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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2020 22:27:35 GMT -5
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Post by thwhtguardian on Mar 16, 2020 8:41:46 GMT -5
And Sauron has closed the gates to Mordor as he and all his hordes self isolate for two weeks for the good of all Middle Earth. It's no fun conquering the world if your opponents have already been polished off by a virus after all. |
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Post by Confessor on Mar 16, 2020 9:06:10 GMT -5
And Sauron has closed the gates to Mordor as he and all his hordes self isolate for two weeks for the good of all Middle Earth. It's no fun conquering the world if your opponents have already been polished off by a virus after all.  |
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Post by Confessor on Mar 18, 2020 10:41:06 GMT -5
As noted a few posts back, I recently purchased a copy of Katharyn F. Crabbe's book of critical essays on J.R.R. Tokien's works, and I'd like to share some of her interpretations and hypotheses as a way of (hopefully) starting some group discussions here. So, first up, here's some comments that Crabbe makes about the nature of good and evil and how Tolkien himself perceived good and evil in relation to his books.  Crabbe suggests that, "many of the central episodes and characters in The Hobbit reflect Tolkien's thinking about the origin and nature of good and evil." She further elaborates by saying, "the rudiments of Tolkien's visions of good and evil, while not central, are clearly and consistently depicted in the actions and motives of Bilbo and those he encounters in his adventures. Fantasy, it has been said, re-enacts the process of creation, and in The Hobbit the issues of good and evil are inextricably bound up with creativity, especially the creation of beauty. For example, the Trolls on the mountainside have "heavy faces" and speak like working-class urban Englishmen – their language 'was not drawing room at all,' and their manners are worse. Good, on the other hand, is expressed as a kind of Inklings society – composed of creative and merry males. 'The dreadful language of the Wargs' sounds so dreadful because it is used to talk about, 'cruel and wicked things.' As the Wargs' language suggests, if evil beings do create anything (and most of them do not) it will not be beautiful. The Goblins, for example, 'are cruel and wicked, and badhearted, they make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones.' Dragons are evil because they do not create or enjoy; they only hoard."
Crabbe's above hypothesis is interesting, but I'd like to take it a step further and ask whether we think that it was precisly Tolkien's upper-class, "Inklings society" friends and lifestyle that made him regard anything uncouth, uncreative, or brusque as "evil." I mean, just why is it that the Trolls, Goblins, and Orcs in Tolkien's books all talk like working-class British labourers? |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Mar 18, 2020 12:28:50 GMT -5
As noted a few posts back, I recently purchased a copy of Katharyn F. Crabbe's book of critical essays on J.R.R. Tokien's works, and I'd like to share some of her interpretations and hypotheses as a way of (hopefully) starting some group discussions here. So, first up, here's some comments that Crabbe makes about the nature of good and evil and how Tolkien himself perceived good and evil in relation to his books. Crabbe suggests that, "many of the central episodes and characters in The Hobbit reflect Tolkien's thinking about the origin and nature of good and evil." She further elaborates by saying, "the rudiments of Tolkien's visions of good and evil, while not central, are clearly and consistently depicted in the actions and motives of Bilbo and those he encounters in his adventures. Fantasy, it has been said, re-enacts the process of creation, and in The Hobbit the issues of good and evil are inextricably bound up with creativity, especially the creation of beauty. For example, the Trolls on the mountainside have "heavy faces" and speak like working-class urban Englishmen – their language 'was not drawing room at all,' and their manners are worse. Good, on the other hand, is expressed as a kind of Inklings society – composed of creative and merry males. 'The dreadful language of the Wargs' sounds so dreadful because it is used to talk about, 'cruel and wicked things.' As the Wargs' language suggests, if evil beings do create anything (and most of them do not) it will not be beautiful. The Goblins, for example, 'are cruel and wicked, and badhearted, they make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones.' Dragons are evil because they do not create or enjoy; they only hoard."
Crabbe's above hypothesis is interesting, but I'd like to take it a step further and ask whether we think that it was precisly Tolkien's upper-class, "Inklings society" friends and lifestyle that made him regard anything uncouth, uncreative, or brusque as "evil." I mean, just why is it that the Trolls, Goblins, and Orcs in Tolkien's books all talk like working-class British labourers? I always thought his characterization of the villains, especially in the Hobbit, as having its roots in the traditions of English literature like Oliver Twist and the Christmas Carol where rough language was short hand for thief, it was just a quick way to establish who was a villain so the plot could get on with moving forward. Though that short hand of course is rooted in class itself so it's probably not off base to simply label it as that in the end. A modern day take on it would be having a character talk with an exaggerated New York Italian accent if you wanted to quickly imply that a character was a crook. Such an association doesn't have the same class-ist implications it does achieve the same end. |
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Post by Rob Allen on Mar 18, 2020 12:49:19 GMT -5
The equation of evil with the lower class goes back at least to the Middle Ages. The word "villain" originally referred to a peasant serf. The proto-novels of the era often had a serf as the antagonist of the aristocratic hero, so "villain" started to be used for any antagonist.
