David Brin's criticisms

[tumhalad2]

Hey Tolkien fans

I was reading David Brin's critique on The Lord of the Rings recently and I have been having what one might call a 'crisis of faith'.

It seems to me that Tolkien himself was torn between different interpretations of his own story, though Brin seems to say that ultimately it the disastrous, 'genocidal' romantic view that held sway.

Can we really catagorise Tolkien's work like that, and can Brin allagorise it to the degree that he says that Tolkien's "good" side are not really good but only fighting selfishly for the preservation of the "old world" (ie agrarian etc) and that "evil" is simply a word used by the "victors" who win the War of the Ring to label Sauron's army which is the only that is composed of "all the races in middle-earth" (does he think there's Avari or something in Sauron's forces). Brin casts Sauron in the light of rebeller against the old world, against the uber-elves, against the evil Gondorians.

Can this really be the case. If I look at LOTR in that light I cannot, sorry, cannot enjoy it any more. As such I don't want to look at it in that light but Brin's argument is peruasive.

The way I take it, The end of the War of the Ring is no agrarian, back to old ways affair. It is a time of change, and by no means does the defeat of Sauron mean the 'defeat' of machines. Rather I take Sauron's defeat as being the defeat of an evil,an evil which is defined in Lord of the Rings, and which Brin fails to grasp.Sauron, ultimately, is no one's ally; indeed if he were victorious he would have consumed even the universe perhaps. Brin would say- "that's from the victor's point of view', to which I say-"no, its the reality. Indeed, The victors 'wrote' the Red Book, but nonetheless, was Sauron victorious no Easterling or Southron wouldh've been any better off.

Ultimately, the society that does win through the War of the Ring is an imperfect, indeed hierarchical one. But by no means does Tolkien envisage a return to such. There is enough evidence in his own writing that such an 'elitist' society is as terrible as any other (Numenor). Though there is elation with the victory of Gondor, and though it is not demcratic, it is, ultimately, better than Sauron's dominion.

Brin is right to suggest that there are instances in which Tolkien appears to critique his own writing and challenge his own ideas. However, Brin does not extrapolate on this and instead his article pushes his agenda. The Lord of the Rings should not be taken to either extreme, for there are many contradictions and paradoxes within tolkien' s own thought that make for a complex, and therefor very real-like, universe.

Thoughts on Brin and his critique?

here's the article:

www.davidbrin.com/tolkienarticle1.html

[littlemanpoet]

No time to read the article right now, but on the face of it, it seems that Brin is criticizing Tolkien's LotR for being northwestern European and Anglo-Saxon. Oh to be a Brit basher, especially when one is a Brit! Something perversely pleasurable about it, I'm sure.

[Sir Kohran]

Note: if you are American please don't take any offense; this is not an anti-American rant, just my own take on his work.

Looking at Brin's biography I was unsurprised to see that he was American and I think this explains a lot of why he does not 'get' Tolkien's themes. He criticises the 'romantic' ideal of a past golden age. The problem with his writing is that he doesn't have the right perspective. Tolkien was British and writing for a British audience (it was only later that the book became the international favourite it is today). Thus his work reflected a British outlook and British opinions.

The thing is that America has never really had a past 'golden age' - despite some bumps on the road (the Depression, Vietnam, 9/11, etc.) America's history has virtually been uphill ever since they gained their independence and became a nation. Throughout the 19th Century, the US was expanding across North America, and in the 20th Century they became the world's richest country, with only some small involvement in WWI experiencing little of WWII's negative effects.

Britain also did well in the 19th Century, becoming the world's dominant power and enjoying great wealth and advanced culture. In the 20th Century, on the other hand, Britain had a pretty hard time of it. Millions of young men were mindlessly slaughtered in one of the most horrific conflicts in history (WWI) and after WWII the country was shattered, both financially and spiritually. The British Empire was crumbling and the country became increasingly little more than anywhere else that had experienced the war, with a bleak, dull future. The glory days of the Victorian era semed like a dream to many people after that. For the people of Britain in the forties and the fifties the 'golden age' was very real, and now out of reach.

And I think that comes through in Tolkien's writings. Arda was once a world of beauty, light and perfection (essentially the Victorian era). But by the time of his story (LOTR, written in the fifties) the world has become a decaying, desolate place, scarred by the ruin of war. Places of happiness like Lothlorien and Rivendell still remain - but they are really just what has survived - they are from a past age, a glimpse of a bygone era. The heroes are not trying to create a better future, they are trying to save what is left of the past. The 'future' appears to be the smoke and cruelty of Mordor and the Orcs.

Much of what happens in LOTR and its ending are perhaps Tolkien's own fantasy - that the depressed British would find the strength within themselves to overcome the bleak future prepared for them and to return to the 'golden age' of the Victorian era. And I think this was a sentiment shared in much of Britain.

