Oh F*ck, Not Another Elf

 

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

For the last month my lovely Patreon subscribers have been getting early access to my essays on the Rings of Power and matters arising. 

I've now collected the whole thing into a lovely little PDF booklet, running to a shade under 100 pages. 

It is currently available on Ko-Fi as a pay-what you like down-load. 

My Patreons have mostly pledged $1 for each essay, meaning they've paid around $10 or £8 for my thoughts: do please pay whatever you think my writing is worth. (That's your actual moral pressure, that is.) 

What I would like best is for you to join the select crew of Rilstone Fans who pay me a quid or so each time I publish something substantial: all my Patreons have already got access to the virtual book. 

I can't actually stop you subscribing to Patron, reading the essays, and then unsubscribing without paying anything, but I will know who you are and I will judge you. 

I shall now rejoin the human race for a few days and then start writing about something else. The Rings of Power essays were rather "shooting from the hip"; the next set may be a little more through. 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Join Patreon

Buy PDF booklet

Leave one-off tip.

Rings of Power Episode Eight, wherein these reviews come to an end

 https://www.patreon.com/posts/rings-of-power-73404984

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you would like to read this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Rings of Power, Episodes 8, part 1

 https://www.patreon.com/posts/rings-of-power-8-73380435

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you would like to read this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Appendix

This week, Private Eye dusted off a hoary old joke that was first used, to my certain knowledge, in 1977.

A fictional academic, Dr Euydice Pipkin, complains that Rings of Power is insufficiently faithful to Tolkien's work. The script, she says, ignores Tolkien's stipulation that "in strictly dynastic terms the Herbs were scions of Akond the Swat" and references "Christopher Tolkien's splendid Scraps Retrieved From My Father's Waste Paper Basket, 1957-1963."

In fairness, Private Eye has been making the same jokes every fortnight since 1961. Every issue, teenage poet E.J Thribb writes an excruciating obituary in free verse ("So, farewell then, Hilary Mantell..."); nearly every week student radical Dave Spart gives an incoherent and self-contradictory op-ed on some left-wing theme. (Unfortunately, Owen Jones has rather stolen his act.) The regular book review column is generally intelligent and perceptive, and sometimes even fair. (The Eye is half satire and half actual journalism.) But it generally includes a spoof entitled What You Didn't Miss which parodies some dull, pretentious tome -- often a biography which lovingly records the lunch dates and voting record of a long-forgotten back-bench Tory MP. So Tolkien is certainly not being singled out for six column inches about "Lord Twiglet, high marshall of the Snurdlings."

The joke about Christopher Tolkien recycling texts that his father had thrown in the bin is very old and not very funny. The six thousand or so posthumous pages were not discarded scraps but documents that Tolkien himself had preserved, labelled, annotated, placed in rough sequence but never prepared for publication. But he did intend them to be published: at one point he issued an ultimatum that Unwin could only publish Lord of the Rings as a four volume work, with the fourth volume being the never-completed Silmarillion. This would, in fact, have been a much better way to proceed: The Lord of the Rings In Four Volumes With Epilogue and Backstory is one of the most interesting tomes in Morpheus's library. The rather haphazard Appendices are a poor substitute.

The Private Eye joke relies on a very familiar trope: people who don't like Rings of Power, or Peter Jackson's parody of the Hobbit, or indeed Ralph Bakshi's 1978 cartoon, are extreme pedants and purists who no work could possibly have satisfied, and their opinions can safely be ignored. Don't mention that the cognoscenti were on the whole very pleased with the 2007 Drury Lane musical and Brian Sibley's 1981 radio series.

This stuff happens around other geeky properties. No-one will ever believe me if I say that I dislike a particular episode of Doctor Who because I think it badly written or poorly acted: they assume that my real objection is that it contradicts a footnote to a reconstruction of a lost 1966 black and white William Hartnell story. Why on earth would people who like Star Trek think they have the right to an opinion on Star Trek? That's not who Star Trek is for.

Very few Marvel Comics fans complained when Thanos, a deity who has conceived a courtly romance with Death was transformed in the cinematic universe into an alien with a Malthusian theory about population control. Avengers: Endgame was basically just a very good film, regardless of how selective it was about its use of half a century's worth of superhero lore. A giant purple gorilla who wants to kill everyone in the entire universe with a magic glove is a lot of fun regardless of the fidelity of his backstory. 

Certainly, some critics can be a little on the pedantic side: but it is does not follow that all criticism is pedantic. 

Oddly enough, Sir Lenworth Henry's sweet interview in this week's Guardian also lapsed into stereotypes. He could have said that the people who objected to the dark-skinned Harfoots being played by actors with, er, dark skin were racists. He could have sent they were unperceptive critics, or that they hadn't read their Tolkien carefully enough. Instead, he pushed back against them for being bloggers:

"They’re sat in their pants, eating Hobnobs and looking at their computers, slagging off anything different."

