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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."
Well gee then I guess we shouldn't wax romantic about his fuedal/fascist world of uplift either eh?
Not knocking uplift, a great read, but come on!
The world he's built is just as deterministic and
ordered as LOTR if not more so.....
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Is it really a fairy tale's obligation to address the wrongs in society, and to ensure that humanity continues its technological progress? Must a story really be "forward thinking" in order to have any redeeming values?
Ñ'
The theme at the end of the last book when they return to the shire covers the same ground - battle between rural idyll and mechanisation.
Just because tolkien has an axe to grind doesn't make it any less of a good story (plenty of other authers have also had underlying messages that they want to put over eg CS Lewis and Pullman's Nothern Lights. You can take it or leave it and just enjoy the yarn)
1. Of course this is a backward-looking tale - it was modeled after ancient Scandinavian mythologies.
2. It's also about a world in transition, and the dawn of Man's dominance, so in that sense it is forward-looking.
3. Is anybody else sick to death of comparisons with Star Wars? Puh-lease...
4. And while we're at it, is anybode else EXTRA sick of drawn out analogies to the real geopolitical world of the 20th century? Too many bozos waste too much time trying to play matchup in a self-congratulatory exercise.
"let's see, Thorin Oakenshield's reestablishment of the Kingdom Under the Mountain is really a metaphor for the Palestinian's struggle against Israel..."
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Earth. Glory Season.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
There's actually a very good reason for this idea of putting The Rightful King on the throne.
In a medieval society, the absolute worst tyrant on the throne was still better for the common people than a war of succession. If you put the King's son on the throne, there's at least a reasonable chance of stability, but if the line of succession is unclear, you often end up with a long, bloody war.
WRT Brin, I think he worries too much. Sure, we like the trappings of royalty, but I think most people would start getting upset the moment some King declared that he was better than them. Monarchy is a product of the whole medieval world view, with a heirarchal view of society. We don't have that anymore. Today's royalty have exactly the same status as movie stars.
Canada still has the Queen of England as its official leader and this hasn't stopped it from being a democratic nation. Aside from appearing on TV a couple of times a year and visiting once in a while, the Monarchy has no real-world affect on us.
Consider the rings. Those man-made wonders are deemed cursed, damning anyone who dares to use them, especially those nine normal humans who tried to rise up, using tools to equalize and then usurp the rightful powers of their betters -- the High Elves*.
The Rings were forged by Sauron - neither Elf nor Man. He is just a Maiar. A god-like spirit. And he's Morgoth's (the source of evil on Middle Earth) first Lieutenant.
The nine Ringwraiths [...] can be looked upon as cautionary figures, conveying the universal lesson that "power corrupts."
On that much we can all agree. But I think there's more to the Ringwraiths. To me, they distill the classical Greek notion of hubris [...] -- the idea that pain and damnation await any mortal whose ambition aims too high. Don't try putting on the trappings or emblems or powers that rightfully belong to your betters
The rings don't belong to anyone but Sauron himself. Hence even the Elven rings are under the rule of the One ring. That's the WHOLE FUCKING POINT: ANYONE who aspired to great Power in middle earth is subjected to the Evil that Morgoth/Sauron brought forth.
*Another point: the high elves were banished from 'valinor' the land of bliss because after Morgoth came, they tried to overtake the land for themselves, and in their arrogance, they were exiled.
Ugh... Fuck. I have to go punch a brick wall. This article is as stupid as the people who said the "Two Towers" were and allusion to WTC.
To quote rage against the machine:
WAKE UP
KNOW YOUR ENEMNY
I, of course, am planning on going to the opening of the two towers dressed as an elf anyway.
And for those of you who haven't read it: the article is funny, which makes up for a lot. for example Brin writes: "Witness the most amazing accomplishment of NASA -- managing to turn the exploration of space into a huge snore."
annmariabell.com
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
Go read the article. Read the last page.
:)
*sigh*
OK, for those of you who still didn't read it, the point was to get you to examine the story from a different perspective, to get you to consider for a moment the possibility that the "good guys" were really the "bad guys." It's an exercise in not being such a MTV-loving couch-potato consumer who just takes everything at face value... "oooh shiny objects and hot women, must deactivate brain while watching movie." The article did NOT knock LOTR. Save your canned responses for whenever Micro$oft does anything.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
I can't help but feel that he has totally missed the point. JRR Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and Christianity was a very important influence on his philosophy. Good, evil, and humans living up to their ability or failing at the test is very relevant in terms of religion.
