A rising dislike of Tolkein?

[Jo498]

Gollum was "grey" before he had the ring, otherwise he would never have gotten the ring. There are unfriendly and corruptible hobbits, but if one has not read the whole book one would not know. (But isn't Bill Farning a hobbit?)

Dwarves are rather "grey" as already shown in the "Hobbit"

The very few remaining Elves are all "good", but mainly because there temptations and tribulations took place two ages past (described in the Silmarilion). At the time of LotR the ones we encounter would not "fall", but neither can they do a lot. They are passively defending a few isolated spots.

Of the wizards (actually which does not become completely clear in the main text of LotR something similar to angels with limited powers due to a humanlike "incarnation") the most powerful is corrupted and supposedly only one remains true to his mission. (Although Radagast may be counted as "good" as well, but he doesn't do a lot.)

I would not deny that there are many tropes in place in LotR, but as said above, it is not as simple as many claim. And furthermore, hardly any story is free from such clichees. Clichees and tropes by themselves do not make a story bad. I am not through, but are there good "Sranc" in Bakkers world? and I would actually hate it, if Martin's Others turned out to be NOT an evil (or maybe chaotic neutral quasi-natural) force. There is something like an unplausible inversion of a trope for the sake of inversion.

[Hodor!!!]

A sincere question here; did you finish the books?

Yes, Denethor is a man, but as Scot Ellinson said, Elves are much darker than we see them.in LotR - indeed, we see very little of them in LotR when you think on it. Those we do see are "good" but the explanation for that is rooted in their history, as laid out in the Silmarillion. And also in the Silmarillion, we see that Elves can be and are very dark at times.

No, as I wrote I stopped after about a hundred pages of boredom and there is no way I will read more unless someone forces me to. The reasons for race generalisations being rooted in history, well that is what most racists claim nowadays. They will tell you for example that people from the middle east are not genetical inferior, but the Muslim culture made them generalisation1, generalisation2, ...

[The Marquis de Leech]

OK. Clearly the mods aren't paying attention to the length of the thread, so I might as well get to work:

First of all, even if I had not seen the movies, I knew that the mission - destroying the magic ring in a vulcano -- was going to be the whole plot. Sure, they will be some danger, some bonding, some adventuring, some growing, yada yada yada... but there was not ever the slightest doubt in my mind that the jolly little people would eventually prevail against the evil foreign races.

The jolly little people (who are often chronically afflicted with smug parochialism) aren't fighting the evil foreign races. They're trying to destroy an object that gives the wearer near-absolute power. The War of the Ring is literally a distraction that enables Frodo to get to Orodruin. Where he, of course, fails.

I would be okay with that, if the characters were intriguing and interesting, but I found them to be silly caricatures. The characterisations are mostly based on race features and I did not like that at all.

I heard people having problems with the good races being white and the bad black, but my issue wasn't that. I would still find it horrible if it was the other way round. Just the notion that you can define people by their race and never be wrong.

Saruman wears white, is white, and calls himself the White. And he's evil. So, oddly enough, is Grima Wormtongue. And Lotho Sackville-Baggins. And Ar-Pharazon. And let's not even go into the Sons of Feanor.

Meanwhile, Ghan-buri-Ghan is dark-skinned and a good guy.

Give me an orc (or whatever they are called) resistance group that fights for pacifism, or a really dumb elve, or a really evil hobbit, who tortures hobbit grandmas for fun. I don't count Gollum, because he is shown as more insane than evil. Surely, a guy from the "good people race" can be corrupted, but only by the foreign magic stuff. If he had just stayed in the Hobbit gated community and would have stayed away from the evils of the outside world, he would be okay.

Utter tripe. The Shire is a smug little place, full of smug little people, and that's not portrayed as a good thing. The Scouring of the Shire chapter (cut from the movies) shows what happens when the outside world catches up with the hobbits.

I could have overlooked all that, if the text wasn't so mind-numbingly bland and dry. It's a story about good guys trying to prevent the big baddie to get a weapon with which he could rule the world - like most plots of "He-Man" or the "The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". But the difference is that Tolkien does not show the slightest self irony. The humourless pathos that the story radiates is my biggest turn-off. It takes itself way too serious to get me to take it serious.

Most quests are about gaining an item to defeat the enemy. Tolkien inverted the entire quest trope, by focussing on losing an item - specifically an item that could have, in the right hands, defeated Sauron then and there. The whole point of the story is about the rejection of power, not merely "stopping Sauron from getting a weapon".

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Hodor,

Dude, the Elves are barely seen in LoTR. They are a long way from "pure good" as three kinslayings and numerous betrayals attest. Galadriel was seriously tempted by the ring. You are missing lots and lota of context. Hell, Tolkien shows racially based tensions between Elves and Dwarves. It takes an intervention by Galadriel to get Gimli into Lorien.

[HexMachina]

No, as I wrote I stopped after about a hundred pages of boredom and there is no way I will read more unless someone forces me to. The reasons for race generalisations being rooted in history, well that is what most racists claim nowadays. They will tell you for example that people from the middle east are not genetical inferior, but the Muslim culture made them generalisation1, generalisation2, ...