They're not wrong; they're sad. 

I don't know exactly where the pants thing originated. Simcha Jacobovici has repeatedly described people who are skeptical about his claim to have discovered the grave of Mr and Mrs Jesus as "underwear blogger". He imagines these people -- including some very eminent New Testament scholars at prestigious universities "sitting in their underwear, eating out of pizza boxes, spending their days and nights attack me and others personally." He even provides a cartoon so we know what pizza and underwear look like.

If a writer doesn't bother to get dressed in the morning, the article isn't worth reading, if the article isn's worth reading, the writer can't be properly dressed. In the olden days they used to wear dressing gowns and silk pyjamas. Maybe we should all move back to garrets.

According to the Tale of Years, Ar-Inziladun came to the throne of Numenor in or about the year 3175 of the Second Age. Ar-Inziladun is an Adunaic name; Adunaic being the ordinary language spoken by the men of the West. But he adopted the Quenya Tar-Palantir as his Regnal name, to signify a renewed friendship between Numenor and the Elves.

Tar-Palantir had one daughter, Miriel, and a nephew, Pharazon. Tolkien does not say that Miriel ever acted as Tar-Planatir's regent, but he doesn't say that she didn't: the history of the Second Age is necessarily a bit sketchy. He doesn't say that Miriel was blind, either,  but since her father's name means "the farsighted" the idea has a certain mythic irony. 

Now, Numenoreans practiced primogeniture -- the crown (or, in fact, the sceptre) passes automatically on the monarch's death to the eldest child, regardless of gender. So when Tar-Palantir dies, Miriel ought to become Queen. But in fact, Pharazon will seize the throne. (He's already appeared in Rings of Power: he's the slightly shifty chancellor who assured the guildsmen that Galadriel wasn't going to take their jobs, but I don't think he's been identified as the king's brother's son.) He is going to force Miriel to marry him, even though Numenor does not generally permit marriage between "those more nearly akin than cousins in the second degree". He'll then embark on an humongous war, which will end with the complete and utter defeat of Sauron. But instead of destroying or exiling him, he will have the bright idea of dragging him back to Numenor in chains, which is, of course, precisely what the Dark Lord wanted all along.. In Numenor, Sauron will take on the role of Bad Councillor in the mould of Wormtongue. (I imagine that Tom Hiddleston has already read for the role.) He will sows in the king's mind the idea of cheating death; and Al-Pharazon will take a war fleet to Valinor with a view to stealing immortality from the gods. This will result in the complete and utter destruction of Numenor. It will also result in the setting being transformed from a disc world to a spherical one. God evidently feels that if he is going to react, he might as well over-react. Someone called Elendil will escape from the devastation with his children Isildur and Anarion, and they will found a kingdom called Gondor and not live particularly happily ever after. Isildur's bane, and all that... This is all going to happen in the next century or so: in the lifetimes of the Isildur and Elendil and Miriel. Numenoreans live longer than ordinary humans, but not nearly as long as elves. (They are also quite a bit taller than humans, incidentally: which is why the four foot Hobbits are known as Halflings.) 

Now, according to the introduction to Lord of the Rings, Hobbits first show up in Middle-earth over a thousand years later, at the end of the first millennium of the Third Age. But Tolkien -- probably writing in the persona of Merry -- says that Hobbit legends tell of a time when they lived in the land between Mirkwood (nee Greenwood the Great) and the Misty Mountains. That's roughly where the Harfeet are plying their caravan trails in Rings of Power. (Tolkien talks about Hobbit legends recalling their "wandering days", which presumably suggested Poppy's song in Episode Five.) I don't think Tolkien intends us to think of there being proto-Hobbits in Middle-earth in the Second Age, but I don't think the text positively says that there weren't any.

What it definitely does say is that the Istari -- the five wizards -- arrived in Middle-earth, not un-coinicidentally, at the same time Hobbits were first noticed, about the year 1,000 of the Third Age. We know that they are Maiar -- lessor deities, clad in mortal flesh -- but they are specifically said to have come over the Sundering Sea in ships. That's why to start with Cirdan the shipwright was the only one who knew who they were. Valinor is a physical place accessible by ship, where embodied beings have infinitely prolonged lives. Even after the world becomes round, you still get to it in a physical boat, across a kind of magic bridge. The Istari did not drop out of the sky at the end of the Second Age. 

Tolkien also tells us that during the Second Age, the Elves of Eregion became allies of the Dwarves of Moria. He says that it's the closest friendship the two races have ever had, as a result of which, the Elvish smiths of that time became the most skilful that there have ever been. He says that the Elves initiated contact with the Dwarves because Mithril had been discovered in the mines, and that Gil-Galad-Was-An-Elven-King sent Elrond to Eriador as an embassy. That's reflected quite closely in the TV show: the idea that the Elves need the Mithril to stop themselves from "fading" is a rather unsubtle embellishment, but the brotherly love between Elrond and Durin Jr is as good a way of personalising a fairly dry chronicle as any.