But America never went through this stage of post-war depression (heck it's been over a century since a war was even fought in North America), or at least not in the way that Britain did. So it's not all that surprising that Brin, as an American, finds Tolkien's ideals strange. And in some ways he's right - constantly looking back on the past and trying to recreate it is not a good way to live. But he's not British and so I think this affects his outlook somewhat.

Of course, Britain eventually got past this bleak stage and (mostly) recovered from the war, but sadly Tolkien died before he could see it happen. I often wonder if his works might have been different if they had been written in the 70s-90s rather than the 40s-50s. Perhaps we might have gotten a different message altogether.

Anyway, that's just my opinion from what I've gathered on Tolkien as a person. What does everyone else think?

[Raynor]

Originally Posted by David Brin

LOTR clearly reflected this era. Only, in contrast to the real world, Tolkien's portrayal of "good" resisting a darkly threatening "evil" offered something sadly lacking in the real struggles against Nazi or Communist tyrannies -- a role for individual champions.

Come on. I bet that every country that was under Nazi or Communist oppression has a wide folklore about the resistors. Even my small county has, and they are honored to this day by books and whatnot.

His elves and hobbits and uber-human warriors performed the same role that Lancelot and Merlin and Odysseus did in older fables, and that superheroes still do in comic books. Through doughty Frodo, noble Aragorn and the ethereal Galadriel, he proclaimed the paramount importance -- above nations and civilizations -- of the indomitable romantic hero.

I wonder what has struck Mr. Ph.D as super-heroical about the hobbits, be they of the fellowship or not. Their hairy feet? Ability to eat several times a day? Inhuman precision at rock throwing? I guess he missed the part about humble turning the wheels of the world, rocking the towers of the wise, etc.

Wouldn't life seem richer, finer if we still had kings? If the guardians of wisdom kept their wonders locked up in high wizard towers, instead of rushing onto PBS the way our unseemly 'scientists' do today? Weren't miracles more exciting when they were doled out by a precious few, instead of commercializing every discovery, bottling and marketing each new marvel to the masses for a dollar ninety-five?

I am sure that what has made the humanity advance in their contact with the High Elves was the later keeping their secrets from the former.

Didn't we stop going to the Moon because it had become boring?

And now we are bored of Earth and going back to the Moon.

"There's a reason why kings built large palaces, sat on thrones and wore rubies all over. There's a whole social need for that, not to oppress the masses, but to impress the masses and make them proud and allow them to feel good about their culture, their government and their ruler so that they are left feeling that a ruler has the right to rule over them, so that they feel good rather than disgusted about being ruled."

I wasn't aware that monarchs had it going so bad, being forced to live in luxury and all that. I guess I was wrong!

This fits the very plot of Lord of the Rings, in which the good guys strive to preserve and restore as much as they can of an older, graceful and 'natural' hierarchy

No, they were just praying that their efforts were not too late to help them _survive_. Preservation of the past is more of a elvish motive, and LotR is human-centered.

manufactured power-rings that can be used by anybody, not just an elite few.

Did not Gandalf tell you that the rings give power according to the measure of each possessor? I guess not, and it takes the steam out of that statement.

Consider the rings.Those man-made wonders are deemed cursed, damning anyone who dares to use them.

Man-made rings indeed!

The only people with dark skin in Middle-earth are the Orcs

W-o-s-e-s.

Let's not ignore, but instead openly acknowledge the underlying racialism and belief in an inherent aristocracy that J.R.R. Tolkien weaved into the books, without even much attempt at subtlety.

Anyone care to send Brin a link to a good old fashioned Barrow Dowsn "LotR is not racist 101" thread?

Or might [the armies of Sauron] instead have thought they were the 'good guys', with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elves and their Numenorean colonialist human lackeys?

Yes; elves had human lackeys and slaves working their fields.

In fact, toward the end of this essay, I'll offer my own small bit of ironic take-off. A different, and possibly much better, way of viewing Sauron, the evil Dark Lord.
...
Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the Ring War -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and movie-makers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle-Earther! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return... bringing more rings.

Why, oh, why did I read Tolkien's version instead of this. Ashes and sorrow!

All right, I read Tolkien's epic trilogy a bit unconventionally, starting with The Two Towers and backfilling as I went along.

See, _that_ is how you read a book and make a critique about it. That's a proven way to get the story and its theme right. I bet you all have been doing wrong all along.

[Boromir88]

After reading Raynor's post, I wasn't expecting too much 'Enlightment' (yes that's an intended pun) from this guy. So I kind of skimmed through the article a bit, to get a few chuckles...

