On Visualizing A Virtual Middle-Earth

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the Middle-Earth Online website's new developer diary, in which the PC MMORPG's production designer Marc 'Taro' Holmes talks about the "epic responsibility" of visualizing Tolkein's world. He discusses some of the visual controversies: "The debates go back and forth, seemingly without end - does the Balrog have wings or is he made of living flame? Do dwarven women really have beards? How tangible are the Nazgul? How beautiful are the elves?", and shows some early concept art for the barrow-downs at Tyrn Gorthad.

Comments

Drivel about cultural relativism...

[freeBill]

...does not emerge from cultural relativists alone.

Some of what this poster says is easy to agree with: Tolkien was not attempting to evoke Egyptian culture in his description of the hobbits prepared for some eternal sleep in the barrow-downs. And the author of this piece deserves to be taken to task for it.

But stardeep commits the same crime of which he accuses the artist when he confuses "This reminded me of cultural relativism" with "There is definitely something relativistic about this." Then he goes way out of bounds when he says Tolkien was "certainly a cultural supremicist." Tolkien's clear-headed denunciation of the Nazis in the late '30s made it absolutely clear what he thought of cultural supremacists as well as racists.

What is particularly insidious about this particular brand of drivel is that we know precisely why Tolkien deliberately limited the cultural influences from outside Britain when he created the images he sought to portray in The Lord of the Rings. He felt the British Isles were culturally deprived by the lack of depth (in the historical sense) of their literary traditions. He actually wrote the books out of almost a cultural inferiority complex (or to overcome such). He was quite clear on this subject. The only sense he was expressing a feeling of cultural supremacy was the sense that he felt the culture he was concentrating on deserved to have a deeper tradition. It was not "supreme" but good enough to have more than it had (he associated the truncation of that tradition with the Norman invasion).

The truth (and we can talk about "truth" here...as least in the sense of the truth as Tolkien expressed it) is that Tolkien tried very hard to control the way that different cultures (such as the Egyptian and Greek cultures) influenced The Lord of the Rings. Greek myths (particularly the myth of Atlantis) had a direct impact on the stories, but he tried to keep the cultural impact limited as much as possible to the cultures most likely to have had a direct impact on the culture of the British Isles. Cultures such as the Greeks and the Egyptians were deliberately used as models as to what an historically deep culture would be like, but not as models for how bodies might look prepared for burial.