A few years back I saved a couple of quotes from Barbara Tuchman's great book about the 14th century:
A Distant Mirror, Barbara W. Tuchman, Chapter 7:
"The general term for peasant was villein or vilain, which had acquired a pejorative tone, though harmlessly derived from the Latin villa. Neither exactly slave nor entirely free, the villein belonged to the estate of his lord, under obligation to pay rent or work services for use of the land, and in turn to enjoy the right of protection and justice.
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A deep grievance of the peasant was the contempt in which he was held by the other classes. Aside from the rare note of compassion, most tales and ballads depict him as aggressive, insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious, tricky, unshaved, unwashed, ugly, stupid and credulous or sometimes shrewd and witty, incessantly discontented, usually cuckolded. In satiric tales it was said the villein's soul would find no place in Paradise or anywhere else because the demons refused to carry it owing to the foul smell. In the chansons de geste he is scorned as inept in combat and poorly armed, mocked for his manners, his morals, even his misery. [...] The knights saw him as a person of ignoble instincts who could have no understanding of 'honor' and was therefore capable of every kind of deceit and incapable of trust."
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Post by thwhtguardian on Mar 18, 2020 13:08:44 GMT -5
The equation of evil with the lower class goes back at least to the Middle Ages. The word "villain" originally referred to a peasant serf. The proto-novels of the era often had a serf as the antagonist of the aristocratic hero, so "villain" started to be used for any antagonist. A few years back I saved a couple of quotes from Barbara Tuchman's great book about the 14th century: A Distant Mirror, Barbara W. Tuchman, Chapter 7: "The general term for peasant was villein or vilain, which had acquired a pejorative tone, though harmlessly derived from the Latin villa. Neither exactly slave nor entirely free, the villein belonged to the estate of his lord, under obligation to pay rent or work services for use of the land, and in turn to enjoy the right of protection and justice. ... A deep grievance of the peasant was the contempt in which he was held by the other classes. Aside from the rare note of compassion, most tales and ballads depict him as aggressive, insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious, tricky, unshaved, unwashed, ugly, stupid and credulous or sometimes shrewd and witty, incessantly discontented, usually cuckolded. In satiric tales it was said the villein's soul would find no place in Paradise or anywhere else because the demons refused to carry it owing to the foul smell. In the chansons de geste he is scorned as inept in combat and poorly armed, mocked for his manners, his morals, even his misery. [...] The knights saw him as a person of ignoble instincts who could have no understanding of 'honor' and was therefore capable of every kind of deceit and incapable of trust." Never knew that origin of the word. The more you know, right? |
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Post by Confessor on Mar 18, 2020 14:47:15 GMT -5
The equation of evil with the lower class goes back at least to the Middle Ages. The word "villain" originally referred to a peasant serf. The proto-novels of the era often had a serf as the antagonist of the aristocratic hero, so "villain" started to be used for any antagonist. A few years back I saved a couple of quotes from Barbara Tuchman's great book about the 14th century: A Distant Mirror, Barbara W. Tuchman, Chapter 7: "The general term for peasant was villein or vilain, which had acquired a pejorative tone, though harmlessly derived from the Latin villa. Neither exactly slave nor entirely free, the villein belonged to the estate of his lord, under obligation to pay rent or work services for use of the land, and in turn to enjoy the right of protection and justice. ... A deep grievance of the peasant was the contempt in which he was held by the other classes. Aside from the rare note of compassion, most tales and ballads depict him as aggressive, insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious, tricky, unshaved, unwashed, ugly, stupid and credulous or sometimes shrewd and witty, incessantly discontented, usually cuckolded. In satiric tales it was said the villein's soul would find no place in Paradise or anywhere else because the demons refused to carry it owing to the foul smell. In the chansons de geste he is scorned as inept in combat and poorly armed, mocked for his manners, his morals, even his misery. [...] The knights saw him as a person of ignoble instincts who could have no understanding of 'honor' and was therefore capable of every kind of deceit and incapable of trust." That's a very good point, Rob. I did actually know about the origin of the word villain, but hadn't thought to connect it to fictional bad guys being of lower social classes in this way. As a language professor, Tolkien would, of course, have been well aware of this. However, not all his "bad guys" fit this profile: Saruman is not like this and neither is his underling, Grima Wormtongue; Smaug the Dragon is decidely intellectual in the way he speaks, and the Nazgûl are certainly well spoken enough. But yes, Tolkien's evil "foot soldiers", like the Orcs and Goblins, all fit this traditional template for a villain. But I can't help coming back to Crabbe's opinion that "good and evil are inextricably bound up with creativity, especially the creation of beauty" in Tolkien's works. I wonder if Tolkien also associated anybody outside of his "Inklings society" circle as essentially non-creative and therefore "evil" (and I put that in inverted commas because I don't mean that he really thought them evil, but I do wonder if Tolkien had an unconscious bias towards people who weren't well educated or like him and his circle of friends). |
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Post by berkley on Mar 18, 2020 16:00:32 GMT -5
Yeah, there's a bit in one CS Lewis's Narnia books that equates a lower-class - and specifically urban lower-class - accent with evil. But though it's more obvious with British writers, I think this was a pretty widespread attitude. For example, I've been reading a lot of Eisner,s Spirit the last couple years and the bad guys' speech is consistently written a certain way (except for some higher-class swindlers, or criminal masterminds like the Octopus). In fact, just the other night I read a story in which the Spirit, suddenly remembering that he supposed to be undercover, catches himself and starts changing his speech patterns.
