Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
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
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.