I cant understand how you could criticise the content of the books without having read them. It kind of.makes your critique baseless.

That being said, you misunderstood my response. The reason the few elves we see in LotR are good is rooted in their history, not the elves as a whole. Elves as a whole arent morally superior at all. The orcs are the only real racial generalisation in the novels, because even the Hobbits have greyer characters.

[Biter the Gallant]

Ever since GoT started - and subsequently made aSoIaF more popular - people have started to criticise Tolkien, and more specifically tLotR, because of it's lack of "realism." Apparently realism is graphic sex and violence, I suppose. I don't see why people would say sex and violence make a story better. If you're so interested in sex, why not keep it in your own personal life, and if you're so interested in graphic violence, then.... why?

Another criticism of Tolkien is his lack of "complex" characters. They say they are very two-dimensional and boring and the book is about clear cut "good guys vs bad guys." While this is partly true, there are still various examples of interesting and complex characters, such as Boromir, Denethor, Gollum and Frodo. The themes underlying the book are very deep and thought-provoking, and it's a shame that most people just overlook them.

I could not agree more. Additionaly, there _is_ very much brutality in Tolkien's stories, he just presents it in a very different narrative style. Especially in the Silmarillion. There is even (unknown for them, but still) incest between two siblings (Túrin and Nienor), a kidnap-forced relationship-murdering the wife combo (in the story of Eöl) and some extremely brutal deaths (like that of Celebrimbor). Tolkien simply used an other type of storytelling, because he created a world with a kind of lost-but-once-existed "saint order" in it, which is threatened by cruel chaos and tyrannism. That requires different literature devices, than e. g. Martin's world, where chaos and tyrannism are not the great evil, but the normal conditions of Planetos.

The main difference between the two is perhaps that in Tolkien's world originally everything is good (even Sauron was good once) but can be corrupted by evil and power, while Martin has a much more pessimistic opinion about human nature.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Additionaly, there _is_ very much brutality in Tolkien's stories, he just presents it in a very different narrative style.

Oh yes.

LOTR has a hobbit-turned-cannibal, an accursed swamp with long-dead corpses, catapulted heads, and the insanity and suicide of a major leader.

[Biter the Gallant]

Hodor,

Dude, the Elves are barely seen in LoTR. They are a long way from "pure good" as three kinslayings and numerous betrayals attest. Galadriel was seriously tempted by the ring. You are missing lots and lota of context. Hell, Tolkien shows racially based tensions between Elves and Dwarves. It takes an intervention by Galadriel to get Gimli into Lorien.

And it also deserves a note that as both the Hobbit and LoTR are "translations" of parts of the Red Book, we get in them some kind of hobbit POVs to Middle-Earth. In these books we see the Elves as the Hobbits see them. In the Silmarillion we see the Elves as they see themselves, and they immediately seem to be far less perfect :-)

Oh yes.

LOTR has a hobbit-turned-cannibal, an accursed swamp with long-dead corpses, catapulted heads, and the insanity and suicide of a major leader.

Yes! And it is good that you have mentioned cannibalism, its not just Gollum, I have almost forgotten that Grima Wormtongue _ate_ Lotho Sackville-Baggins in the novel :ack:

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

As this thread is in threat of imminant lock down I ressurected my "Orc Redemption" thread as it's a very similar discussion to this one.

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/topic/108710-could-orcs-in-tolkiens-subcreation-be-redeemed-what-does-that-answer-yes-or-no-say-about-tolkiens-view-of-politics-and-his-moral-views/page-6#entry5979409

[Richard]

I confess that I find a bit wearing the constant refrain of "Oh, but in the Silmarillion....." when dealing with criticism of LOTR.

The Silmarillion is a separate book, and was not even a completed work at the time of the author's death. LOTR's elves - for example - have to be judged on how they present between the covers of that particular work, not on what the DVD extras may or may not say about them. To draw a parallel, I'm particularly fond of the little orc vignettes at the end of The Two Towers, but it would be ridiculous of me to invoke these scenes to argue that the goblins in The Hobbit are actually a lot more humanly complicated than you think. They aren't. They present in The Hobbit as exactly what they are - standard fairy-tale monsters for a standard kid's fairy tale. What Tolkien chose to build on that in later works or unpublished notes is neither here nor there where that particular work is concerned.

I'd say, in fact, that a very large part of the problem in dealing with the big T is exactly this - that people are far too often unable to untangle specific criticism of specific works from a more general criticism (or worship!) of the man himself.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Except that LOTR, as conceived, is explicitly set in the world of The Silmarillion, and indeed is the spiritual sequel of the earlier work. Tolkien wanted the books published together, which held up the publishing of LOTR for several years before the author went crawling back to Stanley Unwin. To ignore The Silmarillion in a discussion of LOTR is like ignoring the Old Testament in a discussion on the New Testament: it can be done, but it removes an awful lot of literary context.

The Hobbit, as originally written and published in the 1930s, was never intended as being a Middle-earth story, and had to be retrospectively inserted into the canon (with adjustments to the Riddles in the Dark chapter) after LOTR arrived on the scene.