Tolkien himself calls them tragic figures and dwells on their background.

Dwells on their background? Besides 3 being 'great lords of Numenor' thats all we know about the Ringwraiths prior to receiving the Rings. In fact Tolkien left their identity unknown to emphasize their thraldom to Sauron. I wonder where he got the idea that Tolkien 'dwelled' on their background or that they were 'decent men?'

identifying with a side that's 100% good. You can revel as they utterly annihilate foes who deserve to be exterminated because they are 100% distilled evil.

Funny, doesn't Tolkien say he does not believe in absolute Evil? And I think from this thread, there is a consensus that there is no absolute good either? And maybe he missed some of these remarks from Tolkien:

Some reviewers have called the whole thing simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked) in people in a hurry, and with only fragment to read, and, of course, without the earlier written but unpublished Elvish histories. But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right…In their way the Men of Gondor were similar: a withering people whose only ‘hallows’ were their tombs. But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs.~Letter dated 25 September 1954

The snootiest and most relentlessly aristocratic characters in LOTR stand off in the wings. For example preachy, secretive and patronizing Elrond and Galadriel, coaxing maximum effort while letting others do the fighting for them.

And yet these two were quite influential and important in 'fighting the long defeat.' Perhaps 'Dr. Brin' missed the part where Mirkwood and Lorien are repelling assaults of their own? Perhaps he missed the part where Celeborn leads an army to defeat the forces of Dol Guldur and Galadriel trashes the place?

And that is all I really cared to read. I wouldn't put too much stock into this Doctor tumhalad.

[Quempel]

I must have a different version of the books, either that or Brin just likes the bad boys to win.

[Aiwendil]

Wow - I've seen some reasonable critiques of Tolkien, but Brin's essay is surprisingly muddled and imperceptive. I seem to remember an equally brainless tirade against Star Wars from him. Has anyone read actually read anything by him? Is his fiction any good or is it as uninspired as this?

[littlemanpoet]

Okay, so he's not a Brit bashing Brit. I take that back.

But he sets up a paper tiger: "bullies" taking other men's wives and wheat "has always been the way" of things, and so people have to be made to feel good about being ruled. Whereas the historical record may vindicate his claim in a general way, this only tells us that rulers have historically abused their authority. He refuses to consider that there may actually be something legitimate called "authority". If one took his arguments to their natural conclusions, and accepted them, one would have to be an anarchist and consider democracy only the next step in the governmental evolution of humanity. What tripe.

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

Wow - I've seen some reasonable critiques of Tolkien, but Brin's essay is surprisingly muddled and imperceptive. I seem to remember an equally brainless tirade against Star Wars from him. Has anyone read actually read anything by him? Is his fiction any good or is it as uninspired as this?

I read one of his stories which was pretty good, I think it was called "Crystalline spheres" or something like that. Maybe a good storyteller, but he's not as bright with essays. As far as I look at it, he's quite "out", but there's more essays like this out there (and it will take several Downs' forums to examine them all )... personally I don't bother with them, or at least don't let them influence my opinions on Tolkien (though if there is anything that may enlighten me on same point, I seek and check if it fits and then I may even learn something...).

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Brin's criticisms are of a piece with China Mieville's, and not too distant from Philip Pullman's. What all three have in common is adherence to some form of secular materialism: Mieville is a doctrinaire Socialist, Pullman a militant atheist, Brin a technolator. Not really mindsets prepared to find Tolkien's philosophy appealing!

Brin tries to make two arguments here. The first is a complaint that Tolkien doesn't share his worship of 'progress', technology always carrying us onward and upward. Well, that's true. Tolkien's youth was seared by the first War of the Machines; he was there when a generation of young Europeans were immolated in a mechanical Moloch. Why should a Somme veteran see 'progress' in the Maxim guns, the quick-firing howitzers, the phosgene gas? For that matter, why should a contemporary man, doctorate or not, have such confidence that there's nothing wrong with mass deforestation and the pouring of poisons into the air and water?

But the sillier argument, one shared by Mieville and many other leftists, is the political one. Please pay attention, Trots: Tolkien wasn't writing a political book (and didn't buy the 'all art is political' bromide). He's not arguing political theory nor advocating monarchy as a form of government: it's simply a datum of a faux-medieval world. It's not as if the Captains of the West were wickedly crushing some Sauronian Autonomous Workers' Collective! Mordor is of course a monarchy as well- but an utterly tyrannous, totalitarian monarchy, where the Ruler is also the God. Indeed not unlike the regimes contemporary with LR constructed in the name of the 'workers.'