But there's no doubt that all this was much nearer the surface in writers like Tolkien because the class system is more explicit or out in the open in the UK, while in the US (and Canada too, I would say), while it exists, it isn't always acknowledged or recognised at the conscious level.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 19, 2020 16:26:37 GMT -5
One thing that bothers me about Lord of the Rings - this is supposedly the story where it's the unexpected, the seemingly weak, in a sense the ordinary person, who turns out to be the real hero who saves the day when all the men of renown, descendants of kings, and sorcerers could not hope to prevail. And the Hobbits are basically the royalty of their race, with the possible exception of Sam. Far from 'even the smallest person can change the course of the future,' only people with the right bloodline can do so.
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Post by berkley on Mar 19, 2020 19:06:38 GMT -5
I'd say the Hobbits are more middle class, or perhaps more accurately gentlemen farmers - not royalty, not necessarily even of the nobility, but long-established families and property-owners.
The basic point holds, of course, that the workers, the labourers, the propertyless, are an underclass of servants who probably do not take part in whatever decision-making political system the Hobbits have going. And since not everyone can be a well-off landowner, they are presumably the majority, so yeah, Frodo, Merry, Pippin, all the Hobbit protagonists apart from Sam are members of a privileged minority.
I forget, does Tolkien mention anything about how the Hobbits make communal decisions, what to do about the war, etc, once they hear about it?
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Post by Confessor on Mar 19, 2020 21:38:08 GMT -5
I'd say the Hobbits are more middle class, or perhaps more accurately gentlemen farmers - not royalty, not necessarily even of the nobility, but long-established families and property-owners.Bilbo's family were exactly the text I've bolded. He, Frodo, Merry and Pippin are all definitely Middle-class, while Sam is working-class. The central Hobbits in Tolkien's stories (with the exception of Sam) are all essentially based on Tolkien and his friends. However, they are most definitely not royalty or even the gentry. They are still very much the "little man", insofar as they are peaceful folk who have little interest in affairs beyond their borders. They are ordinary people who are asked to do extraordinary things in order to save Middle-earth. Much like Tolkien and his friends were asked to do in World War I. |
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Post by berkley on Mar 20, 2020 2:19:05 GMT -5
I'd say the Hobbits are more middle class, or perhaps more accurately gentlemen farmers - not royalty, not necessarily even of the nobility, but long-established families and property-owners.Bilbo's family were exactly the text I've bolded. He, Frodo, Merry and Pippin are all definitely Middle-class, while Sam is working-class. The central Hobbits in Tolkien's stories (with the exception of Sam) are all essentially based on Tolkien and his friends. However, they are most definitely not royalty or even the gentry. They are still very much the "little man", insofar as they are peaceful folk who have little interest in affairs beyond their borders. They are ordinary people who are asked to do extraordinary things in order to save Middle-earth. Much like Tolkien and his friends were asked to do in World War I. Has anyone ever gone so far as to try and establish a one-to-one correspondence, e.g (picking names at random) Frodo=Tolkien, Merry=CS Lewis, etc ? |
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Post by Confessor on Mar 20, 2020 5:29:16 GMT -5
Bilbo's family were exactly the text I've bolded. He, Frodo, Merry and Pippin are all definitely Middle-class, while Sam is working-class. The central Hobbits in Tolkien's stories (with the exception of Sam) are all essentially based on Tolkien and his friends. However, they are most definitely not royalty or even the gentry. They are still very much the "little man", insofar as they are peaceful folk who have little interest in affairs beyond their borders. They are ordinary people who are asked to do extraordinary things in order to save Middle-earth. Much like Tolkien and his friends were asked to do in World War I. Has anyone ever gone so far as to try and establish a one-to-one correspondence, e.g (picking names at random) Frodo=Tolkien, Merry=CS Lewis, etc ? I can't remember where I read it (maybe in the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth book), but I seem to remember seeing the suggestion that the four Hobbit friends in LotRs are loosely based on Tolkien and his three closest friends at the time of the outbreak of World War I, rather than his fellow Inklings. I have a feeling that all of them except Tolkien were killed in the war. If I get time I'll have a little look and see if I can find the info again. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 20, 2020 8:03:34 GMT -5
Has anyone ever gone so far as to try and establish a one-to-one correspondence, e.g (picking names at random) Frodo=Tolkien, Merry=CS Lewis, etc ? I can't remember where I read it (maybe in the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth book), but I seem to remember seeing the suggestion that the four Hobbit friends in LotRs are loosely based on Tolkien and his three closest friends at the time of the outbreak of World War I, rather than his fellow Inklings. I have a feeling that all of them except Tolkien were killed in the war. If I get time I'll have a little look and see if I can find the info again. Those were the friends who were featured in the Tolkien biopic from a year or so back. If the film was accurate, two were killed and the third became essentially estranged from Tolkien after the war. -M |
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