more Tolkien, politics, society

[eub]

(a scion of here)

stresskitten wrote:
However, his consistent message about those individual choices is that the temptation to seize power, even for the sake of coercing good, is a temptation toward corruption, and that those who are given power and retain goodness are those who stay humble and use it to serve.

Agreed. And on the other hand, to shirk power, as Aragorn was tempted to, is almost as wrong as to seize it. Neither overstep nor understep one's duty, yeah? Ideally no duty is higher or lower: all offer the same chance of selfless service, the object of which may happen to differ.

In LotR I think this kind of allotted duty is a fusion of Christianity and older culture. My impression, and correct me if one of his letters says "That eub, he's on crack," is that Tolkien felt deeply sympathetic towards, hmm, pre-feudal Northern European cultures. (Middle-earth references a historical grab-bag, but I can't actually think of any outright feudalism.) I imagine Tolkien's sympathy was with their entire kind of life; I'm certainly not saying it was all driven by a taste for their various systems of more or less customary social roles. It's all of a piece -- but that piece happens to be one that's distastefully alien to a modern American reader.

I don't remember what Brin was saying, and I don't care to reread it, but Tolkien is anti-modernist (for aesthetic reasons, not political, but that's not the point), and I suspect Brin of high modernism. Tolkien doesn't intend a political stance, but his sympathies are uncongenial to political democracy, or to Marxism. In many ways old Iceland was far more egalitarian than 21c U.S., but it was not democratic. I don't know what Tolkiend personally thought of democracy, and I'm not saying it can't be logically reconciled with his work, but I do think the bent of his work lies against it.

(Sometime, if you like, prod me to rant about how certain talking-animal fantasies with multiple species read to me like they're coding for some kind of squicky determinism.)

Comments

[chaoticgoodnik.livejournal.com]

In the movie, Rohan came across as a feudal keep and surrounding village more than anything else (even before I learned a single thing about Helm's Deep :).

I kept thinking that the movie had a very ecological subtext. Not sure if this is true of the book. It's in the closet or something (unless I left in in OH ... if so, that gives me an excuse to buy the version with Orlando Bloom on the cover. ;).

[eub.livejournal.com]

In the book, Rohan seemed more, say, 600-800 CE than 1000-1200. To wave my hands vigorously and historically unsoundly.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I kept thinking that the movie had a very ecological subtext. Not sure if this is true of the book.

Oh, yes.

[thatmathchick.livejournal.com]

Hey Eli, will you rant about talking-animal fantasies with multiple species now?

[eub.livejournal.com]

Hey, no, sorry, later.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Waiting patiently.

[drakemonger.livejournal.com]

Is it later yet?

[stresskitten.livejournal.com]

...his sympathies are uncongenial to political democracy, or to Marxism.

See, I don't know why you think that, regarding democracy. I'd agree that his consistent depiction of centralized authority as malign implies he would've been against Marxism, but if you're assuming that he was unsympathetic to democracy just because he wrote about monarchies, I think that's pretty weak.

I think that the real division here is not anti-modernism versus high modernism, it's those who are primarily interested in what individuals go through versus those who are primarily interested in how things should be structured and organized. I think you are forcing a template of opinion about structure and organization onto Tolkien that really does not fit.

Tolkien felt deeply sympathetic towards, hmm, pre-feudal Northern European cultures. [...] I imagine Tolkien's sympathy was with their entire kind of life

Tolkien was fascinated by myth and the question of whether it was theologically good or bad. He wanted England to have a myth cycle of its own, and he wanted to demonstrate that such a myth cycle could accord with Catholic theology. He was steeped in Northern European language and myth from his linguistic studies, so those were the raw materials he had to work with. Creating a mythos of the past is exactly what he was setting out to do, not because he thought we were better off then, but because theological questions about myth and about representation of the past were exactly what he was interested in.

I see the deep sympathy for the way of life of the Shire, and for Rivendell and Lothlorien, but frankly, I don't see it for Rohan or Gondor. I think he portrayed them (Rohan and Gondor) as having beauty and glory, but not in the homesick nostalgia way that he portrayed the Shire and the elven places.

[stresskitten.livejournal.com]

Replying to my own comment, clearly I'm out of control here ;^) But it occurs to me that Brin's axe to grind is *also* the question of whether myth, especially fantasy, and especially LOTR, is theologically good or bad, it's just that for Brin, the yardstick of theological goodness is Enlightenment idealism (the Brin version, anyway). That seems entertaining somehow.

[eub.livejournal.com]

[...] if you're assuming that he was unsympathetic to democracy just because he wrote about monarchies, I think that's pretty weak.

That's not what I'm trying to say. Let me exaggerate to make the point: the spirit of political democracy is that individuals are fungible. (Purely pragmatic democracy has no interest in this, hence "could be reconciled".) LotR disagrees.

It might be worth going outside the text. Would these be representative quotes?

"I am not a 'democrat' only because 'humility' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power—and then we get and are getting slavery,"

"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)-or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy,"

I think that the real division here is not anti-modernism versus high modernism, it's those who are primarily interested in what individuals go through versus those who are primarily interested in how things should be structured and organized.

That's a useful division. I don't see that it invalidates the other. If Brin's calling Tolkien anti-modernist is really missing the point, not just making a different one, please explain how?

He wanted England to have a myth cycle of its own,

A project not undertaken in a vacuum... Whig history may not be strictly a myth, but I say it serves the purpose.