However the friendship of the Elves and the Dwarves happened in the the seventeenth century of the Second Age -- a millennium and a half before the time of Elendil and Isildur. The Rings of Power were forged even earlier, between 1500 and 1600; Celebrimbor dies in 1697, when Sauron has already been active and operating from a Dark Tower in Mordor for five hundred  years. The idea that the black land magically turns black, and Mount Doom starts spitting fire, during the reign of Tar-Palintir seems to delete about three thousand years from the Time Line. (The idea that the land is blackened on one particular afternoon as a result of a deliberate action, as opposed to being gradually ruined over centuries of neglect and exploitation seems very much against the spirit of Tolkien.)

I can't see any way of reconciling this. The Moria plot and the South Lands plot are both taking place in the same time-frame, because Galadriel and Elrond meet at Gil-Galad's palace in the first episode. Events in Tolkien's history has been squished together: the resurgence of Sauron, his defeat, the corruption of Numenor, and the forging of the Rings now take place over decades rather than centuries. There seems to be no narrative space for a fair-faced Sauron to prowl Middle-earth disguised as Santa Claus Annator Lord of Gifts. 

Adaptations are allowed a certain amount of freedom. There are scenes in Shakespeare in which messengers rush in and say "The Irish are revolting" and "The Irish have surrendered" thus condensing months of politics into thirty seconds of stage time. It's quite all right to make up words for Elrond to say to Durin, or imagine what Tharazon said to Miriel on their wedding night, just as much as it is to imagine a conversation between Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn. That's the job of historical fiction. But there comes a point when the sequence of events are so scrambled that what you have has ceased to be historical fiction altogether. And that can work, I suppose. There are Westerns that care a great deal about their American History, and there are cowboy stories in which "Billy the Kid" and "Butch Cassidy" fight at the siege of the Alamo. (I distinctly remember Frank and Jesse James visiting Laura Ingalls in Minnesota. I think Bob Ford sat next to her in Miss Ingles' schoolroom). And, I mean, if you want to write a story in which Tony Blair defeats Saddam Hussien in single combat and is knighted on the deck of his own ship bt Queen Elizabeth, I can't stop you. But it's disconcerting to think you are watching one type of drama and discovering you are watching the other. 

"Men of the Middle-ages! Today is the first day of the Hundred Years War."

I am at this moment wearing the same jeans I wore yesterday and a rather natty red pullover from Primark. I may not have quite showered or shaved but I have drunk a great deal of coffee. Under no circumstances would I put biscuits or pizza near my keyboard. 

SECOND AGE:

1500-1600: Forging of Rings

1695: Gil Galad sends Elrond to Eregion

1697: Death of Celebrimbor

3175: Tal Palintir becomes King

3209: Birth of Isildur

3319: Fall of Numenor

3441: Sauron defeated, Isildur and Gil-Galad die

THIRD AGE

c1000: Harfoots cross the Misty Mountains

c1000: The Five Wizards come to Middle-earth

1600: Hobbits settle in the shire

2941: Bilbo's big adventure

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

 

Rings of Power Episode Seven

 https://www.patreon.com/posts/73050558

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you would like to read this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Rings of Power Episode 6

 

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rings-of-power-6-73038659

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you would like to read this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Rings of Power: Digression

This weeks Quite Interesting discussion on the Twitter was "What is the difference between science fiction and fantasy."

My answer was "If it has swords it is fantasy, but if it has ray guns it is science fiction." 

More pedantically: if it has only swords (Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings) it is fantasy, but if it has both swords and ray-guns (Dune, John Carter of Mars) it is science fiction. 

My favourite answer was "Science fiction has light swords because the writer believes they might be possible; fantasy has light swords because the writer believes they are impossible."

Definitions of this kind always break down: to sustain your argument you have to say that beavers are fish, carrots are fruit, and Star Wars is science fiction. Since people like George R.R Martin and Robin Hobb appear at science fiction conventions and Forbidden Planet sells Tolkien books, the distinction is probably not all that important.

The most useful definition is "Science fiction is the kind of thing that is liked by the kinds of people who like science fiction." This definition also works for Folk Music and Socialism, incidentally. 

Tolkien was troubled by Orcs. There is a scene in Lord of the Rings where Sam looks at the body of a human soldier who has been killed fighting on Sauron's side, and wonders if he was misled rather than evil. Orcs on the other hand are a kind of vermin that can be killed freely and without compunction. Gimli and Legolas have a competition to see how many they can kill at Helms deep. (Peter Jackson turns this into a running joke across two movies.)