... of the indomitable Romantic hero"? He's just got no idea. Tell me who the hero of the Lord of the Rings is? I think Sam is as much the hero as anyone, and who would put him as their first choice?
He seems to be attacking the form rather than the underlying messages, and as has already been mentioned, it's a fairy story. There's just so many ways of looking at Tolkien's work that some of Brin's essay seems just petty. "The paramount importance
It's not a fairy tale. And it is relevent to all ages. The entire story is a metaphor for the internal (and possible social) struggle to resist the allure of unlimited power.
From a literary standpoint the popularity of the series is transcendent in the sense that it lives up to a number of 20th century literary traditions while at the same time maintaining a tradition of heroism which is something very few writers in the 20th century were able to do.
In fact the LOTR is probably the only great heroic epic of the 20th century that can even hold the label of being literature in any sense of the word.
The author's cynical betrayal of the book's ideas is tripe from the beginning. It was not about the big heroes like Aragorn and Gandalf really but how a common man (a hobbit) who wanted nothing more than escape the madness and return to his home had to face up to the evil growing in the world and do something about it. It played perfectly into the 20th century literary tradition of focusing on the common man.
Not only that but throughout the book there is the sense of times changing and the time of man coming of age. It is backward-looking in many ways but it does talk down to the reader and try to tell them the old days were the best or the change must be fought against tool-and-nail. No instead there is a sense of noble resignation that the old times cannot stand forever against the passage of time.
There is a need ( a 20th century need I might add ) to tear down all that is good and loved in the world and to deconstruct it and expose it as a lie even though it might be the truth. I matters not to the cynical, deconstructionist nature of the modern critics. This reviews in salon is just that. I hope in the coming century we realize that the failings of our icons make them more human and more admirable in their courage and do not keep hold the hollow tradition of ripping them down simply because we can.
____________________________________
ACK
I'd read Brin's articles on Star Wars (available at Salon) before passing judgement. His take on Star Wars is far more negative than his take on LoTR. There he's angry.
With LoTR, Brin's having fun in the article while making a point. Much as he notes LoTR can only be taken so seriously, its obvious from his humor (especially the hilarious end with reviewing Sauron) that he's not taking himself 100% seriously either. He's tweaking people's noses and making them think.
Do I think Brin has a point? In general, yes. I've seen a lot of media taken far far too seriously - my favorite was seeing a person very seriously analyze the Star Wars universe and the Federation, and decide the Star Wars universe was more pleasant to live in. It was exactly like Brin's analyses - his choice was pure romanticism - and the assumption that in such a universe he'd be a hero, as opposed to say, Rebel cannon fodder or a Storm Trooper in Remedial Shooting Things Class.
There's only so seriously one can take any "classic" and all bear the stamp of the times and the author, and deeper interpretation needs to keep this in mind. Brin should too be a bit more aware himself, as I feel he misses various kinds of classic heros to focus on a few types.
Do I think LoTR is a classic? Yes, undoubtedly. It's an amazing effort from a man I can only christen a genius. But such men are products of time and place, and why their works are read is a stamp of the reader's time and place. Brin's just analyzing that.
In the end he suggests keeping things in context and their proper places. Not a bad piece of advice at all, even if you don't exactly agree with him.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
What the ancient Greeks called democracy, and what we call democracy are two different beasts. It's all in what you define as a citizen. In ancient Greece, you could vote so long as you were male, greek, and rich. That sounds more like an aristocracy than a democracy to me.
Your assumption that all democracies are equal is ill-founded.
I don't think I agree with your reading of Tolkien. Tolkien's writing ends with the dawn of the age of man - the end of the mystical Third Age marks the close both the Silmarillion and the LotR saga.
