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David Brin On LOTR
hprotagonist0 writes "Salon has posted an article by sci-fi author, scientist, and essayist David Brin (The two Uplift trilogies, The Transparent Society) with his thoughts about LotR. A technophillic optimist, he warns against waxing too Romantic about feudal, good vs. evil fantasy. Instead, he says, we should look ahead to the future. Thought-provoking."
Ignoring the trolls for now, Gandalf would take Dumbledore, easy. Remember, Gandalf is a Maiar, basically a demi-god, and he also wears one of the three Elvish rings (Nenya? I'm not sure which). He's been around for thousands upon thousands of years. Normal weapons can't hurt him (witness his comments to Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli in The Two Towers, when the three warriors still think he's Saruman and consider attacking him), and as somebody already mentioned he went nine rounds with a balrog and came out with the belt.
Plus, Dumbledore lives in a wussy universe.
Gandalf KOs dumbledore in the first round.
Did you read his sequel novel to Asimov's Foundation series? Benford and Bears' were great. They wrote somewhat "in the spirit" of Asimov.
Brins, on the other hand, is so crappy it's hard to find in stores. In his commentary he makes all these insipid, arrogant, and wrong comments about technical flaws in the stories which he then awkwardly tries to solve. What an arrogant knob.
Everything else I've read that he's written is just as idiotic and arrogant.
Brin goes over how JRR Tolkien was a snobby, romantic anglo-saxon elitist, writing about WII. OK... Now tell me something I don't know!
Tolkien himself rejected this notion many times during his lifetime. The story was not a cipher for WWII or the atom bomb. It was just a story. If Brin did something more than simply topical reading/viewing, he would know this. The perpetuation of this myth is just out and out intellectual laziness.
Remember, "Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental."
GF
Lots of petrified grits
annmariabell.com
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
So literature whose author is dead shouldn't be criticized?
The New Critics thought that the author's view on a piece was unimportant. The work stands by itself.
But not democracy as you know it. The Athens 'electorate' was a very small proportion of the total population. Not much chance of the Athenians giving the slaves the vote to start with :-). Plus it was a direct democracy, no elected representatives, the few people eligible to vote did so in person.
Representative democracy with univeral sufferage is a much more recent development and is probably what Brin is referencing.
Actually, the three elven rings were never touched by Sauron, but he knew how they were made because he deceitfully gained the favor of the elf who made them. This is how he was able to gain power over them with the one ring, not because he made them. This was also why the elves never succumbed to Sauron when he possesed the one ring. They perceived him when he put it on, formed the last alliance and Isuldur cut it from his hand. The nine men were forever poisened, the dwarves lost most of them or they were destroyed by dragon fire. Only the three and the one remained to the third age for the events of the Lord of the Rings.
I agree that Mr. Brin is an unqualified git; wholly unsuited to review Tolkien's mythology.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
Read the full length piece on David Brin's site.
I couldn't disagree more with a lot of his commentary, but let's keep this shorter than this article and just focus on his "see through the eyes of Sauron" idea after a small excursion into romanticism
Brin claims that Tolkien is a romantic and basically promoted a "back to the past" attitude.
Morgoth, Sauron, Galadriel, Saruman, Gandalf... most of the key powers in his book are millenia older than the society they live in now.
Galadriel is more than 5000 years old, after all.
The war they have fought is gust as ancient and predates the First Age (Morgoth against the rest of the Valar). The struggle is not past-against-future ("Good Races" vs. Sauron) but future against past (Free development of the Good Races vs. the Old Evil).
My point? Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.
The tales were written down much earlier (when you take the Simarillion and all the other books into account). And they all, different victors in different wars, independently of each other, wrote similar things.
Yes, I know, it's all Tolkien's work, but for his analogy to work, we need a "real scenario" where there clearly is none.
So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?
We know that because Sauron was a Maia (lesser demi-god) of Aule, the Smith. He was a fire-demon, remotely similar to the Balrog (which are also Maia of Aule). I don't have the Simarillion with me here, but I am reasonably sure that this is mentioned there.
I am reasonably sure that the eyes of a Balrog glow with his inner fire, so the leap of faith isn't too far... Furthermore, the eye is not red, but fiery, swathed in flames, whatever... Any that is entirely reasonable for a fire-demon.
Isn't some of that over-the-top description just the sort of thing that royal families used to promote, casting exaggerated aspersions on their vanquished foes and despoiling their monuments, reinforcing their own divine right to rule?
No, as explained above.
Yes, I'm having fun with words like "really" -- relating to a made-up story. But come along with me for a minute: Next time you reread LOTR, count the number of powerful beings who are vastly uglier than anybody with that kind of power would allow themselves to be. Why? How does being grotesquely ugly help you govern an empire?
Most of these beings were greated by Morgoth in mockery of the other races (Elves transformed into Orcs, etc.) and as Morgoth is only a Valar working alone, without the support of the others or the guiding hand of Illuvatar, his creations are bound to be less perfect (in the sense of beauty through symmetry).
Furthermore, he is very apt at destroying, not at building. and destruction is never pretty, I'd say.
As for ugliness helping you to rule... If you're truly powerful, beauty isn't important. Power is.
Then unleash your imagination a bit further.
Ask yourself: "How would Sauron have described the situation?"
And then: "What might 'really' have happened?"
Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy -- this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.
Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil Dark Lord"?
Or might they instead have thought they were the "good guys," with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?
The humans he refers to, the humans from the East have no business in the realm of Gondor. They could have lived peacefully where they were, without being under any pressure from Gondor (or Rohan, or any other place around there).