Tolkien toys with the idea that Orcs are a kind of automata, mere extensions of Morgoth's will; or at any rate that their wills have been totally overridden by Sauron. They talk among themselves, in lower class English accents, obviously, but he speculates that they may merely be imitating the sounds of human speech without understanding what it means. But the published texts seem clear that Orcs are people: they have agency and feelings and subjectivity. In origin, they are probably twisted or corrupted Elves. This is a fairly major theme in the mythos. Evil does not create, or have independent existence: it only twists and corrupts the good. Trolls are broken Ents, Orcs are broken Elves, evil itself  is a discordant counter melody which God will incorporate into the great cosmic concerto.

Unlike the Christian Satan, Sauron is capable of repentance: Morgoth himself may come back to the light at the very, very end of time. But there is no hint that there are, or could be, good Orcs, or that Orcs can be redeemed. Dead humans pass beyond the circles of the world into an unspecified but presumably Christian afterlife; dead elves' spirits find their way back to the Undying Lands and may become re-embodied. I suppose dead orcs remain in middle earth as ghosts or demons.

Joseph Campbell, who is generally wrong, said that "mythology is psychology misread as biography". Ursula Le Guin, who is usually right, said that poetry and dragons speak "the language of the night" -- they follow dream logic rather than logical logic. 

Le Guin is thinking about the way in which characters can be both people in a story and also symbols: that at one level Gollum is a Hobbit who desires a powerful magical Ring, and happens to become the guide of Frodo, another Hobbit who resits the Ring's temptation. But looked at another way, Gollum is Frodo's distorted reflection: he represents what would have happened if Frodo had succumbed to the Ring. Gollum tripping over his silly feet and falling into a volcano is a dumb event which just happens to happen; but it also represents the fact that the Quest can only be completed by Frodo's dark side -- what Le Guin calls his Shadow. (Astonishingly, this is also the plot of a Wizard of Earthsea.)

C.S Lewis complained about Dickens' handling of the character of Jingle in the Pickwick Papers: it is okay, he said, to ask the audience to laugh at a comedy rotter; but to show the baddie facing the real-world consequences of his actions is not playing fair with the reader. I have found this a problem in "serious" situation comedies like Rev. or even Friends: the more real characters become, the harder it is to laugh at their comic antics.

If you like fantasy, you have to accept that it is not real. You make a tacit agreement to put certain hard questions on hold for the duration of the story. I think this is as true for meticulously constructed worlds like Middle-earth as it is for more whimsical constructs like the Discworld. Why does Gandalf, an immortal Maiar sent into the world to defeat Sauron, wear a pointy hat? Because he's a wizard. Why don't the Fellowship fly to Mordor on the back of an eagle? Because it's a story. (That was Tolkien's exact answer. The eagles are part of the machinery: what we would be more likely to call a plot device.) Why are Orcs evil? Because that's what Orc means. 

One of the things we like about High Fantasy -- and superhero comics, and cowboy stories -- is that the differences between good and evil are exaggerated. Black hats are crueller and more callous than any actual cattle rustler is like to have been; white hats are kinder and less corruptible than we can really expect from our police officers. This doesn't necessarily imply a simplistic morality: High Noon is quite a sophisticated little morality play exactly because Gary Cooper is so perfect and and Lee Van Cleef so nasty. Fantasy takes it a lot further: a Black Hat on a Black Hatstand in the Land of Mordor where the shadows are leads an infinitely large posse of ugly deformed Uruk again armies of immortal, beautiful, incorruptible cavalry with the light that existed before the sun and the moon literally shining out of their arseholes.

People who don't really do fantasy very naturally see this as a vile colonial metaphor. And vile colonialists certainly sometimes interpret fantasy in that way. "We, the light shiny people have the right to kill you, the dark ugly people, because we are light and shiny and you are dark and ugly." But if you do like fantasy, you will probably understand that the elves represent us but that the orcs represent us as well. Elves are what we aspire to be and Orcs are what we are afraid of being. The eternal war between Light and Dark (which light wins but at great cost) represents an inner conflict which is happening in the head of all human being at all times. It was the people who mindlessly vandalised trees that Tolkien was inclined to call Orcs.   

Okay, most people who read fantasy probably wouldn't say that at all. They would be more likely to say "Life is messy and complicated but the Lord of the Rings is fun. In real life there aren't Light Shiny People and Ugly Horrid People -- there are just people. But one of the nice things about Lord of the Rings is that it is simpler than real life." Tolkien had no objection to people who called his books Escapist.

