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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."
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.
Hear, hear. It's a story, and a good one. And I don't think everything must be "forward-thinking" to have value.
I vaguely remember a C.S. Lewis quote on the issue of whether or not to raise children on fairy tales and fiction. At the time, it was considered "forward-thinking" to raise children on reality rather than fantasy. (Still is, for some parents.)
I can't find the exact words right now, but in effect, he said that he would rather a child hearing a mysterious bump in the night think of a monster under the bed than a burglar. And yes, there are witches and monsters to frighten, but there are also heroes and knights to look up to, with timeless values such as courage and honesty.
In another much more recent bit of creative fantasy, one main character points out that humans need the little stories and lies in childhood as practice. Practice for believing in the big, important things. Things like Honor and Justice.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
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.
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.
I started thinking the article was pretty out there, ridiculous, and taking what is basically a good story far to seriously, until I got to the end. I don't think a fairy tale has a lot of obligations (if any). I changed my mind on the ridiculousness of the article when I got to the end. The part that starts "Am I pulling your leg? You bet!" and basically asks for people to think critically about what they see. And I like to imagine the point of that exercise isn't just to rip apart LOTR, but to get some practice in looking at the other stories of good vs. evil in similar light. Who's telling the story? Why are they telling the story? Kind of pulls you back to English Lit. or creative writing classes.
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
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.
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.
Settle down people! Did you read this (fascinating) article? He doesn't think we should disregard them at all. Instead, he was doing some literary criticism and looking at the work from a different angle. This article was more of a thought experiment than a proscriptive essay. So interesting to read, and, if anything, reverent towards Tolkein and his works.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
1. Of course this is a backward-looking tale - it was modeled after ancient Scandinavian mythologies.
Uh, it was also written after WWI and into WWII. If you think that didn't have an effect on somebody living throught it....
2. It's also about a world in transition, and the dawn of Man's dominance, so in that sense it is forward-looking.
Okay, but that's streching a point compared to the idealization of the country folk vs. the users of engines and technology. That's not reading something into it. It's more or less stated.
3. Is anybody else sick to death of comparisons with Star Wars? Puh-lease...
Yeah, well maybe you shouldn't be reading articles about modern myths. Star Wars had a huge impact on the psyche of millions of Americans. It's going to mentioned in these discussions. Get over it
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.
Not half as much as I am of dismissive idiots who substitute scorn for thought. Look, parts of these books were written in the form of letters to his son in RAF. So, here's a guy. Lived through WWI. Living through WWII. Knows a lot about myths. Is generally in the position of an intellectual during a time that most intellectuals are convinced that the world is possibly ending. He's basing a tale on a body of knowledge he knows a lot about. He's also living throught one of the worst times for England in modern history. Both of these things are influencing him. Both of them.
Brin isn't asking you to dismiss the work, not like it, or deny it's other aspects. He's simply pointing out that there are more influences on this than how great it would be to be a Hobbit or an Elf or something.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
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.
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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