A rising dislike of Tolkein?

[The Marquis de Leech]

But I think to construct a theory of flawed elf-hood on that is.........reaching. Is there any actual textual evidence to suggest that Gildor is a poor exemplar of his people, a coward etc......? The elves in LOTR do function largely as cryptic way-guides without ever actually doing anything dynamic - until the plot occasionally requires it, of course. To be honest, they function pretty much as a low-profile constantly running Deus Ex Machina device throughout.

Nah, Gildor isn't about flawed Elfhood. He's about the Elves rejecting their role in this story: the Elves are leaving, and it's up to mortals now. Which doesn't really make them good or evil, just antiquated nonentities.

[Matoro]

It's really not all that fruitful to compare Tolkien's Legendarium to ASOIAF. Tolkien creates an poetic epic , Martin writes a political thriller combined to modern fantasy elements.

Tolkien has good and evil, but most of his characters aren't fully good or fully evil. Actually I can't really think many characters that are completely good or completely bad.

Morgoth and Sauron have their reasons. They are not evil because they want to be evil. Morgoth was jealous, ambitious and eventually vengeful. Sauron wanted to cure the chaos by taking the control.

Valar or "good elves", like Turgon or Fingon, aren't completely good either. After all, Valar were able to make mistakes. It was mostly their fault that world become such mess. And many noble elves did questionable decisions - for example, Turgon's retreat to Gondolin could be seen as treasonous, even cowardly. Elves and dwarves both had racist views on each other, and many hobbits were overly proud and did not care about the world. Yes, there are also very good and very bad persons there (just like ASOIAF, not everybody is grey). There is really just too much bad or questionable things done by seemingly "good" characters (or other way around) that it's very hard to argument for "Tolkien's world and characters are completely black and white" -view.

[The Marquis de Leech]

The Morgoth/Sauron distinction is an interesting one. Tolkien wrote an essay on it.

Morgoth's problem was that he was unable to accept an existence or a consciousness outside his own. He wanted to destroy the world, because it was someone else's, and had he been victorious, he'd have even exterminated his own Orcs, because they had minds other than his. Morgoth was motivated by pure nihilistic madness, and his method was to disperse the force of corruption as much as possible (which weakened himself as an entity).

Sauron, by contrast, didn't mind the world existing. He just wanted to do what he liked with it, and unlike Morgoth's chaotic destruction, Sauron (like Saruman) was all about trying to bring order to the world. Sauron's methods were also different from Morgoth's in that rather than dispersing his power, Sauron concentrated it via the Rings. Rather than nihilism, Sauron was an ultra-cynical pragmatist.

[Richard]

surprised you find Christian morality to be 'getting in the way' as it's essentially the morals that the majority of us live our lives by.

Well to be fair, I meant specifically getting in the way of telling a good story. Having an all-powerful all-knowing and eternal force for good on your side kind of depletes the dramatic tension. Most great narrative art is successful to exactly the extent that it manages to circumvent this convention - see the schizophrenic genius of Paradise Lost, the elision of christianity as a factor in a lot of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.

That said, the last half of your sentence there is a massive overstatement - much of our legal behaviour is handed down via Roman law, which predates Christianity by centuries; much of our philosophical outlook is inherited from ancient Greece. A lot of law in the UK at least has also come via Scandinavian (pagan Viking) influence. Ombudsman, for example is a pre-christian Swedish concept. And then there's the impact of the Enlightenment, which is essentially secularism-in-waiting. The American Constitution was drafted by atheists and deists (who, had they had access to Darwin, would likely also have been atheists). The UN Declaration on Human Rights was drafted in the company of at least one declaredly atheist nation, and makes clear that all religions are to be considered equal in the extent to which they are respected as personal choices. Increasingly, UN and other international agreements are drawn up by nations representing a variety of religions and none.....

To call this mish-mash essentially Christian is a bit like saying we're all driving around in vehicles that are essentially Fords.

[Skythe1]

Well to be fair, I meant specifically getting in the way of telling a good story. Having an all-powerful all-knowing and eternal force for good on your side kind of depletes the dramatic tension. Most great narrative art is successful to exactly the extent that it manages to circumvent this convention - see the schizophrenic genius of Paradise Lost, the elision of christianity as a factor in a lot of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.