It is not okay for the Dark Lord's Minions to have feathers in their headdresses. It is not okay for them to have slitty eyes, hooked noses or for their bankers to have a Star of David mosaic on their floor. There has been lots and lots and lots of High Fantasy over the years and maybe we don't need any more of it. Realism has something to be said for it. Circe and Joffrey were arguably more hateful villains just because they were humans as opposed to shoggoth. The people who say that Dungeons & Dragons can't possibly have a racist subtext because African Americans don't really have yellow scaly skin, 1D4 hit points and treasure type A are insufferable twits. The Star Wars mythos was rather improved when the Sand People stopped being "injuns" and became an indigenous nation with their own culture and language.

Some people say that stories about Chosen Ones -- swords in stones and empty thrones awaiting sons of Adam and daughters of Eve and boys with funny marks on their foreheads -- are irredeemably aristocratic. Some people are born to rule, and some people, you and me, are born to chant "All Hail The Long Lost True King of the Northlands" in silly naarthen accents. And you can read the stories that way. And the fact that they can be read that way may make them dangerous stories. But wasn't Joseph Campbell on kind of the right track when he said that the point of Star Wars and the Sword in the Stone and Harry Potter is that we are all the Chosen Ones -- that the journey of the hero is a way of thinking about everyone's trajectory through life. 

We are all Anakin and Mordred and Tom Riddle unless we make a positive effort to be Luke or the Wart or Harry.

Richard Bach wrote a silly book called Confessions of a Reluctant Messiah; a sequel to the even sillier Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. At the the time, I thought it was saying "You, Andrew Rilstone, might turn out to be the second coming of Jesus. Wouldn't that be wild?" I now, of course, understand that it was saying "Everyone is the second coming of Jesus; terms like son of God and Messiah are just ways of understanding what it is to be human." Which is very poor theology but quite good psychology.

Science fiction and fantasy are ways of reading, not ways of writing. If you speak the language of the night, you look at the Lord of the Rings and see a vast tapestry of symbols. If you speak the language of the day then you see a not very coherent or believable collection of facts. If you read the Lord of the Rings and ask "I am sure this poor Orc as its own feelings and point of view -- as it would have if it existed in the real world" then you probably find that Lord of the Rings doesn't work for you. If you read the Lord of the Rings and say "In this world there are the forces of good and there are the force of evil and that's cool" you are probably on Tolkien's wavelength. (If you read it and think "There are good white people and it is natural they should rule nasty dark people and that's true in the real world as well as in Tolkien's" then lots of people on Twitter agree with you.) But if you are uncomfortable with the whole idea of evil races, maybe you aren't the person to be developing a prequel to Lord of the Rings?

Science Fiction is when you write about Evil Races because you believe that some Races are really evil. Fantasy is when you write about Evil Races because you don't. Discuss. 

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If enjoyed this essay please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Rings of Power Episode Five

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rings-of-power-72447052

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you would like to read this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Rings of Power Episode Four

 

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rings-of-power-4-72354196

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you would like to read this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Rings of Power Episode Three

 

Rings of Power Episode Three

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you would like to read this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

What did you think of Rings of Power: Episode Two

 

Rings of Power Episode Two

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you would like to read this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Make a one-off tip.

What Did You Think of the Rings of Power Episode One

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you would like to read this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Make a one-off tip.

Why I Am Hugely Looking Forward To The Rings Of Power

Tolkien is not a writer. Tolkien is a brand. Tolkien is a cultural phenomenon. Tolkien is short-hand for a type of literature which many of us like, or used to like, or like the idea of. Tolkien is not reducible to the words which Tolkien actually wrote. No writer is. 

Tolkien didn't create a text. Tolkien created a mass of texts, out of which can be extrapolated a thing called Middle-earth. Middle-earth is the creation; the exercise books filled with notes about the age of elvish puberty and transformations in the Quenya dative are raw materials.

So, in a funny way, is the Lord of the Rings.

The Lord of the Rings is a grand folly produced by an off duty lecturer in Anglo Saxon. The Lord of the Rings is the supreme work of pulp fiction, to be placed alongside Bob Howard and HP Lovecraft on hippy bookshelves in editions with (no one knows why) flamingos on the cover. It's a self referential geeky game on almost exactly the same level as Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's the place where our deepest most spiritual emotions reside, our true spiritual home. It is a world more real than any other.

It's a collection of archetypes, the exact building blocks from which Western fantasy is built. Wizards with beards, dragons with piles of gold, caves with fiery demons at the bottom of them, forests full of elves, giant spiders, cannibal trolls who turn to stone when the sun comes up, wise eagles, riddling troglodytes, black riders, dark lords, wandering rangers, piggie-nosed orcs, wise talking trees, magic swords, magic rings, magic jewels. 

Some of this stuff was always archetypal: some of it is only archetypal because of what Tolkien did with it. 

So not, in fact, that far, far away from what George Lucas was originally trying to do in Star Wars. Lucas's saga offered us a single narrative space in which cowboy taverns, and World War II fighter pilots, and Lawrence of Arabia deserts and arthurian knights could all happily co-exist. 