I find a central theme in Tolkien to be the passing of the mystical third age into the fourth age of man, and with it a passing of all that has come before. No longer will there be mystical eternal elves; the world is broken and round, and magic is passing from the world. We enter now into the unknown, the age of man. In man, Tolkien sees not the dichotomy of good and evil, the old heroic notions of old that are so present in his talks of past ages. Tolkien sees an unpredictable free will, no disposition to heroics, good or evil. Man is the great enigma, in both his complete unpredictability and his untethered potential.
Tolkien, in this writing, is much like C.S. Lewis - Lewis believed that the world had become devoid of the certain magic and mysticism of being alive. With the decline of religion and morality, the world had lost its spark of charm and character. While Lewis took it as his mission to "re-enchant" the world, I feel that Tolkien did not take so much of a reconstructionist attitude; rather, he recognized the passing and change, and put his faith, albeit haltingly, in the self-creation and free will of mankind. He was not optimistic. He was not pessimistic. He was truly unsure of the future to come, and merely hoped for the best. It is this unpredictability, this certainty in nothing but change, this is what Tolkien was truly attempting to express.
The Lord of the Rings is Tolkein's last hurrah of heroism. It is the final shout of classical myths and larger than life heroes, one last tale to remind us of the fading magic of being alive. Just as we all must eventually lay down the books themselves, eventually we too must emerge from this classical perspective into our own contemporary worldview. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't still lessons to be learned from the tales of our enchanted past, the middle-earth.
This is where Brin's criticism of LOTR breaks down. Frodo might have been well-to-do, but he didn't have any idea that his armor was worth that much. Nor did he, or Bilbo, for that matter, realize that they had the "One Ring" on their mantelpiece. Sure, Frodo was comfortable, but he wasn't some sort of political power, even in the Shire.
As much as Brin wants to concentrate on Elrond, Galadriel, and the rest of the High Elves the story was really about a 4 foot tall hero from the middle of nowhere, and a pile of his diminuitive friends. Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry are the folks that really make the difference, and I could probably throw any one of them across the room. Comparing those folks with "kings" is absolutely ridiculous. Especially since when their adventure was done they went back to the Shire as if nothing had happened.
Brin also misses the point that TLOTR is about the end of an era. The new era is ruled not by elves, but by the son of a woodsman. Aragorn may have been descended from "noble" blood, but his people spent generations as woodsmen protecting a people that mistrusted them. Aragorn starts the story as a nomad with a broken sword. He can hardly be considered a king. In fact, of the original fellowship only Boromir can really be considered as nobility, and look what happened to him.
The rest of the fellowship just happened to be the best that could be assembled at the time. Gandalf wasn't the chief of the wizards (Saruman was), but he was the best that was to be had. Legolas wasn't a High Elf, but he was willing to go, and Gimli went to represent the dwarves.
Speaking of Gimli and Legolas, Brin makes a big deal out of the fact that JRRT is some sort of a closet racist because he allows for the total destruction of the Orcs, but he forgets to mention the very important subplot where Gimli and Legolas face their racial prejudices and become friends.
In short, Brin is stretching. He has an axe to grind and he is trying to get the story to fit his preconceived notions.
>>Brin
>>This yearning makes sense if you remember that >>arbitrary lords and chiefs did rule us for 99.44 >>percent of human existence. It's only been 200 >>years or so -- an eye blink -- that "scientific >>enlightenment" began waging its rebellion against >>the nearly universal pattern called feudalism
>pVoid
>Not to break it to you Einstein, but democracy was >invented in ancient Greece. That's not a couple of >hundred years, it's a couple of thousand years... >just about as old as christianity itself.
Well, while we're busy being irratated....
Many people have already pointed out Greek democracy was hardly the same thing that we have now. I'll point out that you've seriously missed the point:
Brin is saying that for 200 years some reasonable proportion of the world has lived in a democracy. The fact a few Greeks had something like it before the birth of Christ is irrelevant - it was almost forgotten and certainly never much practised in the next 2000 years or so. He didn't say it hadn't been INVENTED, only that it wasn't USED.
>>Timidly at first, guilds and townsfolk rallied >>together and lent their support to kings, thereby >>easing oppression by local lords.
>Does he actually have proof of this, or is he >using the LoTR as a template?
I'll refer you to the history of mainland Europe, in particular you might like to read about what's now Belgium for a start.
>This guy hasn't read the Silmarillion probably.
