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04-18-2014, 02:59 PM | #81 | |
Newly Deceased
Join Date: Sep 2013
Location: America
Posts: 8
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Letter 210 is tricksie
Quote:
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04-18-2014, 09:49 PM | #82 |
Shade of Carn Dûm
Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: Henneth Annûn, Ithilien
Posts: 462
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I could care less if Tolkien was racist. I do not think he was anyway, at least openly. If you're anti-racist to the point you want a racist to conform to your non-racist ways then don't support his work. I do think in LotR there are some Men who're obviously better than others. I do not believe everyone has to except what is the flavor of the century. My morals are more in line with the Hellenes before the Platonists turned the world upside down.
"it has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger." [Thucydides; History of the Peloponnesian War, ch. 3, p. 44] What's next, the term "black Númenórean" is a racist title because it has black in it and they are opponents of Gondor and the good Dúnedain? They're both Dúnedain in any case, but since Tolkien decided to append "black" to a certain segment of them in a negative light, that's kind of racist right? So Tolkien is a racist and anti-feminist, what else, wrote some good books. Cool.
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"For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously!" - G.S.; F. Nietzsche |
04-18-2014, 10:54 PM | #83 | |
Wight
Join Date: Apr 2014
Location: far away,in the southern arda
Posts: 153
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04-18-2014, 11:48 PM | #84 | |
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 785
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Quote:
So you do care to a certain extent?
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04-19-2014, 12:08 AM | #85 | |
Shade of Carn Dûm
Join Date: Feb 2014
Posts: 430
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Quote:
I don't think 'racist' is quite the right word, though he did have some fractures in his mind that are very apparent to me. Tolkien tends to 'essentialise' (i.e. make literal) a demarcation of good and evil across racial divides--excepting men--who he casts as on a spectrum. Therefore, it's no so much a racism cast over skin tones, but across racial divides. Elves versus Orcs, case in point. There was no configuration in the dialogue of any attempt to reconcile the divide. Orcs, fundamentally 'evil', or just having more of the 'reptilian mind' and more of the baser impulses? His entire notion of 'evil' was quite revealing of his own mind. I have pointed out, for example, that Turgon tossed Eol off a cliff. The Noldor were a deeply imperialistic peoples. These are just some examples of the 'double speak' that was part of the Tolkienian universe of unresolvables. |
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04-19-2014, 12:54 PM | #86 |
Loremaster of Annúminas
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 2,321
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They essay is infected by Martinez-ism. By "brown" and "swarthy" Tolkien was only referring to the more suntanned end of European coloration. ("Swarthy," for example, was often used to describe the pirate Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts - who was a Welshman).
It also contains some straight up mis-statements of fact, such as "hobbits as aborigines:" 1) Tolkien never said it, indeed it contradicts his explicit history, and 2) Tolkien of course would have been using the word literally, as he did (in draft) of Bombadil, not in reference to Australia's pre-European population.
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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. |
04-22-2014, 10:26 AM | #87 |
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Lonely Isle
Posts: 706
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Tolkien on aparthied
Tolkien, a few years after LotR appeared, made a public denunciation of apartheid in South Africa on 5th June 1959, during his Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford.
He spoke of his South African birth, and that he did 'not claim to be the most learned of those', who have come from South Africa. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White. (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 238) |
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