I don't believe in the collective unconscious and the power of myth. I don't believe in phallic symbols or the Oedipus complex. But I do believe that Luke Skywalker's lightsaber and Bilbo's sword which glows when there are baddies in the room both came into my life at more or less the same moment. 

I think it was Neil Gaiman who said (in an introduction to the Bone Graphic Novel, which we really should talk about one of these days) that there are two kinds of readers of Moby Dick. Some of us enjoy the story of Ahab and call-me-Ishmael and Queequeg and the great big suicidal fishing expedition and find the inter-chapters a great bore. And some of us really like the mad essays about whales and whaling and think the main story is a bit long-drawn out and melodramatic. I myself shifted camp. The first couple of times I read it I struggled with the whaling material; but then I realised that what Melville is writing is a comedic anti-novel, along the lines of Tristram Shandy, and that the whole point of the inter-chapters is that they are completely barking mad. How I could have missed this when he takes quite so long to tell you that whales are definitely fish, I don't know. "Are you, reader, a loose whale or a fast whale" is one of the cleverest and craziest and most evocative passages of text ever written.

Yes, I am afraid I have read Moby Dick more than twice, but in my defence I have never read Tristram Shandy at all. I think I also preferred the inter-chapters in The Grapes of Wrath, since you asked.

Do you remember that annoying book club advertisement, which used to be on the back-page of every single colour supplement, which said that the English speaking world is divided into those who have read Lord of the Rings and those who are going to read it?

I think, on its own terms, that this is pretty obviously not true. There are at least four kinds of people in the English speaking world: the ones who have read Lord of the Rings, the ones who have read it more than once, the ones who are going to read it someday, and the ones who would not read it for a thousand pounds if it was the only book in the world. 

But the people who have actually read it can be split along the same lines as the people who have actually read Melville. Some of us are mostly in it for the story, and regard the historical passages as distractions or bores; and some of us want to know about Middle-earth and could frankly do without the Hobbits altogether.

It's all C.S Lewis's fault. Tolkien was happily doing his world-building, but Jack insisted on a story.

The Hobbit is story: but the Hobbit is only part of Middle-earth by a serendipitous accident. The absurd film of Tolkien's life which sank without trace a couple of years back envisaged it as the culmination of a life's work, the moment where the troubled Prof finally saw how he could embody his years of thinking into a single great work. (It's the same myth that Stan Lee propagates about himself: literature is dreamed up in a single flash and where the text ends up is always the place the Author intended it would go.)  

In fact, the book started life as not much more than a doodle. He wrote "in a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit" on the back of an envelope and extemporised a narrative from there. You can see, in the first pages of the Hobbit, that he is making stuff up as he went along. Hobbit sounds like Rabbit which suggests Hole, but the Hole turns into a kind of English country residence and the Hobbit into an English country gentleman. Nothing in the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit would be different if hobbits lived in houses rather than holes, unless you are a strict enough Freudian to think that hills and round doors are symbolic. 

Tolkien seems to have had a belief that writing was like discovering or uncovering or remembering. He felt as if there was an already-existing story and he had to find out what it was. I doubt that he literally believed that, but it seems to have been how his writing process functioned.

Lots of writers have a tendency to turn all their stories into one big story, whether it is P.G Wodehouse sending friends of Bertie Wooster off to Blandings, or Isaac Asimov deciding that his earth Empire stories, his Foundation stories and his Robot stories should culminate in a book called God Emperor of Foundation and Robots. [Check this. Ed.] When C.S Lewis challenged Tolkien to write a story about time travel, the mythical Atlantis that his astral travellers visited almost inevitably became part of a Second Age of the world he had been imagining since before the Great War. Tolkien, who definitely hated allegory and would never ever have written one, told a story about a little painter named Niggle who kept finding that his smaller paintings were really part of one enormous work of art. So of course the adventures of the funny little hole dwelling Englishman intersected with the legends of Beren and Luthien and Sauron and Earendel and the nauglamir. And of course, that meant that there was suddenly a race of diddymen in his mythology. And that meant that there was a point in imaginary space and imaginary time from whose vantage point the great big mythology could be seen. 

It is a truism that the Lord of the Rings is not a sequel to the Hobbit, but a sequel to the Silmarillion. It's about the aftermath of the defeat of Melkor and the final departure of the Elves. It lets us see Arda from the point of view of the little people, and lets us hear the legends as the little people heard them. You could say that it was a distraction: that the Lord of the Rings prevented Tolkien from completing his life's work. The invention of Hobbits pretty much guaranteed that the Silmarillion would never be anything other than a pile of contradictory notes. Or you could say that if he hadn't wasted his time on excessive world building he might have written five more trilogies, as good or better than Lord of the Rings. It depends which side of the line you are on. 

