Tag Archives: tolkien

don’t ruin Tolkien for me, assholes

I read the Lord of the Rings in approximately middle school (the late 1980s), and I am rereading it with my son now. It’s wonderful. Now, I think it is amazing that there are people called “Tolkien scholars”, and I am a fan of scholarship in general. But really, let’s not ruin Tolkien by overthinking it like this:

The Lord of the Rings seems immersed in racism (the superiority of the fair and noble elves, the inferiority of the brutish, mongrel orcs), colonialism and imperialism (the return of the king means the restoration of empire), and deeply retrograde sexism (with a core cast of characters that is overwhelmingly male). There is also a generalized suspicion of democracy, cities, modernization, progress, cultural relativism, and materialism in favor of monarchism, agrarianism, stasis, fantasies of good versus evil, and a traditionalism that at times borders on religious fundamentalism (Tolkien himself was a pre–Vatican II Catholic). The Lord of the Rings is a series obsessed with ruins, bloodlines, the divine right of aristocrats, and a sense of history as a tragic, endless fall from grace.

I don’t take it this way, actually. The world of the Lord of the Rings is a simpler world where there is a clear dichotomy between pure good and pure evil. I think this is what Tolkien wanted to explore – essentially the “why do bad things happen to good people” problem. The answer to this question was clear in Middle Earth – because there are evil supernatural beings out there who are the source of all bad things, there is a constant push and pull between good and evil, and sometimes evil gets the upper hand. (There is a supreme being or god in the Tolkien universe, who seems to have intentionally created good and evil, and there is some mystery as to why. Tolkien was religious and probably wanted to wrestle with this question in his own way.) Orcs and trolls are just evil minions created by these evil supernatural beings. It is their nature to be evil and they are not deserving of our sympathy. I think he was well aware that this sharp dividing line does not exist in our real world. In fact, among all the “races” he invented, it is the humans alone who seem ambiguous in terms of being capable of both good and evil. So this sounds like our real world. And at the end of the Lord of the Rings, and especially if you read the Silmarillion, Tolkien transitions from the fantasy world back to our real world.

Maybe I’ll get into the “fair” elves and comical Scottish dwarves at some point, because although I like the movies I don’t think the way these “races” are portrayed are true to the books, or at best they are just one possible interpretation.

There Be Dragons: my 2022-2023 fantasy journey

Stop reading here if you don’t care about my fantasy (novel reading) journey. I read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings probably as a pre-teen in the late 1980s or so, and loved every minute of them. I was talking to a young person recently who has not read them and does not have any interest in them, and it kind of made me sad. I would not be the same person if I had not read them. Sadly, I don’t think anyone else can ever live up to Tolkien’s legacy, not even authors who put “R.R.” in their names and then don’t finish their books (I liked Ice and Fire as far as it went and I hope it eventually concludes). But anyway, here’s what I’ve read over the past year or so.

The Silmarillion: I finally went back and read this. I supposed it was in the back of my mind from the recent Amazon series (which I thought was decent and hope will continue) and from the mention of it in Ready Player Two. The Silmarillion is long and somewhat hard to read, but it really helped me appreciate the incredible depth of the fantasy world that Tolkien created. Long as it is, I did not appreciate before that the Silmarillion is only a summary of the incredibly deep alternate universe Tolkien created. He must have spent more time in that alternate universe than in this one. An interesting thing about the Silmarillion is the idea of a mischievous creator god who created evil on purpose. Was this for his amusement. He also created humans and elves, and we eventually learn that humans return to be with him after death. Elves do not die from old age or disease, but they die in battle, but they go somewhere but they don’t get to be with the creator god. Dwarves were created by a lower level of gods akin to angels, without the creator god’s permission. Orcs were created by the evil demon-like god in “mockery” of the elves.

Earthsea: I read the five-part Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin. I’ve heard this described as “the other” great fantasy series of the 20th century. Maybe, but not on a par with Tolkien. I liked it.

Land Fit for Heroes: Since I love Altered Carbon, I will read anything by Richard K. Morgan. I enjoyed this, although I found the ending leaving me to piece some things together on my own, in a classic William Gibson move. Well, Morgan is clearly Gibson-inspired.

What to Middle Earth, Ice and Fire, Earthsea, and Land Fit for Heroes all have in common? DRAGONS!!! So I learned that Rule #1 of fantasy writing, should I ever choose to undertake it, is there have to be dragons.