If there is any political dimension at all to the Lord of the Rings it's the very basic contradistinction between coercion and slavery, and freedom maintained under a light and enlightened hand. It's noteworthy how egalitarian the Western rulers are- any Rider can speak his mind to Theoden, for example. For all Brin's (and others') rantings about 'hierarchy' and 'tugging the forelock,' there isn't in fact any of this in Tolkien- these are the critics' projections. For Tolkien, that government governs best which governs least; isn't the Shire effectively an anarchy?

After all there's nothing sacred about democracy, "the worst form of government ever devised, except for all the others" according to Churchill. It's merely a pragmatic prophylactic against the rise of a Caligula or a Stalin. Plato's philosopher-kings would be great, if they existed. If there were some absolute guarantee of monarchy permanently in the hands of the likes of a Trajan (or an Aragorn) we should jump on it. It's not as if our prized universal franchise has a very good track record for picking illustrious rulers!

What Tolkien really was on about, of course, was the dual evils of Pride and Power. Power, "the making of the Will instantly effective:" whether by 'magic', force, or enslavement; and the concomitant of that Pride which hold's one's Will superior to the desires or good of others. Tolkien's heroes are defined by their *reluctance* to exercise power (this hardly needs rehearsal). And Pride ineluctably goes before a fall- the "snootiest" races, as Brin calls them, are responsible for the Kinslaying, the Rings of Power, and the Breaking of the World. Truly some of Tolkiens' peoples are gifted- but when they forget that their abilities are indeed gifts, to be used for the common benefit (like Sam's box of earth) then the consequences are dire. Gandalf never forgets that he is a Steward, the 'servant of the servants of Eru' in a formulation Tolkien would have known. Denethor forgets what Stewardship means, and in his pride chooses to exercise the last element of power remaining to him- filicide and suicide.

It may be that some of the attacks on Tolkien from the Left (I'm thinking here of Mieville, not necessarily Brin) is that they alraedy have imbibed a fair dose of Sarumanism. "Knowledge, Rule, Order," in time we can control the power, and override the weakminded fools who don't relise it's for their own good.... Shippey is quite right in identifying Saruman's speech as a politician's doublespeak (a word coined by Orwell at the same time Tolkien was finishing the Lord of the Rings).

[Aiwendil]

Mieville is a doctrinaire Socialist, Pullman a militant atheist, Brin a technolator. Not really mindsets prepared to find Tolkien's philosophy appealing!

True enough, I suppose. On the other hand, I'm a leftist, humanist, anti-religious, pro-science, social democrat and LotR is my favorite book. And unless I'm quite mistaken a sizeable fraction of Tolkien fandom is similarly leftist. So either we're quite irrational or the conflict that people like Brin and Pullman see between liberal secularism and Tolkien's works is not quite as severe as they think it is.

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

True enough, I suppose. On the other hand, I'm a leftist, humanist, anti-religious, pro-science, social democrat and LotR is my favorite book. And unless I'm quite mistaken a sizeable fraction of Tolkien fandom is similarly leftist. So either we're quite irrational or the conflict that people like Brin and Pullman see between liberal secularism and Tolkien's works is not quite as severe as they think it is.

Perhaps the difference is best explained in that you, Aiwendil, accept Tolkien's myth for what it is, whereas your like-minded counterparts fail to understand that "Tolkien wasn't writing a political book", to quote Mr. W.C. Hickli.

[Aiwendil]

Perhaps the difference is best explained in that you, Aiwendil, accept Tolkien's myth for what it is, whereas your like-minded counterparts fail to understand that "Tolkien wasn't writing a political book", to quote Mr. W.C. Hickli.

I suppose that's true. However, I think there may be more to it than that. I know that Tolkien wasn't writing allegory; but if I detected, shall we say, right-wing 'applicability' in LotR I would certainly dislike it (and the same goes for any other ideology I dislike).

To put it another way, while I certainly do not take Tolkien's work to contain a political or philosophical "message", I do think that (as in all really good stories), these kinds of themes can be found below the surface. But what I find under the surface is nothing like the extreme reactionist conservatism that Brin et al. seem to find. On the contrary, the ways LotR explores issues such as environmentalism, the tendency of power to corrupt, inter-racial cooperation, and even capital punishment fit very well with my left-leaning views.

So I think that Brin and friends are not wrong merely in that they read LotR as a political work; I think that the politics they read into it are the wrong politics.

[Boromir88]

So I think that Brin and friends are not wrong merely in that they read LotR as a political work.~Aiwendil

Well said, and why did Tolkien write the Lord of the Rings? Well, let's see what he says:

'I hope that you have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings? Enjoyed is the key-word. For it was written to amuse (in the highest sense): to be readable.'~Letter 181

Then you get people like Brin and Birzer (someone else I'm not too fond of) who like to attach their own personal agendas to the story, which starts to ruin the fun for readers...as I took from tumhalad's original post.

