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Tell the world you have never read the Silmarillion without telling the world you have never read the Silmarillion
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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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Admittedly while Tolkien wrote that even he would probably not be likely to portray sympathetic, oppressed orcs like in the pic. I don't remember any of the silmarillion being concerned with them at least.
I'm not old enough to know what the much smaller pre-movie lotr fan base was like. Right now there are a bunch of reactionary nerds who sort of hide in it because of Tolkein's more antiquated Britishness (racism) and I wonder if the fandom was always like that
Tolkien was inconsistent over the years about orcs. Where they came from and whether they were purely evil was just kind of an afterthought to their purpose - someone for the heroes to fight. Kind of like his whole world was just a place for his hobby languages to exist in.
He was always adamant about that. The most "curtains are fucking blue" person ever. Meanwhile its impossible to not see a lot of very obvious parrells to WW1 and WW2 at minimum.
Like please try to not think that the Dead Marshes were inspired by experiencing WW1. i dare even the most media illiterate to think there's nothing there.
He wasn't thr most curtains are blue guy ever, here's the full quote:
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
There is a major difference there and he had said in other occasions that he's sure aspects of his work do reflect his life experiences but never as any intended 1:1 paralel
Oh that's cool. That's actually a really intetesting perspective on writing
Also Numenor is funny from this angle: an island, where local civilization slowly turned from peaceful rural people into technologically advanced maritime slave-trading colonialist empire, which twisted its religion to place its monarch at the top of it and repressed those who still followed the old religion. That, of course, has absolutely no relation to Tolkien's Catholicism and his dislike of Industrial revolution and contemporary Britain.
I thought it was really clear in the Silmarillion that they were elves taken captive by morgoth and corrupted through torture. So like there's obviously a sympathetic way to approach this.
The Silmarillion is like fifty percent t Christopher Tolkien piecing things together. The guy changed his mind a few times regarding orcs and became more sympathetic to them each time but to work that in Christopher would have to change a lot of the silmarilliom to match. In lord of the rings itself (the books) You do get examples of orcs talking among themselves and they are intelligent, have independent goals and ideas and different cultures based on where they come from. The orcs guarding Cirith Ungol talk about how they hate their boss and would rather be back in the mountains just being normal bandits.
Definitely, I'm not arguing against that. I think its good that people are consciously moving away from the evil races trope. I just don't think what Tolkien thought about it one way or the other is that important.
It was interesting as someone who was into The Hobbit long before the Lord of the Rings trilogy was released. I grew up with the 1977 animation like a lot of kids my age. Wood elves were purple, orcs had two throats, and dragons had dog faces and cat eyes.
I never saw it growing up, but for many children, Aragorn/Strider looked like this:
So anywho, LotR being Norse/Celtic analogous was new when the Jackson films came out. This doesn't even get into the artwork done by people like John Blanche, Ian Miller, or Frank Frazetta.
As they were meant to lol. I actually just rewatched it for the first time in years last night!
Yeah the whole reactionary "Men of the West" shit didn't to my knowledge exist before the films. Along with the rest of the Viking obsessed reactionary thing in the mainstream
i dunno what you mean, men of the west is just english for dunedain. in his conceit of translating the book from the original westron, the toponymy around bree was always meant to have celtic vibes and the rohirrim were always meant to have anglo-saxon vibes.
the dwarves had gothic-sounding names (in english translation) because they took those names from people related to the rohirrim, and since the rohirrim were getting anglo-saxon-coded, these guys got a related gothic-coding.
and there were always nazis who liked the books and liked to read their own shit into it.
Watched it last night and was singing "Down, down to goblin town" all morning lol
I loved that as a kid! The orc songs go hard
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Yes! I remember that too. One of them is imagining the world after the ring is destroyed
When i read the books, back in the pre-movie days i was a kid, so i wouldn't have been able to pick up on what was reactionary or not. But i think the general feeling of that time was that the books were anti-war. And while they were about adventure and wars, they stood out by centering the hobbits who weren't warriors and prized simple, peaceful living.
The books reputation then was more about the feeling of histrory to the world that Tolkein built into it (i don't remember hearing the term world building back then, but that's what we'd say today). And then about the anti-war themes especially in the Hobbit and the parrells to WW1 and WW2 in LOTR
Right, I should make it clear that I don't feel like LotR or Tolkien more broadly have nothing good to be said about them, just that there are a bunch of reactionaries who see LotR's inherent fantasy lookism and binary semi-Christian morality as last bastions of their lame reactionary worldview.
At the end of the day it's (as always) a bunch of boring culture war fought within the medium of people's treats of choice in an economic environment that structurally divorces people in it from the consequences of their political reality.
For sure, i don't want to make it sound like their aren't problematic things or things that shouldn't be critiqued. I have a lot of problems with it, and i get that reactionaries see what they see in it