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.