Who cares what he has declared? Can't you just read what he has written and decide for yourself?
Oh yes, JRRT was a brilliant linguist. The sort who made a "heavenly" elvish language from a cross of Finnish and Welsh, and then an "evil" dark language which sounds very much like Turkic. Oh sure, of course he did not mean it. No relation to real world, of course. Pure coincidence. Ha.
> The tales were written down much earlier (when you take the Simarillion and all the other books into account). And they all, different victors in different wars, independently of each other, wrote similar things.
Soviet propaganda existed in the form of many books, written by different people over quite a long time span. But they all said very much the same things. So?
> Most of these beings were greated by Morgoth in mockery of the other races
We know this from JRRT only. This proves nothing. You're trying to prove one party slogan by referring to other party slogans.
> Furthermore, he is very apt at destroying, not at building
Again, we know this from JRRT only. I think elves ran a pretty good destruction spree in Mordor too, after they won.
> The humans he refers to, the humans from the East have no business in the realm of Gondor. They could have lived peacefully where they were, without being under any pressure from Gondor (or Rohan, or any other place around there).
That's a lie. Silmarillion tells us that Gondor was founded by conquerors who came from the sea. Do you think these lands were empty before them?
> Tolkien describes, among other things, the pirates of [wherever] that work with Sauron's army now... doing nothing else than they did before... raper, pillage and plunder... does that sound like "serving an evil Dasrk Lord" or "being the good guys"?
Ha. Can you guarantee that the elves/people army was completely devoid of villains and marodeers? Get real. A war is a war. It's always a place where bad people feel at home. One thing we know for sure: Aragorn hired a squad of dead bodies to serve him - how'd you like that?
> This one is an interesting thought. The orcs (et al.) were duped into senseless slaughter and massacers for how many millenia?
Again, this is something we learn from the victors. The history (the real one, I mean) teaches us that primordial tribes in general tend to quarrel quite often with each other. It's only natural that they consider their neighbors the Bad Guys. From orcs viewpoint, this might well have been the other way round.
> I have played RPGs for almost two decades now, in every world imaginable, every genre. The plain and simple truth about LOTR is that the amout of work you'd have to have going on behind the scenes to make his suggestion reality is staggering
Wow, are you trying to prove a this-could-not-happen-in-reality point by referring to you-can't-implement-this-in-RPG? It's a rather strange twist I'd say.
> And unless he prevides me with more detailed ideas how this might work out, I don't buy it.
Too bad you can't read Russian (see my other post here). You could get a lot of detailed ideas and food for thought.
Kudos to /. for posting such an insightful one!
on
David Brin On LOTR
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· Score: 1
It's incredible that such obvious but hard-on-your-conscience truths have been actually voiced.
And now, even echoed by/.
Must be some change in the air recently?
Most people I know are so blinded by the book's sheer grandeur that they miss its powerful racism and inequality message _entirely_. They even try to argue. "Hey, how can Frodo be racist! He's so cute! And Aragorn is so noble!" Oh my. People really must be FORCED to read such eye-opener essays as this one. I would nominate it a required reading in all high schools.
For example, are you aware that the "black language" of Mordor is in fact very similar to Turkic language? The author, being a linguist, could not be unaware of that. Well, how'd you like that - Turks have been conquering Europe for centures, let's now have a revenge by associating them with the Black Lord! This might be a "subconscious" thing, but it stinks nevertheless.
Interestingly, there's one culture that seems to be more resistant to the LOTR propaganda (probably because of the historical background). Namely, in Russia, even though there's a huge JRRT fandom (as everywhere), there's also a number of notable "sequels" written to present the same story from entirely different viewpoints. Not a history written by victors, but - as David Brin suggests - an attempt to figure out what might REALLY have happened in Middle-Earth. And these are not just "fan fiction," too. The books I'm speaking about are published in large numbers and are quite popular. Admittedly they are weaker than the original LOTR in terms of artistic beauty and complexity, but they compensate for that by their fresh insights and that powerful "wow, how could I be so blind!" feeling. Too bad they are not likely to ever be translated back to English. (We don't like to be disillusioned, do we?)
To complement the earlier posting on Russian bands distributing their MP3s:
This is the case not only for music. Russian online libraires (the biggest one is lib.ru) host tons of fiction and nonfiction books of all sorts. What is interesting, it's not only pre-19 century classics with expired copyright, as on Project Gutenberg. The big majority of Russian literature online is modern, highly popular books - sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, detectives, etc. And what is even more interesting, ALMOST ALL of these books are online with full consent of their authors (when the authors are alive). Many modern Russian writers have their own sites where they post MOST of their works in entirety, usually with the exception of one or two latest books which are being currently actively sold on paper (for these, you can usually read online excerpts). If you don't want to buy, no problem, wait a year or two and this latest book will get online by then. Truth is, online books PROMOTE paper books, and many Russian writers understand this and use this promotion actively.
