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#41 | ||
Loremaster of Annúminas
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 2,307
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Now, one 'race' Tolkien regards as being do definitionally swarthy as to carry it as a name, with Capital Letters, are the Swarthy Men of the First Age. And the people of Ulfang and Uldor do turn out to be rat-bastards; but on the other hand those of Bor are noble and go down fighting against the traitors.
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The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it. Last edited by William Cloud Hicklin; 06-03-2020 at 07:06 AM. |
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#42 | |||
Blossom of Dwimordene
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: The realm of forgotten words
Posts: 10,357
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You passed from under darkened dome, you enter now the secret land. - Take me to Finrod's fabled home!... ~ Finrod: The Rock Opera |
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#43 | ||
Overshadowed Eagle
Join Date: Nov 2017
Location: The north-west of the Old World, east of the Sea
Posts: 3,854
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Lord Byron (the very same) manages to hit the Tolkien Racism Trifecta in his OED quote, from 'Corsair': "That man..Whose name appals..And tints each swarthy cheek with sallower hue." And then, of course, there's the other 'sallow' race: Quote:
![]() The view I get from all of these quotes is that when he bothered to think about it, Tolkien was pretty good on racism. He specifically qualifies his Orc description as 'degraded and repulsive' - ie, this isn't what actual 'Mongol-types' are like - and throws in a 'to Europeans' on his 'least lovely', which seems to me an acknowledgement that it's the Europeans who are at fault in making that judgement. There hasn't been anything which jumps out as Tolkien thinking deeply about something and then making it unabashedly racist. But, when he doesn't think deeply - when he writes about the generic Elvish appearance, or makes everyone from the South and East into The Enemy - he mirrors the racist attitudes of the time, with white-to-olive Goodies and brown-to-black Baddies. To come back to Beowulf: yes, Tolkien probably did view the poem through a white, male gaze, and may have had difficulty pulling back from that. But what I've seen no evidence of is the notion that he insisted everyone else had to see things the same way he did, and that (to my memory) is what the article baselessly asserted. hS |
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#44 | |
Wight
Join Date: Jun 2017
Posts: 118
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Beowulf isn't intended to be understood from Grendel's perspective or his mother's perspective. The very idea that "marginalized" voices must be given center stage is one of the most pernicious aspects of critical theory and postmodern "thinking" in general. |
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#45 | |
Overshadowed Eagle
Join Date: Nov 2017
Location: The north-west of the Old World, east of the Sea
Posts: 3,854
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![]() There's nothing wrong with reading and analysing Beowulf from a perspective close to that of its protagonist. What would be wrong would be if Tolkien had insisted that there was no other way to read it. Of course there are other ways! What does it tell us about the Geats' attitude towards strangers that their big story is about monsters? What does it tell us about the Saxons that their big story is about Geats? What can we speculate might be the Geats' attitude towards women, or disabled persons, based on the information contained in Beowulf (and the information not contained in it - if there are no women in prominent roles, for instance, that tells us something about both the mythic society, and the society of the people who preserved it). There's a dozen dozen ways of looking at it. But one of those ways, and the one that should be the foundation of study, is the question of what the writer thought about what they were writing about. And that, as far as we know*, was indeed a white, male gaze. hS *I think? Wikipedia talks about monks, so... I guess male. Almost certainly white.** **The question here is 'would a woman or an ethnic outsider have composed a poem about a big burly man killing an ethnic outsider and a woman?' |
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#46 | ||
Loremaster of Annúminas
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 2,307
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The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it. |
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#47 | |
Wight
Join Date: Jun 2017
Posts: 118
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