Why Scientists Love 'Lord of the Rings'

HughPickens.com writes: Julie Beck writes in The Atlantic that though science and fantasy seem to be polar opposites, a Venn diagram of "scientists" and "Lord of the Rings fans" have a large overlap which could (lovingly!) be labeled "nerds." Several animal species have been named after characters from the books, including wasps, crocodiles, and even a dinosaur named after Sauron, "Given Tolkien's passion for nomenclature, his coinage, over decades, of enormous numbers of euphonious names—not to mention scientists' fondness for Tolkien—it is perhaps inevitable that Tolkien has been accorded formal taxonomic commemoration like no other author," writes Henry Gee. Other disciplines aren't left out of the fun—there's a geologically interesting region in Australia called the "Mordor Alkaline Igneous Complex," a pair of asteroids named "Tolkien" and "Bilbo," and a crater on Mercury also named "Tolkien."

"It has been documented that Middle-Earth caught the attention of students and practitioners of science from the early days of Tolkien fandom. For example, in the 1960s, the Tolkien Society members were said to mainly consist of 'students, teachers, scientists, or psychologists,'" writes Kristine Larsen, an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University, in her paper "SAURON, Mount Doom, and Elvish Moths: The Influence of Tolkien on Modern Science." "When you have scientists who are fans of pop culture, they're going to see the science in it," says Larson. "It's just such an intricate universe. It's so geeky. You can delve into it. There's the languages of it, the geography of it, and the lineages. It's very detail oriented, and scientists in general like things that have depth and detail." Larson has also written papers on using Tolkien as a teaching tool, and discusses with her astronomy students, for example, the likelihood that the heavenly body Borgil, which appears in the first book of the trilogy, can be identified as the star Aldebaran. "I use this as a hook to get students interested in science," says Larson. "I'm also interested in recovering all the science that Tolkien quietly wove into Middle Earth because there's science in there that the casual reader has not recognized."

Comments

Re:Plot Hole

[halivar]

Because hobbits tend to fall off the back of eagles during aerial combats with fellbeasts. No, flying them in on eagles is a terrible idea.

Re:Plot Hole

[Mitreya]

Short version: why didn't they just ask the Eagles to fly them to Mordor? Or over the mountains?

Short (prevalent) answer: Eagles would be extremely easy to spot over the skies of Mordor, and thus would be stopped before they got to Mount Doom. They were willing/able to pick up Frodo at the end because Sauron had already been defeated.

More discussion here

Tolkien overexposure

[DNS-and-BIND]

I remember before the movies came out, that I wished more people could experience Lord of the Rings. It was just such an awesome book. I dreamed of the day the work would be known to everyone. Oh, don't get me wrong, lots of people knew LOTR back in the day, but it wasn't mainstream. I knew that if my dream were to come true, the real key would be overexposure. Hey, it's either that or stay a cult classic, right?

Of course, today, my dream has been fulfilled. The movies were great. Lots of haters, but you know what? The director kept most of the themes intact, and that's what counts.

The really ugly haters are on the literature side. The "literati" (LOL what a dumb name) are horrified by Tolkien because he shoves in their face the fact that they don't get to decide what literature is. The readers do. He reminds them that they are less and less relevant with each passing year, and they hate that.

Tolkien stands in stark contrast to the socialist-leaning, Modernist, elitist literati that hate him so much. As Mingardi and Stagnaro have demonstrated, Tolkien understood that socialism was unworkable and made little distinction between "left" and "right" socialism. Shippey notes that the literary coterie that "ruled and defined English literature at least for a time, between the wars and after World War II⦠were committed modernists, upper class, often Etonians, often professed Communists, often extremely rich, well-entrenched as editors and reviewers in the literary columns." (p. 316) In another article, Mingardi and Stagnaro show that far from being a statist as so many of the literati were throughout the 20th century, Tolkien identified himself as an anarchist (of the private property sort, not the socialist, bomb-throwing sort).

Furthermore, he commits a cultural/political crime that for our socialist literati is unforgivable. He likes the middle class and writes about them affectionately in the guise of the Hobbits. No sense of alienation! No sense of looking down on the middle class snootily from a lofty vantage point! Unforgivable!

-- Why They Hate Tolkien, by Lew Rockwell

Re:Tolkien overexposure

[gstoddart]

Or, alternately, Lew Rockwell and others are poncy, pretentious literati who deem themselves the arbiters of what it and isn't true, and nobody gives a shit what they think?

Tolkien himself said:

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history â" true or feignedâ" with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

So, maybe the people who are saying "it is or it isn't this" are largely full of shit?

(Which, I think, is what you said in your last paragraph before the quote).

Re:Plot Hole

[CrimsonAvenger]

Who's the eldest being in Middle Earth, Tom Bombadil or Treebeard?

Bombadil was "eldest and fatherless".

Treebeard was merely the eldest Ent. Note that the Ents were awakened to sentience by the Elves, so Galadriel (who was among the Firstborn of the Elves) was older than Treebeard as well.

Note that the age of any particular Elf is problematic in general - very few of the Firstborn were mentioned by name, which is not the same as "only a few of the Firstborn were still alive in Middle Earth (much less in Valinor)".

Is "Sauron" (lit. "abominable") a name that he despises and does not permit his underlings to speak, and if so, why does he have his messenger refer to him as "Lord Sauron the Great" and a servant refer to himself as "the mouth of Sauron"?

Because they weren't speaking English, and it's annoying to have names for characters vary within a literary work? Or possibly because the comment about "he permits his name to be neither spelt nor spoken" was an exaggeration by Gandalf (the wisest of the Maiar) when speaking of Sauron (the most powerful of the Maiar)?

Why does Gandalf warn people against using devices "of an art deeper than we possess ourselves" when talking about the palantir and yet have no problem with with the fellowship using all sorts of magical items of arts deeper than they possess (glowing elvish swords, daggers from the barrow, the Phial of Galadriel, Galadriel's box of earth, etc)?

Because he meant "an art deeper than *I* possess" when he said that (he was using the Royal "we"...). The work of Feanor was beyond even the Maiar, unlike sharp pointy things made by Elves and handed out by same to diverse characters....

So Galadriel knows Sauron's thoughts that concern the elves, but didn't know of Saruman's betrayal, or never saw relevant to mention it to Gandalf?

Saruman was NOT an elf (it's not clear what he was - perhaps a Maiar like Gandalf). So "thoughts that concern the elves" didn't apply. Note that the thoughts in question weren't "thoughts of interest to elves", but "thought about the elves".

Oh, and the mithril shirt pretty much had to be hard enough to stop a blade, or there was no point to it. Most likely the "supple as linen" was marketing-speak for "amazingly light and flexible by the standards of a mailshirt". What, you didn't think they had marketing in Middle Earth? Marketing was one of those evils even older than Sauron that was mentioned in passing....