed at all, very different without him.

[zompist]

Back on topic, it also shows up in the relative absence of women in LotR (quick quiz: without looking it up, how many women in LotR have speaking lines?)

Taking the challenge - I think it's four (Galadriel, Eowyn, that old woman (Ioreth?) from the houses of healing, and Arwen (at least I think so - I am not sure what I remember her saying is in the Annexes or in the main text). If you count the Annexes, there at least is also Aragorn's mother.
But the fact that you can actually enumerate them makes your point.

Six: Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, and Goldberry, Tom Bombadil's wife. Arwen does speak in the text.

Rose, Sam's wife, technically has a line, but not directly-- it's recounted by Sam.

[xxx]

In the films, the female characters have gained importance,
bringing them in line with current productions...
even though racial issues remain very present...

[alice]

It was mere serendipity on my part. I thought the same as you about going through that Wikipedia category, but had an intuition that Doyle could be of fitting age, and voilà! He was indeed born in 1859, thus I guessed that alice meant him.

Actually, I meant this person of importance in the history of colanging. NIce try though.

[alice]

Back on topic, it also shows up in the relative absence of women in LotR (quick quiz: without looking it up, how many women in LotR have speaking lines?)

Taking the challenge - I think it's four (Galadriel, Eowyn, that old woman (Ioreth?) from the houses of healing, and Arwen (at least I think so - I am not sure what I remember her saying is in the Annexes or in the main text). If you count the Annexes, there at least is also Aragorn's mother.
But the fact that you can actually enumerate them makes your point.

Six: Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, and Goldberry, Tom Bombadil's wife. Arwen does speak in the text.

Rose, Sam's wife, technically has a line, but not directly-- it's recounted by Sam.

I actually meant in the book, not counting the appendices. There are eight: Lobelia, Mrs. Maggot, Goldberry, Galadriel, Éowyn, Ioreth, Arwen, and Rose. (Plus Shelob if you stretch "speaking" to breaking point.)

[Raphael]

It was mere serendipity on my part. I thought the same as you about going through that Wikipedia category, but had an intuition that Doyle could be of fitting age, and voilà! He was indeed born in 1859, thus I guessed that alice meant him.

Actually, I meant this person of importance in the history of colanging. NIce try though.

Oh! Thank you.

[WeepingElf]

It was mere serendipity on my part. I thought the same as you about going through that Wikipedia category, but had an intuition that Doyle could be of fitting age, and voilà! He was indeed born in 1859, thus I guessed that alice meant him.

Actually, I meant this person of importance in the history of colanging. NIce try though.

So my intuition led me astray. Of course, Zamenhof is more important in the history of conlanging than Doyle, of whom I never heard that he would have made up a language. And Doyle's connection to "elves" is AFAIK limited to believing in the Cottingley Fairies, which were of course of the kind Tolkien went against.

[Glass Half Baked]

This is the obligatory reminder that when it came out, LotR was lampooned for its Romantic style. Tolkien deliberately imitated older styles of story telling, and to readers of the mid twentieth century, still riding high on Modernist writings about beatniks doing drugs in Algeria, LotR must have felt like a disco album dropped in the middle of the grunge movement.

This is what irks me about more recent authors who try to "modernize" Tolkienian high fantasy. Martin, for example, took a lot of LotR-inspired imagery and added the sex and economics back in. that's fine; I don't dislike some of his books. But it's a bit like trying to modernize a penny farthing. Anyone riding around these days on a penny farthing is doing it deliberately, and modernizing it is just an exercise in missing the point.

That said, I don't think we can excuse Tolkien for having so few female characters, or for being so cavalier about the swarthy=dubious trope. From his personal writing, it's obvious he was a small-c conservative, and saw the world in terms that would be quite alien to most people today.

[zompist]

This is the obligatory reminder that when it came out, LotR was lampooned for its Romantic style. Tolkien deliberately imitated older styles of story telling, and to readers of the mid twentieth century, still riding high on Modernist writings about beatniks doing drugs in Algeria, LotR must have felt like a disco album dropped in the middle of the grunge movement.

I'm not sure the same people were reading both.

There was much less of a break in genre fiction. Tolkien pretty much created the epic modern fantasy, but if you knew sword 'n sorcery (Lieber, Howard, Burroughs...), William Morris, Lord Dunsany, Peake, Eddison, it wasn't a huge gap.

[Glass Half Baked]

Well, it's possible the savage reviews have been lifted up in a "Dewey Defeats Truman" effect, but I've certainly seen plenty of reviewers who thought LotR was slop, and they would probably have laughed their asses off if you offered Conan Fucks the Venusians as a precedent.

My point was that Tolkien wasn't trying to push literature in any direction the literati would consider "forward." It was a quite deliberate homage to past styles, even if as you say it wasn't that out of place. Therefore, we shouldn't be surprised to find the economy of the Shire to be baffling and impossible. That doesn't reflect the omissions of the times so much as the omissions that are expected in the ancient tales that inspired Tolkien.

To bring it back to the main point, we can't say "well, yeah, it's problematic, but that's how it was in the past," because you could absolutely expect better from an author in 1954.

[Ares Land]

On another matter, I once read a German book in which the author accuses Tolkien of racism (Elves and Númenóreans as über-Nordics etc.); I think this is undeserved, though Tolkien fell victim of racial stereotypes of his time (but the most lovable race in his legendarium are the hobbits, who hardly fit any stereotypes of a "master race" - the Elves and Númenóreans come across as haughty and arrogant often enough); however, I don't know whether a character like Arondir is the best way to counter these stereotypes.

It's probably not the first attack on those grounds. I tend to find it a bit cheap. As it happens, I found Epic Pooh annoying too, though I admire Moorcock as a writer. I think Moorcock's own fantasy works were a better answer! (And yet I suspect we'd find Moorcock troublesome today.)

[WeepingElf]

My point was that Tolkien wasn't trying to push literature in any direction the literati would consider "forward." It was a quite deliberate homage to past styles, even if as you say it wasn't that out of place. Therefore, we shouldn't be surprised to find the economy of the Shire to be baffling and impossible. That doesn't reflect the omissions of the times so much as the omissions that are expected in the ancient tales that inspired Tolkien.

To bring it back to the main point, we can't say "well, yeah, it's problematic, but that's how it was in the past," because you could absolutely expect better from an author in 1954.

Yes, Tolkien's writing was conservative by the standards of his own time, there can be no doubt about that. The beat generation writers were light-years ahead, and even mainstream fiction was more modern in the 1950s. It is of course a well known fact that Tolkien found it difficult to attune to the rapid cultural changes of the 20th century.

On another matter, I once read a German book in which the author accuses Tolkien of racism (Elves and Númenóreans as über-Nordics etc.); I think this is undeserved, though Tolkien fell victim of racial stereotypes of his time (but the most lovable race in his legendarium are the hobbits, who hardly fit any stereotypes of a "master race" - the Elves and Númenóreans come across as haughty and arrogant often enough); however, I don't know whether a character like Arondir is the best way to counter these stereotypes.

It's probably not the first attack on those grounds. I tend to find it a bit cheap. As it happens, I found Epic Pooh annoying too, though I admire Moorcock as a writer. I think Moorcock's own fantasy works were a better answer! (And yet I suspect we'd find Moorcock troublesome today.)

Moorcock of course belongs to another generation than Tolkien, and is far less conservative in his outlook; he was part of the 1960s counterculture, and probably influenced by the beat generation writers. I haven't read much of Moorcock's work, but what I read were some of his Elric stories, which did not really appeal to me. I did notice, though, that he satirized earlier fantasy writing, including Howard and also Tolkien.