[sologdin]

are they separate? it's one serial.

that said, I do get annoyed by the dilution of the silmarillion with the suckiness of LotR. why do all these losers always want to intrude on discussions of the former with their inchoate thoughts regarding the latter, particularly the subliterate ones who know it merely through cinema?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Richard,

As RBPL points out LoTR and the Silmarillion are in the same world. The Silmarillion provides important context for LoTR.

[Darth Richard II]

Eh, are we arguing with someone who now claims to not even have read the books? Come guys, don't feed the troll. It will follow you home and quote Goodkind at you all day.

Also how is this not locked yet? All the mods big Wolrd Cup fans?

Oh yes.

LOTR has a hobbit-turned-cannibal, an accursed swamp with long-dead corpses, catapulted heads, and the insanity and suicide of a major leader.

Yeah but there's no whores or STDs! How boring!

[sologdin]

the rings can be metaphors for STIs, then. the way to stop them is accordingly to travel back up the birthing canal of their deliverance and stuff them into the heat of their incubatory womb. that always works for real, so, yaknow, good metaphor.

[The Marquis de Leech]

the rings can be metaphors for STIs, then. the way to stop them is accordingly to travel back up the birthing canal of their deliverance and stuff them into the heat of their incubatory womb. that always works for real, so, yaknow, good metaphor.

Let's get nice and Freudian on LOTR:

- Aragorn carries around the shards of Narsil, so he has a dysfunctioning sword. He also spends this time unable to fulfil his role as King, and is therefore unable to marry Arwen, so his other sword isn't particularly functional either. When Narsil is reforged as Anduril, Aragorn regains his masculinity, and is hence able to marry.

- Putting the ring on your finger is dangerous and intoxicating, with interesting long-term side-effects. Putting long thin objects in holes carries with it a certain metaphorical symbolism...

[Shryke]

Let's get nice and Freudian on LOTR:

- Aragorn carries around the shards of Narsil, so he has a dysfunctioning sword. He also spends this time unable to fulfil his role as King, and is therefore unable to marry Arwen, so his other sword isn't particularly functional either. When Narsil is reforged as Anduril, Aragorn regains his masculinity, and is hence able to marry.

- Putting the ring on your finger is dangerous and intoxicating, with interesting long-term side-effects. Putting long thin objects in holes carries with it a certain metaphorical symbolism...

Putting the ring on clearly symbolizes marriage and how the man disappears from existence the minute he's tied down by a monogamous relationship. The only way to end this scourge is to take it back to the place from whence it came, the womb and there destroy both the womb and the thing that shelters it, symbolically killing motherhood in order to forever free men from bondage. Of course Frodo, a ring-bearer, inevitably fails at the end as no man who has tied himself down is capable of making the hard choice to free himself at the end. And of course, those who wore the ring but cast it aside eventually are all, naturally, broken as they must be by the experience of marriage and are not fit to live within the proud and now-virile kingdom of Aragorn at the end and so must sail west.

Obviously Galadriel's talk about using the ring symbolizes the consequences of women taking power within a relationship and how it must inevitably lead to ruin. Note that Arwen subsumes her own identity/immortality and thus gains happiness and joy for all. And then gets to die alone because once her man is gone, she no longer matters.

This is also why there's basically no female characters. It is, after all, a heroic narrative which precludes their involvement.

[Richard]

As RBPL points out LoTR and the Silmarillion are in the same world.

Irrelevant. The original Star Wars movie and Clone Wars - No Prisoners by Karen Traviss are "in the same world", but that doesn't mean you can explain the flaws in the former by reference to the detail in the latter. A novel must stand and fall on its own merits, not by reference to other aspects of canon.

The Silmarillion provides important context for LoTR.

In terms of over-arching canonical content, sure. That's to say - yes, you can argue interesting things this way about - for example - Tolkien's attitude to elves or orcs in general conceptual terms. But you can't use that over-arching context to argue that some (perceived) authorial failing regarding elves in LOTR is wide of the mark. You have to address that perception within the framework of the novel concerned.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Richard,

So, if you start ASOIAF with ASOS it is Martin's fault if you have trouble making sense of it?

[Richard]

No, that'd be my fault for being an idiot - as far as I'm aware each of Martin's books carry a neat little sub-title detailing which volume of the Ice and Fire sequence you hold in your hands.**

However, it would certainly be Martin's fault if he'd published ASOS ahead of AGOT and ACOK, then died and had to rely on a friendly relative to cobble together a book based on vast quantities of notes and variegated text detailing a random bunch of events taking place before the storyline contained in ASOS even got started.....

Which is to say - it's not even close to a good analogy. Martin's books have been written in order, as an ordered sequence. LOTR was written as a standalone piece (not even the publishers' aspirations towards a sequel for the Hobbit really apply - LOTR is fashioned in such a way that you need have no knowledge of the Hobbit at all for the narrative to work).

** though we could have a lively argument about the relative merits of sequential vs discrete fiction, and whether a book that requires you to have read several previous volumes in order to work well can actually be counted as a discrete novel at all.