I have. And the first 10 volumes of the History of Middle Earth, including the poetry (eek!) There's some merit in what you say, but its much more complex.
> It seems to me he's the typical Hollywoodist he >criticizes in his own essay: trying to attract >attention by shock value.
Actually, he's a widely respected sci fi author. He's been writing on these themes for several years. If he's using shock value its to needle you into thinking about the ideas he presents. You can disagree, of course, but that seems to be his motive to me.
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
My one response to Brin's article would be that it is possible to take pleasure in archetypical fantasies like LotR without it indicating a regressive Romantic yearning. This is complex and his chief complaint is persuasive. But the idea he describes--the conservative tendency to idealize the past, to imagine that the present represents perhaps the worst of all worlds, a world where the forces of evil have conspired to makes one's life miserable--is not the only incredibly dangerous idea implied in fantasy. The other dangerous idea is the related fantasy of stark and immediately identifiable divisions and affiliations between Good and Evil. These two ideas which have a deep affinity for each other are, in my opinion, the chief intellectual facades (and I mean "intellectual" in the broadest sense) behind which the most common and yet most virulent human evil hides. Brin mentions that the Nazis were deeply Romantic, and he's right.
Still, though, I take pleasure--both emotional and intellectual--in the "Lord of the Rings", and I believe that I do so with no great danger to my soul. That's because I, in short, know better.
Art is not Reality; reality is Reality. Art's job is not to perfectly represent reality--past, future, or possible. Its job is to abstract essences of the human experience of reality in a way that is pleasurable or increases comprehension--or, hopefully, both. Thus, what the art means, what it is doing, may be quite unlike its superficial appearance. In particular, Brin fails to acknowledge that an essential element of narrative art is the identification the reader has with the piece's protagonists. And so even if we have Kings, Elven Lords and elite, ancient Wizards, nevertheless they are common because we are common. In them we are not so much imagining a world ordered where others, or even ourselves, are at the top of the pyramid--we are imagining the expression of the best within each of ourselves. In this way our great stories have always served both great powers, always at war--the proclamation of the divine right of Kings and the inevitability of xenophobia intertwined with the individualism, egalitarianism, and the hope that maybe, just maybe, a peasant boy will seize the sword from the stone. It could be me. Or you.
In truth I wonder if this paradoxical clash of ideals is not one of the driving forces of narrative motion. Just what is it we really want? The thing of it is that we don't quite know. That's what's interesting.
Bah! Brin is out of his mind. Although he has a lot of good thoughts in that article, I think he has read too much into his analysis. In fact, he negates his own commentary at a few points by noting that Tolkien was the most critical of the "Romantic" portions of his world, i.e., the elves and their desire to keep the world as it is and not allow progress.
In fact, this is the whole point of the books! It may be regrettable that the elves have to journey across the sea and Middle-Earth loses a part of itself that it can never get back. But that is the price of progress. And according to Tolkien, it is *inevitable* that we move forward; that progress happens. We will keep tokens of that older time in our lives, so that we don't forget it, but we will still move forward.
Tolkien strives for the balance that we all wish for - between the romanticism of the past in the context of technological progress.
Examples:
1) Gimli keeps a lock of hair of Galadriel, in order to remember her beauty, with the plan to encase it in a construct of dwarvish metalworking. Nature in Technology.
2) Later in the story, Gimli shows his desire for progress as he laments the decay of Minis Tirith and the ability of dwarvish *technology* to bring it back to life. Again, technology will provide the solutions to the ills of the world.
3) Gimli's description of the Caves of Aglarond, where he comments on their beauty to Legolas. Legolas, being an elf (one of those romantics Brin so despises), laments that dwarves would ruin the beauty if they found out, but Gimli immediately scolds him, saying the no dwarf could ruin such beauty. They would use their technology to *improve* the natural beauty. Clearly, Gimli illustrates Tolkien's desire for the balance between nature and science, the romantic past vs. the technological future.
4) It is the elves who are leaving Middle Earth. If the stories were so full of Romanticism, the elves would have stayed and continued to affect the non-progress of Middle Earth.
5) Arwen, an elf, turns away from her birthright and chooses the path of mortality. That is Tolkien's clearest indication anywhere that the progress of men is desired more than the ways of the romantic elves.