Essays or chapters? World or story? Text or legendarium? Is your gaze fixed on Middle-earth, or on Bilbo and Frodo and Aragorn and Legolas? And how cross are you with people on the other side of the line? 

I loved the Hobbit because it was a story about Adventure with a capital A. I loved the Lord of the Rings because it was Dungeons & Dragons with two big Ds. (I also loved Dungeons & Dragons because it was like Lord of the Rings: it's complicated.) But as soon as I managed to get to the end of it, my heart was given to the Silmarillion. 

History never comes to an end, whatever Mr Fukuyama may have said. Events continue to happen in Middle-earth after Sam shuts the door and says "We'll I'm back". But Tolkien came to think that was the where the story finished. He started a novel set in Minas Tirith at the time of Aragorn's son, but he never got beyond the first chapter. He wrote an epilogue, which the publishers overruled: I can't decide if they were right or not. The appendices tell us about the deaths of Merry and Pippin and Aragorn and how Sam and Legolas and maybe even Gimli came to the undying lands. And in a way the story carries on down to our age, the Sixth or the Seventh or the Eighth Age. The Red Book survived into modern times. Hobbits still exist, but have dwindled in number and hide from the big people. Elves have diminished; either physically, into little people, or spiritually, so they appear as ethereal ghosts, but they are still around. The ultimate viewpoint of Lord of the Rings is a fairy tale England where spiritual elf-folk and elusive little people can sometimes still be encountered. The original point of the Lost Tales was that Tol Eressea, the Lonely Isle, the place between the Undying Lands and Middle-earth, was named (stop me if you've heard this before) England. There was even going to be a kind of Ragnorak, a very final story in which Turin slays Melkor (who had more cause?) and the Silmarils are returned to Yavana and the Two Trees are restored. 

 Oh, Mr Frodo, Sir, don't the great tales ever end? 

The Silmarillion is a difficult book of course. It is dense and has lots of names in it and you pretty much have to pay attention to the maps and the family tree. But the big problem with the book is that it is history shaped. It may see history itself as a story, but it's a story about the rise and fall of cities and empires and continents, of the sundering of tribes and generational feuds. There are characters, but they blow horns and fight battles and go on quests and kill dragons and inadvertently marry their sisters. They they never stop to skin rabbits or hunt for potatoes or salvage snout from sieges. The tale of Beren is a fine tale, but Beren is not a character. We meet him for a while, and then step back and see where he fits into the great music of history. 

C.S Lewis admired Olaf Stapleton, although he also accused him of devil-worship. I don't know if Tolkien ever read him. There are no characters in Last and First Men: if the book has a plot its the plot of the human race expanding into space and dying out on (if I remember correctly) Pluto. 

Any fantasy story has an implicit history; but it is pretty rare for the shape of that history to be the main object of our aesthetic pleasure. Star Wars has a history: it goes "There was a good republic; it was supplanted by the evil empire, which was in turn defeated by a rebellion." Chosen ones are prophesied and corrupted and babies are fostered with unknowing farmers and many, many wars are fought, but you can't really step backwards and see the shape because there isn't one. The TV universe has taken an interest in weaving the various strands together. It expects us to care that the death Godfather Slug leaves a power vacuum that can be killed by a former bounty hunter; and to think that "who rescued Baby Yoda when Anakin killed the Younglings?" is a good question: but it's still basically a soap opera. It is set in the middle of the story, in an eternal present, asking relentlessly what will happen next. 

The history of Middle-earth is a structure: big enough to get lost in, but small enough to hold in your head. There is more to it than "The Empire Rises; the Empire Falls" but less to it than the real world. It doesn't get caught up in the  infinite, specific, complicated, mass of facts that make up real history.

That may be why people with disgusting political beliefs like it so much. They often believe that history has a simple pattern, a perceptible structure which they can see and you can't. They often think they know the ending. 

We've all heard of Atlantis: but it's just an idea. It was an island. It sank. Possibly it sank because it did a bad thing. I am afraid that for most of us it is a sunken city where Mermaids or King Neptune live. For many of us it's primarily the home of Aquaman or Prince Namor. Tolkien takes the idea and makes it a thing; a node in his grand narrative. We see the fathers of men being given Numenor as a gift from the gods; we see Numenor as a great and beautiful land; we see it becoming corrupt; we see it sinking into the sea. And we see Faramir revering it as part of sacred history. First, Gondolin is a city that will exist in a prophetic future; then it is a hidden city where great events transpire; then it is besieged and destroyed; finally it is the legendary land where Bilbo's glowy sword was forged.