My humble opinion is that, even though Russians don't have so many fancy copyright laws, there are some things about online content that America should probably learn from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares what he has declared? Can't you just read what he has written and decide for yourself?
Oh yes, JRRT was a brilliant linguist. The sort who made a "heavenly" elvish language from a cross of Finnish and Welsh, and then an "evil" dark language which sounds very much like Turkic. Oh sure, of course he did not mean it. No relation to real world, of course. Pure coincidence. Ha.
> The tales were written down much earlier (when you take the Simarillion and all the other books into account). And they all, different victors in different wars, independently of each other, wrote similar things.
Soviet propaganda existed in the form of many books, written by different people over quite a long time span. But they all said very much the same things. So?
> Most of these beings were greated by Morgoth in mockery of the other races
We know this from JRRT only. This proves nothing. You're trying to prove one party slogan by referring to other party slogans.
> Furthermore, he is very apt at destroying, not at building
Again, we know this from JRRT only. I think elves ran a pretty good destruction spree in Mordor too, after they won.
> The humans he refers to, the humans from the East have no business in the realm of Gondor. They could have lived peacefully where they were, without being under any pressure from Gondor (or Rohan, or any other place around there).
That's a lie. Silmarillion tells us that Gondor was founded by conquerors who came from the sea. Do you think these lands were empty before them?
> Tolkien describes, among other things, the pirates of [wherever] that work with Sauron's army now... doing nothing else than they did before... raper, pillage and plunder... does that sound like "serving an evil Dasrk Lord" or "being the good guys"?
Ha. Can you guarantee that the elves/people army was completely devoid of villains and marodeers? Get real. A war is a war. It's always a place where bad people feel at home. One thing we know for sure: Aragorn hired a squad of dead bodies to serve him - how'd you like that?
> This one is an interesting thought. The orcs (et al.) were duped into senseless slaughter and massacers for how many millenia?
Again, this is something we learn from the victors. The history (the real one, I mean) teaches us that primordial tribes in general tend to quarrel quite often with each other. It's only natural that they consider their neighbors the Bad Guys. From orcs viewpoint, this might well have been the other way round.
> I have played RPGs for almost two decades now, in every world imaginable, every genre. The plain and simple truth about LOTR is that the amout of work you'd have to have going on behind the scenes to make his suggestion reality is staggering
Wow, are you trying to prove a this-could-not-happen-in-reality point by referring to you-can't-implement-this-in-RPG? It's a rather strange twist I'd say.
> And unless he prevides me with more detailed ideas how this might work out, I don't buy it.
Too bad you can't read Russian (see my other post here). You could get a lot of detailed ideas and food for thought.
It's incredible that such obvious but hard-on-your-conscience truths have been actually voiced.
/.
And now, even echoed by
Must be some change in the air recently?
Most people I know are so blinded by the book's sheer grandeur that they miss its powerful racism and inequality message _entirely_. They even try to argue. "Hey, how can Frodo be racist! He's so cute! And Aragorn is so noble!" Oh my. People really must be FORCED to read such eye-opener essays as this one. I would nominate it a required reading in all high schools.
For example, are you aware that the "black language" of Mordor is in fact very similar to Turkic language? The author, being a linguist, could not be unaware of that. Well, how'd you like that - Turks have been conquering Europe for centures, let's now have a revenge by associating them with the Black Lord! This might be a "subconscious" thing, but it stinks nevertheless.
Interestingly, there's one culture that seems to be more resistant to the LOTR propaganda (probably because of the historical background). Namely, in Russia, even though there's a huge JRRT fandom (as everywhere), there's also a number of notable "sequels" written to present the same story from entirely different viewpoints. Not a history written by victors, but - as David Brin suggests - an attempt to figure out what might REALLY have happened in Middle-Earth. And these are not just "fan fiction," too. The books I'm speaking about are published in large numbers and are quite popular. Admittedly they are weaker than the original LOTR in terms of artistic beauty and complexity, but they compensate for that by their fresh insights and that powerful "wow, how could I be so blind!" feeling. Too bad they are not likely to ever be translated back to English. (We don't like to be disillusioned, do we?)
To complement the earlier posting on Russian bands distributing their MP3s: This is the case not only for music. Russian online libraires (the biggest one is lib.ru) host tons of fiction and nonfiction books of all sorts. What is interesting, it's not only pre-19 century classics with expired copyright, as on Project Gutenberg. The big majority of Russian literature online is modern, highly popular books - sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, detectives, etc. And what is even more interesting, ALMOST ALL of these books are online with full consent of their authors (when the authors are alive). Many modern Russian writers have their own sites where they post MOST of their works in entirety, usually with the exception of one or two latest books which are being currently actively sold on paper (for these, you can usually read online excerpts). If you don't want to buy, no problem, wait a year or two and this latest book will get online by then. Truth is, online books PROMOTE paper books, and many Russian writers understand this and use this promotion actively. My humble opinion is that, even though Russians don't have so many fancy copyright laws, there are some things about online content that America should probably learn from them.