6) When the party stays in Lothlorien, at the end Aragorn comments that time flows slowly in the land of the elves, but they must leave soon because events continue on the outside world. If they intend to fight evil, they must move forward. Again, the romantic elves are not the path to enlightenment and freedom.
7) Gandalf gives Aragorn a directive and a challenge at the end of the stories that it is now the time of men. Much that has been will now pass away, but that does not mean that Aragorn should neglect his future. He should hold in his thoughts and heart the beauty of the past and use it to guide his way as he makes progress into the future.
In my opinion, Brin is completely off the mark in his analysis of LotR. I think Tolkien had the essence of progress in his heart as he wrote the books. He laments that the beauty of the elves is fading, but knows that it was that same group who caused the sufferering in the world and it is best for them to leave and for the race of men to guide things toward a more prosperous future.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
The tale of the ring is huge and covers many themes, but I can't imagine twisting a story as thouroughly as he did, even ententionally.
The central theme of The War of the Ring to me is that each person matters, any race, any sex, any size, any level of intellegence. Even characters that were failures their entire lives were able to find within themselves (at least) one shining moment to make their world a better place.
Are these ideas antiquated, belonging only in our past?
NO!
-Zaphod
Was he an elitist? Yes, of course he was. He was the product of his place and time. But as such, he was also a first-hand victim of technology. It's amazing to me that Brin misses entirely the impact of the First World War on Tolkien and his writing.
Tolkien fought at the Battle of the Somme, which was a slaughter of unprecidented scale. On the first day of the British attack, 20,000 men were mowed down by German machine guns - this coming after the British bombarded the German positions with hour after hour of relentless artillery. Tolkien lost two of his best friends to the war, and himself was sent home with trench foot.
Relentless belief in "progress" was a defining factor of the prewar period, and it took years of staggeringly innefective and grotesque fighting to convince most Europeans that progress wasn't all it had been made out to be. The men who fought the war and lived to tell the tale certainly harbored no illusions about it.
It's no wonder that Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings, a tale in which individual actions could make a difference. After seeing battlefields completely denuded of vegitation, turned to rotten, corpse-laden mud by machines of death, is it so surprising that he glorified the fields and trees and rivers? Perhaps the Dead Marshes aren't such a stretch when you've seen bodies littering the battlefield.
Tough to stay optimistic about the future when you've fought in one war that maimed you and killed your friends, and seen a second world conflagration that saw entire cities aflame and nations engulfed by mechanized armies.
Mr. Brin is right that we should look to the future. But in moving forward, let's not forget that there are things about the past that do bear preserving. Humanity, decency, individual responsibility, and mistrust of power seem like pretty damned useful concepts to me.
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I had to say that seeing the beating Brin is getting here.
Like many I was charmed by LOTR, but I agree with Brin to some extent. To put it simpley
"good vs. evil, comic-book syndrome is getting old".
I am not suggesting that the LOTR is anything other than one of the best pieces of fiction ever written, *but* there are basic themes that evaluate to the simple comic-book syndrome.
This formula has bothered me since I was a kid watching "transformers" and "gi joe", often times hoping that cobra commander or megatron would win.
I watched "moulin rouge" thinking that in the story within the story, the "evil" king should have got the girl. Should a man that has given his life to rule his country and thus have little experience at love be denied because of his sacrifices?
"titanic" showed a perfectly beautiful couple tormented by a crass, angry aristocrate. That movie made all the money that it did because we're prone to enjoy "formula" movies. This is not necessarily always a bad thing btw.
Why are all the bad guys ugly and the good guys beautiful?