But with those people such as Brin who interestingly enough (and you can tell just by reading the article) admits to not really 'reading' the story:

"All right, I read Tolkien's epic trilogy a bit unconventionally, starting with The Two Towers and backfilling as I went along."

who do a shoddy job of research and just start attaching their own agendas to the story to push their point.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

David Brin is a scientist talking about things that are well outside his field, among them history, philosophy, sociology and literature. The PhD that he quotes so prominently at the head of his article is in Space Science, which is why everything he says that isn't directly related to astrophysics is either egregiously wrong, grossly over-simplified or common knowledge. What he does manage to do very well is to put forward an absolutely typical scientist's view that thanks to science we are daily approaching the Utopia of Technology, from which we may infer that Science is Important and that Scientists Are Our Benefactors (does that sound to anyone else like a public information film from the 1960s?). Brin is also infected with the idea that the only alternative to American republican democracy is Stalinist dictatorship (monarchy of all kinds and in all places being the same thing by another name), and that's before we even begin to consider his apparent claim that you can have either reason or romance, never both. The sad fact is that all of Brin's opinions as expressed in this article arise from ignorance and prejudice: the prejudice of the sciences against the humanities, the prejudice of the modern against the ancient, and the prejudice of the liberal democrat against all other forms of society.

I thought I recognised this article, and I've been able to track down a thread in which we all had a good old dig at it a few years ago ( J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress?). Bill Ferny in particular makes the points I wish I could make, and others that require a great deal more education. Obviously one would normally assume that someone wanting to compare the modern and medieval worlds by the application of philosophy would have first tried to acquire an extensive knowledge of those subjects, but as the thread I've linked to above makes abundantly clear, that is not always the case. Also, quoting your degrees in an irrelevant context is pretentious in the extreme, particularly when it's done to mislead the reader into thinking that you're a professional academic, when in fact you're a writer of second-rate science fiction. If you've read Brin's The Postman (in which a character tries to improve the present by resurrecting an idealised version of the past), you'll understand just how laughable it is for him to assume an attitude of superiority towards any writer, living or dead.

I was going to end there, but my natural vindictiveness demands that I attack at least one specific point, so I'll have a couple.

It's only been two hundred years or so -- an eyeblink -- that 'scientific enlightenment' began waging its rebellion against the nearly-universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture.

Except that feudalism didn't develop as a political system until the appearance of expensive heavy cavalry on the European battlefield, before which there was no such thing. Under feudalism, all land is owned by the king, who allows his followers to use it in return for service. Each major lord has lesser lords who owe him fealty, and so on down to the serf, who gives labour, military service and a share of his crops in return for a strip of land to farm for himself. Anglo-Saxon kingship didn't work like that, nor did monarchy in Scandinavia. In eleventh-century Iceland, there was no king at all, and the country was governed by a system of assemblies open to all citizens. For half a millennium, Rome was a republic, governed by democratically elected officials, albeit with a very restricted franchise; and this system was itself borrowed from ancient Greece, where the very term democratia was coined. So such ancestors of Americans as Englishmen, Germans, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Greeks and Italians did not always live under feudalism. The Irish had developed a sophisticated system of elective monarchy, combined with a rule of law from which even the highest were not exempt, before the fall of the Roman empire; and the Africans whose descendents are Brin's countrymen organised themselves in clans that wouldn't have known feudalism if it had jumped up and given them a haircut. Most of our ancestors, no matter who 'we' are, did not live under feudalism. In fact, only a statistically minute number of people ever have. Of course, if your grounding in history came from watching Ben Hur once when you were at school you might be a bit sketchy on the differences between nineteenth-century Zululand and seventeenth-century France, but in that case you shouldn't be making sweeping generalisations about their respective political systems.

Long before Aristotle became a tool of the establishment, his rediscovery during the High Middle Ages offered some relief from dour anti-intellectualism.