That said, the last half of your sentence there is a massive overstatement - much of our legal behaviour is handed down via Roman law, which predates Christianity by centuries; much of our philosophical outlook is inherited from ancient Greece. A lot of law in the UK at least has also come via Scandinavian (pagan Viking) influence. Ombudsman, for example is a pre-christian Swedish concept. And then there's the impact of the Enlightenment, which is essentially secularism-in-waiting. The American Constitution was drafted by atheists and deists (who, had they had access to Darwin, would likely also have been atheists). The UN Declaration on Human Rights was drafted in the company of at least one declaredly atheist nation, and makes clear that all religions are to be considered equal in the extent to which they are respected as personal choices. Increasingly, UN and other international agreements are drawn up by nations representing a variety of religions and none.....

To call this mish-mash essentially Christian is a bit like saying we're all driving around in vehicles that are essentially Fords.

I wasn't saying Christianity came first, but nonetheless it's the same set of principles, regardless of where they are derived from - it's a notion of what is right and wrong, and most of the civilised world agrees with these principles.

But to me that's the point of LOTR, Tolkien is first and foremost telling a story about morality and the implications of decisions, which is what stories do. They are all a study of the human (or elven, whatever) psyche, a play on how we understand things and how we interpret things. A good story elicits emotion, a great story elicits threads and discussions like these.

Even people that claim to dislike LOTR have read it and formed an opinion based on the text, and are willing to argue their points against it, that just proves how much of an important piece of it fiction it is.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Richard,

Well to be fair, I meant specifically getting in the way of telling a good story. Having an all-powerful all-knowing and eternal force for good on your side kind of depletes the dramatic tension. Most great narrative art is successful to exactly the extent that it manages to circumvent this convention - see the schizophrenic genius of Paradise Lost, the elision of christianity as a factor in a lot of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.

Sure because the characters in LoTR could sit back and do nothing knowing that all-mighty Iluvatar had their backs and would save them from any peril? That's just not how I recall the story.

[Arkash]

Although the story is amazing, and I've read LOTR and the Hobbit at least 5 times when I was younger (and the Silmarillion twice), I must say that since I've started reading much more modern fantasy (Asoiaf, Robin Hobb, Pratchett, David Gemmell...) I've grown some distance towards Tolkien's writing.

For me, the heart of a story is its characters, and imo, there are only seven compelling ones the entire story : Boromir, Saruman, Gollum, Frodo, Sam, Faramir and Eowyn.

All the others are damn uni-dimensional and flat. Okay his universe is massive and complex and whatever, okay his story is universal, epic and magnificent. But Tolkien never found the knack of writing compelling characters. But that's just my opinion !

But no one can deny the influence he has on this modern fantasy. Contemporary authors have long since surpassed Tolkien's writing but in a way, it all started with him, so for that, I'll respect him forever.

[Hodor!!!]

The view of elves as racial good guys based only on LOTR would be inaccurate though - it would be making an assumption that an entire race is the same as the very few elves we see in the novel. The elves in LOTR are in general 'good', though Galadriel's temptation shows they are as vulnerable to corruption and "darkness" as everyone else, but it would be wrong to assume that they are a good race as a whole based on interactions with such a small group of them.

Imagine I wrote a book, where there are five Jewish characters. All of them are greedy, have long crooked noses and plan to dominate the world. Now imagine, being asked about this in an interview, I would say: "True, all my Jewish characters are stereotypical Jews. But I'm not racist. You are! Because you judge a whole race by a few individuals."

Would you be convinced that my book wasn't racist?

I hope not.

[Skythe1]

Imagine I wrote a book, where there are five Jewish characters. All of them are greedy, have long crooked noses and plan to dominate the world. Now imagine, being asked about this in an interview, I would say: "True, all my Jewish characters are stereotypical Jews. But I'm not racist. You are! Because you judge a whole race by a few individuals."

Would you be convinced that my book wasn't racist?

I hope not.

I didn't realise a long crooked nose and plotting world domination was a stereotypical Jewish trait...

But what has racism got to do with whether elves are good or evil?

[Hodor!!!]

I didn't realise a long crooked nose and plotting world domination was a stereotypical Jewish trait...

>>>>>>>>>>>> Kind of the most common.

See, for example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/stereotypes_of_jews

But what has racism got to do with whether elves are good or evil?

>>>> Everything. Defining a group of people by generalisations of all of them instead of individuals, that is pretty much text-book racism. It doesn't matter if they are all evil or all good, the point is that they are supposedly all something, they are depicted purely as the product of the culture they are born into and/or apparently genetically inherited character traits.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Hodor,

Perhaps if those five characters were the center of the story and that's the only image of them you get throughout that story.