Since Gondor's strength has been waning for a few centuries by the time of LOTR, it is reasonable to assume that no recent incursions into the lands of thr East have taken place either.
Tolkien describes, among other things, the pirates of [wherever] that work with Sauron's army now... doing nothing else than they did before... raper, pillage and plunder... does that sound like "serving an evil Dasrk Lord" or "being the good guys"?
Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the War of the Ring -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and moviemakers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle Earthling! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return ... bringing more rings.
Sounds good to me. Let's find proof for that. The One Ring has been made to control all other rings, to bind their purpose to the will of the wielder of the One Ring. Does that sounds like the Hero of the Masses tm? If he were to distribute the power, it would be different, but the Ring was not crafted for that purpose.
Brin's notion of the Nine as tragic figures for the idea of "power corrupts" goes along the same lines. This, too, is false. The Nine Rings were not made to corrupt but the connection to the One Ring brought about this fate. Without Sauron's intervention the Nine Kings of Men would not have become the anathema of life.
If that's going too far, here's a milder version. Those orcs and low elves and dwarves and dark-skinned or proletarian men who fought for the Ringlord were fooled by Sauron's propaganda.
Fair enough. Even that slight variation adds flavor to an already-great tale, making you pity Sauron's dupes a little, even though you still cheer as they're slaughtered down to the last private and orcoral.
Come on, folks, a little empathy!
This one is an interesting thought. The orcs (et al.) were duped into senseless slaughter and massacers for how many millenia? Never suspecting anything was amiss? Even Orcs are too intelligent for that. So, there must have been a strong incentive to not question Sauron's propaganda... like a secret police with their magical spy-eyes, which would make him no better than his rivals.
Instead of railing against "evil," try to understand it. That's always been the best way to defeat it.
This is what Saruman tries and he fails to do so. I do not know whether understanding evil might work for anyone else, but the "heros" of LOTR have seen an example of what Sauron can do, subverting their most powerful... I don't fault them for declining to try that stunt again.
Am I pulling your leg? You bet! I don't take speculations about fictional villains quite that seriously. ...?"
My real point is more general.
Don't just receive your adventures. Toy with them. Re-mold them in your mind. Keep asking "What if
It's how you get practice not just being a passive consumer, or critic, but a creative storyteller in your own right.
I have played RPGs for almost two decades now, in every world imaginable, every genre. The plain and simple truth about LOTR is that the amout of work you'd have to have going on behind the scenes to make his suggestion reality is staggering. It is completely unfeasible without a great deal more power, magic and technology than this setting provides. And unless he prevides me with more detailed ideas how this might work out, I don't buy it.
And remember this too: Enlightenment, science, democracy and equal opportunity are still the true rebels, reigning for just a few generations (and still imperfectly) in one or two corners of the Earth, after elite chiefs, romantic bards and magicians dominated our ancestors for maybe half a million years.
And..?
Sauron has not yet been proven a rebel, so where's the similarity?
So, all in all, I can't buy his suggestions and I truly wonder whether he's actually read the Simarillion (or the Lost Tales, or Tales from Middle Earth, ...)
Tolkien himself rejected this notion many times during his lifetime. The story was not a cipher for WWII or the atom bomb. It was just a story. If Brin did something more than simply topical reading/viewing, he would know this.
Brin DIDN'T say that LOTR was an alagory for WWII. That's just something the poster threw in. Brin just said that Tolken was writing the books at a time when the 'failure' of the scientific enlightenment was aperant.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wrong
RTF Introduction to LOTR by Tolkien himself!
He absolutely was not writing about WWII and spoke of his personal distaste for allegory and specifically states that LOTR is not about anything other than what is in the book.
He also states that he thinks that many people confuse applicability with allegory. Since LOTR deals with such universal concepts, and is in essence a myth, it is applicable to lots of situations, but not a thinly veiled text about WWII. That would cheapen the book. Think of it in the same light as the Illiad, Odyssey, Anead or any great mythology.
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
The final page of the article summaries some important problems with modern pop culture, the real target of Brin's article I suspect.
It also pulls together Brin's admitedly wordy argument ( at least compared to the average slashdot story )
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
GO. And READ. The ARTICLE. NOW. Mr. Brin, being the man his is, states his enjoyment of the works and his enormous respect for Tolkien severa times. He also says that he is very happy to keep these ideas in the realm of fiction, where they are delightful and can even provide role models, rather than in he realm of reality, where they result in you and me being forced to weed Aragorn's garden all day.
There is a slight difference... in Brin's Uplift series, the universe is extremely fuedal, with lordly races 'uplifting' the tiny and weak races and holding them in servitude for billions of years.
But Brin's characters specifically fights AGAINST this regime, showing the flaws in the system. Brin paints Humanity as the exception to the rule. And the characters are generally an ensemble of good people all going through their lives, happening to be in the right place and the right time to make a difference... not superhuman heroes who carve chunks from dragons as a matter of daily course.
So Brin's Uplift world is about normal humans (or monkeys, or dolphins, or aliens) in spectacular situations, NOT like heroic fantasy in which it is about spectacular humans overcoming spectacular odds.
I think that if you believe that the Uplift trilogy is about the success of fuedal/fascist society, you have not read it very well, if at all.
P.S. I greatly enjoy LOTR and other works of heroic fantasy. I think Brin is a rather preachy person, though I love his books too. But he is NOT hypocritical, his books follow his philosophy very closely.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.