If Aristotle ever became a tool of the establishment, it was around the time that his works were rediscovered, courtesy of the Moslem scholars who hadn't lost them in the first place, brought to Europe via the Kingdom of Jerusalem and translated into Latin, which is scarcely the language of the common man. However, if it's anti-intellectual for Arabic-speaking Europeans to discover a lost Greek writer through the works of Moslem philosophers, for other writers to translate his corpus into Latin for wider dissemination, and for still more to use the new learning to advance European philosophy, then it's an odd sort of anti-intellectualism. If anything, medieval academics were even more eager for knowledge and enamoured of learning than their modern counterparts, seeming to delight in all forms of academic pursuit with the enthusiasm of those for whom learning was a rare and marvellous gift. The Middle Ages were a period of constant experimentation in literature, both Latin and vernacular, allied with a rediscovery of the ancient world and the development of new philosophical ideas and political systems. One of the foundations of logical scientific thought, Occam's Razor, was propounded by a fourteenth-century friar, and William of Ockham was not the only man of his age to be developing intellectual tools or scientific theories. As for keeping the fruits of learning from the common man, Alfred the Great was personally translating important Christian works from Latin into English in the ninth century, for the specific purpose of bringing important works to a wider, less educated audience. In his translation of Boethius, he introduces the new analogy of a wagon wheel to explain the interrelationship between fate and God's foreknowledge, reducing a complex idea to an image that could be understood by even the lowliest of his subjects. If this is the feudalist anti-intellectualism of early England, I think I could live with it; and Alfred was no isolated example, but working in a distinct tradition of educational revival that goes back at least as far as Charlemagne. But of course I'd say that: being that I live in a monarchical state, I must have no freedom of expression or movement, and the obligation to turn up with bow and knife whenever Lord Clinton needs to raise troops for the Duke of Devonshire.

I think that's enough sniping from me. Doubtless David Brin was not being entirely serious when he wrote his article, as I hope he wasn't entirely serious when he decided to give a book the title Tomorrow Happens; so perhaps I should take his comments with a pinch of salt. The form of technocratic utopianism that he espouses was common coin in the 1950s, but has been abandoned by all but the most determined fantasists since then, and for obvious reasons; so perhaps there's some hidden joke that I don't quite understand. Then again, how many people outside the science-fiction community care what David Brin thinks anyway? This is scarcely going to persuade dyed-in-the-wool Tolkienistas that they've wasted their lives, and outside this forum I could probably count on the thumbs of one hand the number of people I know who have even heard of the man.

[davem]

If you think that's funny, try these

http://posseincitatus.typepad.com/po...-elvish-a.html

http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_09_10/cover.html

[tumhalad2]

fascinating...the things people come up with...

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

I suppose that's true. However, I think there may be more to it than that. I know that Tolkien wasn't writing allegory; but if I detected, shall we say, right-wing 'applicability' in LotR I would certainly dislike it (and the same goes for any other ideology I dislike).

Same here!

I always wonder when I hear these criticisms - have these critics not thought about who were the first big fans of Tolkien's work? The hippies? The counter culture? There's a very good reason they took to Lord of the Rings and it does not all have to do with copious amounts of mushrooms and pipeweed...

It always makes me laugh when both left and right pick up on the Scouring of the Shire as some kind of overt criticism of socialism, as if you look at it, Saruman is quite the opposite. And what seems to be the idealised Hobbit society? Some form of anarchism, clearly - with little state, plenty of sharing, lots of criticism of greedy people like the Sackville-Bagginses...The most 'political' in terms of left/right that Tolkien gets is to pull down, at every turn, forms of totalitarianism, from the fascistic/stalinist styles of Sauron and Morgoth to the greedy, exploitative Corporate machine of Saruman. He does have lots of Kings, but Tolkien never shies away from ripping apart any King who treats his subjects badly - these Kings may have 'divine rights' but they are very modern too in that they also have 'divine responsibilities'

I think some like to go after this surface reading that Tolkien was some antiquarian oddity what with his Kings, Wizards, Los and Beholds and whatnot. But look beneath the surface and his work is stuffed to the gills with modern ideas.

He's not an enemy of rationalism and science, but he is indeed an enemy of misapplied technology. It's no mistake that some readers have seen applicability between the Ring and nuclear weapons, and Tolkien pulls no punches that while it's fine to make Rings of Power with good intentions, with bad ones they simply become fearsome, and evil, weapons. Tolkien always makes the case for the common man too, or else why would it be Hobbits, Sam in particular, who save this world? He makes the case for giving the criminal some compassion in the shape of Gollum. He shows us how racism is ridiculous by showing us the friendship which grows between Legolas and Gimli. He shows us why we need to become tree-huggers by giving us the Ents. Blah, blah, blah....

I think only as time goes on will most people outside the fan community come to realise Tolkien's message. The world is changing now from left/right divides to other kinds of divide - seemingly that of liberty/control. For example - very odd in the UK now that our 'right' party the Tories are looking to ban seemingly everything that's bad for the environment (bye bye Plasma TV) - that used to something of the like put out by the extreme left in the 80s.

I suppose too this shows just how modern Tolkien really was.

Of course, it could just be that yet another fantasy/sci-fi writer is feeling restricted by the looming presence of Tolkien and wants/needs to pull things down a bit!