The Elves in LoTR are window dressing at best as such you don't get their deeper personalities and anything close to a full sense of their culture and range of emotions. When you do get a peak, as with the temptation of Galadrial you see that they are a long way from merely "good" and do have a desire for Earthly power.

We refer to the Slimarillion because the Elves in that story were much more than mere window dressings. In it they are good, bad, jealous, virtuous, coniving and heroic. They are people. The 7 or 8 named Elves who appear in LoTR are simply to small a sample and they are on screen too short a time to give a real impression of who the "Elves" are as a people.

[Skythe1]

>>>> Everything. Defining a group of people by generalisations of all of them instead of individuals, that is pretty much text-book racism. It doesn't matter if they are all evil or all good, the point is that they are supposedly all something, they are depicted purely as the product of the culture they are born into and/or apparently genetically inherited character traits.

Oh, so you think pretty much every fantasy novel that includes different races is racist then? Because 9 times out of 10, that's the case.

Personally I'd call that stereotyping, not racism.

[Hodor!!!]

Oh, so you think pretty much every fantasy novel that includes different races is racist then? Because 9 times out of 10, that's the case.

>>> What makes you think that?

No, I think pretty much every novel of every genre that depicts a large group of people as is they were essentially all the same is racist. Because they are.

Personally I'd call that stereotyping, not racism.

>>> It doesn't matter what you call it, having stereotypes based on race is racism.

Here's the definition of racism:

"racism

the belief that all members of each race posses characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races."

[Skythe1]

>>> It doesn't matter what you call it, having stereotypes based on race is racism.

Here's the definition of racism:

"racism

the belief that all members of each race posses characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races."

I'm sorry I really can't be bothered to argue the point. I'm struggling to understand how you don't find most fantasy novels racist if you're going to go by the literal definition of the word.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Hodor,

If a bit character appears for a paragraph how is it possible to fully flesh out that character to avoid racism as you are defining it?

[sologdin]

fantasy settings with distinct 'races' are certainly racialist. it's all gygax's fault.

[Hodor!!!]

I'm sorry I really can't be bothered to argue the point. I'm struggling to understand how you don't find most fantasy novels racist if you're going to go by the literal definition of the word.

Well, I have not read "most fantasy novels", only a few, so I don't think I'm qualified to make such a general statement.

[Hodor!!!]

Hodor,

If a bit character appears for a paragraph how is it possible to fully flesh out that character to avoid racism as you are defining it?

It is not about racism as I personally understand it, I'm talking about the general, accepted meaning of that word.

No, it is not possible to flesh out a character in a few sentences. But that is not an excuse to use racial stereotypes.

Let me come back to my Jew-example. Is it possible to have minor Jewish characters that are not conforming to racist clichées? Of course! Just don't let his Jewishness define him/her. I don't think it is that hard.

[The Marquis de Leech]

It is not about racism as I personally understand it, I'm talking about the general, accepted meaning of that word.

No, it is not possible to flesh out a character in a few sentences. But that is not an excuse to use racial stereotypes.

Let me come back to my Jew-example. Is it possible to have minor Jewish characters that are not conforming to racist clichées? Of course! Just don't let his Jewishness define him/her. I don't think it is that hard.

So, purely in the context of LOTR, there are a handful of Elves, who are an ancient immortal people, far beyond the understanding of mortal and mundane hobbits (Galadriel, after all, is Feanor's niece). All we know about them is that they fought Sauron long ago, but are now fading away.

I'm not sure how you take such window-dressing and turn it into racial stereotyping. I mean, first we had the "Dwarves are Jews!" claim - now we're having an "Elves are so stereotypical!" claim. Well, the first problem with that is that there aren't stereotypes about Middle-earth Elves - they're an invented species. What next? Ents are racist because they like to hang out in forests?

[Matoro]

Well jew-example doesen't really work all that well since jews are people like every other ethnic group, but elves are completely different species. And species is a bit important to define, isn't it?

And in most cases elvishness isn't even "defining" trait. Probably the most "elvish" character in LOTR is Elrond, who is actually half-elf (well, 34% human 66% elf). Many elf-"stereotypes" are actually invented by Tolkien, and in their world they aren't stereotypes, but real traits that separate elves from humans.