Just for fun, take a closer look at the movies showing, and look for it. The "us vs. them", "beauty vs. ugly", "good vs. evil". Compare with movies that break that dwell less on this formula eg "Changing Lanes" http://us.imdb.com/Title?0264472
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
And his articles in Salon about them are interesting. As he says in the article, "It's how you get practice not just being a passive consumer, or critic, but a creative storyteller in your own right." I agree in large part with some of his discussion of Star Wars: there are many interesting directions Lucas could have taken with the story, none of which he did. Thus, Episodes I and II are tepid. Brin is spot-on about Tolkien's romantic longings. Tolkien wrote about a world in decline, where beauty was passing out of the world. That's the topic of the Silmarillion, and the Lord of the Rings just forms the last chapter in that saga. It's also hard to argue against the idea that the Lord of the Rings shows racist tendencies. However, Brin misses some of the points. Sauron is evil because he chose to follow Melkor/Morgoth in the the beginning of the world. Melkor/Morgoth was evil because he aimed to corrupt Illuvatar's design. The parallel is to (certain forms of) Christian morality. Evil is ugly because its exterior form mimics its interior darkness. Melkor was once the fairest of the Valar, but his evil ate away at that and he became menacing, not beautiful. Sauron wore a fair form before the fall of Numenor, but in its destruction he lost his ability to assume it. Gandalf and Saruman are powerful, not because of some secret knowledge they have, but because they are Maiar. Their powers are limited, which is why they can't destroy Sauron outright (Sauron was also once a Maiar, note), but flow from their nature. This idea might be undemocratic. However, in Tolkien's world, it's a fact: neither the Maiar nor the humans can do anything to change it. Democracy can't alter inherent inequality. As Brin notes, Tolkien's "heroes" aren't always heroic. The Elves, in particular, have a checkered past (e.g., the Kinslaying) and they show little willingness to fight in The War of the Ring. Many of the wizards, Maiar sent to help Middle-Earth against Sauron, either turn (Saruman) or forsake their duties; Gandalf alone holds steadfast. The Numenorean kings, from whose line Aragorn descends, ended up bringing destruction upon themselves. In Tolkien's world, everyone is subject to the forces of decay and corruption. I agree in some respects with Brin's criticism of Star Wars. However, Tolkien's work has far greater internal consistency. Taken in itself, it works, but it is an expression of Romanticism, many of whose ideals don't apply to our real world. Thus, many of the lessons you might take from Tolkien's work don't apply either.
Feudalism is a logical consequence of agriculture, but agriculture only goes back about 15,000 years. Human existence goes back something like 100,000 years, and during most of that time, we were hunter-gatherers. Brin's percentage should be 14.44.
The lives of hunter-gatherers were actually pretty sweet. A big farm demands constant work from everybody and you end up with dreary work ethics. Hunting and gathering leave a lot of free time, so you paint the insides of caves, play tunes on primitive instruments, and loaf.
We really need a literature that revels in the glories of hunter-gatherer societies. The closest we have right now are "Quest for Fire" and "Clan of the Cave Bear". Hey you authors, get to work.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
It's not about mythic heroes saving the day. Frodo bears the ring into Mordor - very heroically. Sam helps him, becoming a Ring Bearer as well. Togather they both become darker, and Frodo takes wounds that will haunt him - forever.
In the end it is NOT the mythic hero Frodo, favored heir of the richest man in the village, with his mithril coat and magic sword, who saves the day.
In the end Evil is defeated by squabbling against itself - as the corrupted Gollum seizes the ring and ends up getting cooked.
Lets look at the Fellowship of the Ring - a gathering of mythic heroes all. A returned King, assorted adventurer-hobbits, a wizard with assorted elves, dwarves, and horses.
What happens to this Fellowship? Well...the leader is slaughtered (albeit to return - being Maia real death is tricky buisiness), there is blood and betrayal amongst them...and they are scattered to the four winds.
So now you have mythic heroes wandering the landscape... So what do they manage? They bring down Saruman... but that's bungled as he ends up corrupting the Shire.
These wandering heroes do manage other heroic feats - the dead rise, wormtongues are dewormed, and so forth. Of course what this amounts to is mostly the heroes gathering to defend Minas Tirith because the *real battle* is in Frodo and Sams hands.
Gandalf shows some of his power defending the city, but in the end it is a woman - female empowerment! - who dares to ignore the mythic prophecies and exert her will over presumed Fate - who takes down the Witch King. That's a powerful message - one can transform oneself form an unimportant marginzalized bystander by telling the mythic "truth" to stuff it and then *making it so*.
Now, by the time Frodo is at the end game he isn't really that bright and shining heir of the richest man in the village anymore. He's become a simple soldier - marching to what he believes will be his death, sick, disheartened, and motivated by his duty to do what must be done.