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

these Kings may have 'divine rights' but they are very modern too in that they also have 'divine responsibilities'

There's nothing modern about that idea. That the king and his senior subjects have responsibilities towards those below them is one of the underpinning concepts of feudal society. People owe allegiance and loyalty upwards, but also owe protection, patronage, good governance and charity to those below them. I think that Sir Guillaume made that point in one of his posts on the other thread, along with an interesting one about the feudal system being in operation in modern corporations. In medieval England, the system was underpinned by the idea that the king received his position Dei gratia, 'by the grace of God'. Thus the true peak of the feudal pyramid is not the king, or even the Pope, but God, the appointer and master of all kings. The ideal of our system nowadays is that each person rises by virtue of their merits to the position they deserve, and this is about as true to life as was the old feudal model. The difference is one of accountability: the feudal model officially makes someone accountable only upwards, but it is as fallacious to think that this means a lack of responsibility as it is to assume that those who are nominally accountable downwards always feel a sense of responsibility towards those they govern. God is far more terrifying an authority than the electorate, particularly when excommunication could be used to justify mass rebellion.

The above model, with God at the top, does not work for David Brin because he does not believe in God. He sees priests as apologists for an absolutist system, existing only to justify the presence and power of the governing class. But during the Middle Ages, belief in God was not restricted to Brin's uneducated and oppressed masses, but was shared by the lords who governed them. Hell was just as real a threat to them as electoral defeat is to our modern politicians, as numerous bequests of land and moneys to the Church demonstrate. Brin simply follows Karl Marx in assuming that nobody has ever really believed in religion, but that many have promoted it simply to reinforce their own positions. That the same could be said of democracy does not appear to have occurred to him, nor that in societies which nominally follow Marxist doctrine, the abolition of religion has not brought an end to the exploitation of ideals, nor even the indoctrination of the people. If the aim of scientific progress has been to put an end to the cynical manipulation of ideology, then it has been a signal failure, since even in today's democratically governed and meritocratically minded Britain, our guiding ideals are twisted to sell us particular policies. Unlike David Brin, I don't see that changing in the future: there will always be something to gain by duping and exploiting one's fellow man. If anything, there is even less moral discouragement from doing this now than there once was, since we believe the myth that people rise to the station they deserve, and we no longer believe that all our actions must be accounted for. The only commandment in a capitalist democracy is 'thou shalt not be found out'.

This is not to say that medieval societies were better than ours, but they were certainly no worse. There has always been some measure of governmental accountability, even under kings; just as the presence of a democracy doesn't guarantee that everyone's voice will be heard. David Brin's mistake is to think that fairness and democracy, scientific progress and freedom from religious persecution are all bound up in one golden system, which we can follow into a better tomorrow. This is not and never has been the case: whereas people were once locked up and tortured on suspicion of heresy, which imperilled the souls and spiritual security of their fellow citizens, now they are so treated on suspicion of threatening their bodies and their democratic freedom through terrorism. Just as the Church once handed its enemies over to the civil authorities for execution, now our democracies farm out torture to their foreign allies. Every society gets something wrong, and usually its greatest evils and achievements both stem from its most devoutly held beliefs.

As was pointed out in the older thread, though, this has little if anything to do with Tolkien, because he was not a political author. Even if we assume that he intended us to overthrow Parliament and establish a system like the ones he portrayed, we would be far from absolutism or feudalism: the model king, Aragorn, begins his reign by public acclamation, having proved himself not just by defending the realm, but more significantly by healing the sick. The society with which Tolkien most often identifies himself, the Shire, has both hereditary and elected officials, but neither group does much actual governing. Theoden is a king in the Anglo-Saxon heroic mould, very similar to Hrothgar. He is a law-giver, like Alfred, Athelstan and Edgar the Peacable, rewarding loyalty rather than obedience and punishing treachery; and he defends his people by military leadership. More importantly, before making decisions he seeks the advice of a limited witan, or gathering of the wise, just as did the Anglo-Saxon kings. The only ruler opposed to Sauron who appears to seek no opinion but his own is Denethor, who is not a king at all, and the only outright despot in the whole of LR is Sauron, whom Brin would make into some sort of hero.

I don't have time to go into much more than that, but I did want to point out that medieval societies were not dictatorships. Some of the powers wielded by governments today would have been unheard of in the tenth century, and probably hotly contested. Tolkien's kings rule by consent and with a light hand. If Tolkien meant any political message to be derived from their systems it is that a good government is fair, open and responsive to advice and criticism, and no more regulatory than absolutely necessary. However, some people are more concerned with outward appearances and terminology than spirit and substance, and to those people a president means freedom and a sovereign means oppression; they see no need to look any deeper.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

A brilliant post, Squatter!

[tumhalad2]

http://plover.net/~bonds/tolkien1.html

Check this out...how do people respond to these criticisms. All pretty condescending.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by tumhalad2

http://plover.net/~bonds/tolkien1.html

Check this out...how do people respond to these criticisms. All pretty condescending.

It's a load of rubbish. The same standard old tripe that lazy critics trot out. A paint by numbers piece. He sounds like he swallowed a set of book notes. But then look at the rest of his blog. Same standard old tripe on the rest of it - supermarkets are bad, Cadbury's is horrible chocolate, blah blah blah...so say something we've never heard before from another million blogs...

Interestingly, I noticed yesterday that Brin wrote the foreword to The Science of Middle-earth. He's much more complimentary in that...

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

That article is just more hand-waving from someone who thinks they're too intellectual to take Tolkien seriously. We've discussed and refuted every sentence before, despite this being the first time we've seen it here; so it's not new enough or provocative enough to warrant a lengthy response. Mind you, I may just think that because I'm the sort of dullard who has better things to do when in Spain than to laugh at British holidaymakers.

[CSteefel]

All right, I read Tolkien's epic trilogy a bit unconventionally, starting with The Two Towers and backfilling as I went along.

Well, this is all I need to pass on reading Brin's paper...

[tumhalad2]

I found this link and message on a blog:


http://revolutionsf.com/article/953.html

THE TOLKIEN CRITIQUE I stumbled across this critique of "The Lord of the Rings" at Boing Boing and read it largely because it was written by author Michael Moorcock, whose own take at darkly heroic fantasy writing has a flavor all its own. Moorcock sees Tolkien's work as conservative and backward-looking (which it is), and too forgiving of (or too inspired by) the "common man" as embodied by those merry hobbits. A complex, dense work of writing, LOTR doesn't delve deep into human nature, he argues -- but, then, what do you expect from a rabid consumer of Nordic culture and medieval literature? Moorcock says: "The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic. If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob -- mindless football supporters throwing their beer-bottles over the fence the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom "good taste" is synonymous with "restraint" (pastel colours, murmured protest) and "civilized" behaviour means "conventional behaviour in all circumstances". This is not to deny that courageous characters are found in The Lord of the Rings, or a willingness to fight Evil (never really defined), but somehow those courageous characters take on the aspect of retired colonels at last driven to write a letter to The Times and we are not sure -- because Tolkien cannot really bring himself to get close to his proles and their satanic leaders -- if Sauron and Co. are quite as evil as we're told. After all, anyone who hates hobbits can't be all bad."

[Raynor]

Come on now, you forgot these good bits:

While there is an argument for the reactionary nature of the books, they are certainly deeply conservative and strongly anti-urban, which is what leads some to associate them with a kind of Wagnerish hitlerism.

Wake me when LotR becomes required reading for the Skinheads.

Evil is never really defined

Indeed; I complained about this too, I can't see who is evil in LotR due to all those nursery rhymes.

The great epics dignified death, but they did not ignore it, and it is one of the reasons why they are superior to the artificial romances of which Lord of the Rings is merely one of the most recent.

This fellow must have read the books with a lot of attention too, if he came to the conclusion that death is ignored (hint: it is the main theme).

If I find this nostalgia for a "vanished" landscape a bit strange it is probably because as I write I can look from my window over twenty miles of superb countryside to the sea and a sparsely populated coast. This county, like many others, has seemingly limitless landscapes of great beauty and variety, unspoiled by excessive tourism or the uglier forms of industry. Elsewhere big cities have certainly destroyed the surrounding countryside but rapid transport now makes it possible for a Londoner to spend the time they would have needed to get to Box Hill forty years ago in getting to Northumberland.

I am starting to like this chap. It never dawned to me that we can happily destroy our surroundings because, hey.... we can always take the train to the yet untarnished places. Talk about cognitive liberation...

And he goes on for four pages. And, evidently, one can always substantiate one's claims by putting silly cartoonish images from LotR (likely of the 1980 vintage), because, you know, that is how Tolkien envisioned his world. I wonder if target practicing on such funny articles will become the favorite Sunday sport of the the Downs. Mirth section, here we come

[tumhalad2]

Ha ha indeed. Though reading some of Brin's stuff again today, it is so difficult to come to the conclusion that he may have a point, one that may be deeply relevant to Tolkien. I find increasingly that while I emotionally enjoy Tolkien, I cannot intellectually justify the most fundemental aspects of his universe.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Tumhalad:

Wherein lie your difficulties?

Come on, we'll restore your wavering faith!

*****
Moorcocks' diatribe has been around for years, possibly decades. Besides being piffle on its own, it also comes from an author so obsessed with not being 'juvenile,' so determined to include 'real-world' angst and sex, that he....writes precisely like a sulky teenager, for whom of course angst, sex, and not appearing juvenile are the principal preoccupations. Elric isn't remotely a grownup character: more like Holden Caulfield with a sword.