At the end of the books, when Frodo passes into the West, he's not that much different. He's haunted by what he has done, he has wounds that will not heal, and much of the light in his own heart has guttered out. He's a fairly realistic war vet, not a idolized shining hero - even while Strider has become the archetypal Rightful King. Note: Strider, Mr. Mythic Hero from beginning to end, doesn't do all that much in the grand scheme of things - he secures his kingdom but does not save the world.
There is a message here - that if one is determined enough fighting the unbeatable immortal darkness one might win - but the cost will be high and being on the right side is no guarentee.
Frodo is rewarded for his toils with immortality in the West, as a wounded and darkened man. Think carefully about being that, in a land of shining Gods and happy bright elves - many of whom have never left paradise - he's going to be one of the very few with inescapable darkness. Forever.
That's *not* the end of a mythic hero, that's the end of a soldier, returning home to try to build a normal life after experiencing direst horror.
Mythic Hero Boy -> becomes ordinary soldier -> Saves World -> pays realistic price for the rest of his days.
In July O7, I got a mac pro. There's no punchline. Just endless joy and wonder.
and that's the real problem with his article, whether you agree or disagree with his philosophical viewpoint.
First of all, the heroes of the story are clearly Frodo and Sam, and Tolkien explicitly portrays hobbits as "the commoners" of the story. Brin manages to completely ignore this.
> Did they all leave their homes and march to war
> thinking, "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil
> Dark Lord"?
Tolkien explicitly states that the Easterlings were deceived and used by Sauron. There is no suggestion that they are inherently evil. Aragorn makes peace with the Easterling survivors after Sauron is destroyed. All the rants about how Tolkien considers the Easterlings subhuman are nonsense. You only have to read the scene where Sam discovers the dead Easterling to see this.
> count the number of powerful beings who are
> vastly uglier than anybody with that kind of
> power would allow themselves to be.
Brin needs to read the Silmarillion to see how Sauron made himself appear beautiful for hundreds of years in order to seduce the Numenoreans, and was afterwards cursed by the Valar and forced to appear ugly forever after.
> Consider the rings. Those man-made wonders are
> deemed cursed, damning anyone who dares to use
> them, especially those nine normal humans who
> tried to rise up, using tools to equalize and
> then usurp the rightful powers of their betters
> -- the High Elves.
This is nearly the exact opposite of what Tolkien describes. The rings were not made by men. They were made by Elves and Sauron and given to men in friendship.
Furthermore Tolkien repeatedly emphasises that the evil of the rings influenced by Sauron, especially the One Ring, can corrupt anyone. The whole point of the story --- the key to the plot --- is that his "everyman" characters, the hobbits, are the *least* corruptible. Brin seems to have missed that point completely. Or maybe he just ignored it because it didn't serve his agenda.
Actually the Hobbit starts out by saying that the Tooks were richer than the Bagginses, and that Bilbo's father built Bag End with his wife's (a Took) money. The Bagginses were more respectable, but the Tooks were far more wealthy. The fact that outsiders to the Shire valued Bilbo's Mithril coat more than the rest of the Shire has very little to do with anything. Bilbo didn't know that the the coat was so valuable, and neither he nor Frodo were likely to sell it. Had it not been for the fact that Bilbo picked up the even more amazingly valuable "One Ring" the Mithril coat would have spent an eternity as a minor exhibit in a backwater Hobbit museum. Saying that Bilbo's coat made him the richest man in the Shire is like saying that the Bedouins of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula that were alive at 400 B.C. were rich because they were sitting on massive oil reserves.
Bilbo was certainly wealthy enough that he was able to live off his investments, but so is every retired person that you have ever met. Plenty of folks are able to retire early. And the book suggests that Bilbo actually spent most of his treasure before turning Bag End over to Frodo. Remember, some of the younger Hobbits even went so far as to dig for treasure in Bag End, but Bilbo had already spent it.
And that isn't even taking into consideration the fact that in many ways it is actually Sam that is responsible for the destruction of the One Ring, and you can't tell me that Sam was some sort of a high roller. He was a gardener!
Fuck 'im. He's wrong anyway. The story isn't black and white. Saruman was good, but was corrupted and turned to evil.
Fuck you.;) The story is black and white. There is no such thing as good and evil in the real world. Any story with good and evil is black and white.
Tolkien based most of the Good and Evil stuff on the mythology of Catholic Christians. Melkor was his Lucifer (you know, the one intelligent angel who gave Jesus the finger and thought for himself) and Sauron was a smaller variant of the same theme.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
In other words - "If you don't like it, read something else." The point is not whether he "likes it". Brin claims that our culture is swinging towards fedual-romanticism and that the popularity of LOTR is a symptom.
I thought Brin's article was excellent. Most of the negative comments take issue with his interpretation of LOTR, but don't address his thesis. Because of this I suspect a lot of the slashflames being directed his way come from reflexive anger at his use of a beloved fantasy as a negative example. A few thoughts in support of his thesis...
Anybody seen these movies lately?
A lone wolf detective is placed on probation for violation of department procedure by his cowardly rule-bound desk-jockey politician superiors. Nevertheless, he attempts to infiltrate a building being held by group of Eurotrash super-terrorists. He interferes with an official SWAT rescue attempt and ends up killing both himself and hundreds of innocents.
A planet-killing asteroid is hurtling toward earth. The U.S. government's solution is to rush a team of rag-tag rejects from the undersea oil drilling business through astronaut training and shoot them into space, planning to destroy the asteroid with a nuclear explosion. One accidentally hits the wrong button en route, resulting in explosive decompression of their space shuttle and the destruction of humanity.
An FBI agent obsessed with his sister's disappearance violates agency procedures and the law to infiltrate a factory he thinks is secretly manufacturing a 'black oil' virus to spearhead an alien conquest of the planet. He succeeds in submerging ten blocks of Vancouver in crude oil and spends the rest of his life in a mental institution. The FBI pays billions in damages.
Didn't think so. But don't they sound more realistic than Die Hard, Armageddon, or the X-Files?
Go hang out at your local Renaissance Fair or Society for Creative Anachronism meeting. Note the lack of people pretending to be plague victims. The dearths of women fantasizing about dying in childbirth at age sixteen. The complete absence of people playing peasants being slaughtered by the thousand over minor points of religious doctrine. What you'll find is a bunch of sysadmins (mostly) indulging their fantasies of living in an age of chivalry that never actually existed.
People in general, and geeks in particular, like to think of themselves as lone geniuses. Statistics says most of us aren't. The vast majority of us are not and will never get to be heroes in the Homer/Campbell/Tolkien/Lucas sense. We aren't Luke Skywalker. We're Trash Compacter Operators (4th Class Probationary) who joined up to pay for school and get the hell off Tatooine.
So who's to say there's anything wrong with a little indulgence in fantasy? It's harmless, right?
Well, yes and no. SCA and LOTR fan clubs never hurt anybody. But the ideas of the Romantic movement Brin speaks of are some pretty widespread memes. And they influence the way we think to a greater degree than we like to admit. How much of the mass media presentation of (American) elections is shaped by a desire to present them as epic struggles between two heroes? Why did people buy in to the visionary genius leaders of various dot coms who were going to revolutionize the world (or at least the way it bought pet food) and make some mad bucks besides? Those 25-year-old CEOs didn't bid their stocks up by themselves.
Brin's point is that Romantic ideals when applied in the real world lead to awful results. That these fantasies speak to all of us, but that their simple solutions should not be applied to a world of complicated problems. And he is dead-on right.
What he was criticizing was Tolkein's philosophy, which shone through when writing the stories. Tolkein was anti-industry, and that bias came through in his work in a very obvious way. Tolkein was entitled to his opinion, and that's no reason for the rest of us not to enjoy his books, Brin is just warning us against picking up the same bias as Tolkein through his work.
Brin advises that we should think about the things we read, and it's good advice. If you read things without thinking about your reaction to them there's always a chance that some of the preconceptions will sneak into your mind. That's one of the reasons why racism and prejudice is so hard to eliminate, because constant exposure can affect us without our conscious minds realizing it.
I read both science fiction and fantasy, and i think about what i read. If i was given the choice between being a common Joe in a high-tech 22nd century, or a King or hero in the 13th century or in an alternate magical world, i'd pick the 22nd century with no thought at all. That doesn't mean i can't enjoy the fantasy books though.
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