So. A TV series based on the appendices to Lord of the Rings, whose primary audience must necessarily be people who have never read them. A TV series which must necessarily evoke the ambience of Peter Jackson's brilliant flawed sophomoric childish vulgar wonderful self parodic movies. A TV series too expensive to fail. A TV series which tries to capture the fluttery moth of Tolkien's history in the net of soap opera. A TV series which serves up a second helping of Elves and Dragons and Hobbits and Wizards and Lost Cities and Mysterious Forests and Magic Rings and Magic Swords -- the whole Dungeons and Dragons patchwork. 

What can possibly go wrong?

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

Thanks for reading.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job. If you enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article). If you don't like small amounts of money come out of your bank account each month, you can also give me a one-off tip. 

Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Make a one-off tip.

 I mentioned previously that I perfectly understand how people can be sad when a performer or a celebrity they admire dies, even if they have never met them. I have to say that in this case I am not so much sad as angry. 

Can I, In Fact, Be Arsed To Watch The Rings of Power?

I have started this article literally five times. Each time it has got bogged down in the same argument that I've had with myself twenty times before. You know how it goes. 

It wouldn't necessarily have been racist to leave Edward Colston where he was; but fishing him out of the river and putting him back on his plinth would be a huge Alan-Moorish magical act in support of white supremacism. Blackface Morris dancing was a harmless and silly tradition until people with no particular interest in folk dance started to say that the Morris was to the Indigenous White Race as the Sun Dance is to the Sioux people and that they were going to BOYCOTT any festival where the dancers painted themselves green instead. (A very intelligent teenager, when I tried to Teach Them The Controversy said "There wouldn't have been much point in using black paint as a disguise and then sewing bells into their costumes, would there?") Rule Britannia was a daft old fashioned tune that came at the end of a medley of nineteenth century sea songs, until it became an inalienable symbol of our very justifiable pride in having conquered the world (why do people do our history down? why do they consider it NECESSARY) at which point the song, and probably the whole concert, had to go away.

Very conveniently, history has provided me with a new example. If every other house on my street had placed a picture of the Queen in the window, then not having a picture of the Queen in my window would be a sign that I was a fanatical, cynical republican. If no other house had a picture of the queen in the window, then putting a picture of the Queen in the window would signify that I was an extreme, sentimental royalist. I slightly regret that the silly American tradition of Halloween has replaced the slightly mad English tradition of Bonfire Night, but as a matter of fact it has: so not having a bag of sweets to share with passing urchins would mark me out as a grumpy old sour puss, or at any rate one of those evangelical Christians who take everything slightly too seriously. I did, in fact, join in with the clap for carers ritual, and a very quiet street celebration of the V.E day anniversary during the Plague Year. I would not have joined in a Clap For Boris, even if every body else did.

We inhabit a universe of signs. I think that is probably what Plato and Jack Kirby and Carl Jung were trying to teach us, and what Richard Dawkins will never understand. Things signify what they have come to signify. I am not twelve: I do not giggle if an old song or comic book uses the word "gay" to mean happy, joyful, or brightly coloured. But neither am I a Daily Telegraph reader, I do not pretend that I think that the people with rainbow flags have "a deep pleasure, self-regard or satisfaction" in the fact that they are "joyful and brightly coloured". (Although some of them arguably do, come to think of it.)


Does anyone remember fanzines? Do you remember standing by photocopiers with bags of five pee pieces? Do you remember begging parents who worked in offices to let you use the photocopier after work, promising to pay for the ink out of your paper-round money? Letraset and pritt stick? The taste of postage stamps after you had licked twenty stamps, and standing behind a stand at conventions, joyful if you sold even one copy? Gesneter machines you had to crank? Drawing on wax stencils with special sharp pens (which never, ever worked).

I don't know if Dungeons & Dragons and Doctor Who and Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and Diplomacy and En Garde brought on a particular kind of madness that Jane Austen and Agatha Christie and Coronation Street and Chess and Backgammon never did; or if there are so many Chess players and soap opera watchers and Whodunnit readers that "finding other people who like what you do" becomes a hobby in its own right. Heterosexuals in the 1950s didn't make up funny cants and code words to identify themselves to each other, so far as I know.

I remember a very circumspect essay in an old DWAS fanzine, that said that it didn't really matter that Douglas Adams and this new guy Tom Baker had ruined the programme forever, because Doctor Who wasn't about the programme: it was an excuse to get together, write fanfic, make models, wear costumes, draw artwork. A Doctor Who convention in the 1970s was  rather like a Puffin Club exhibition, and I am well aware how that sounds. More space was taken up with stuff that the fans had made and written than with actual props from the show.

But that means texts go round and round in circles and disappear up their own fandoms. Unearthly Child is not, for me, a very old piece of TV, and I am slightly resentful if that is what it is for you. Unearthly Child is sitting in (I think) Imperial College London, almost the first time you have travelled on a tube train without your parents. We made a deal that I would be allowed to go to the convention by myself, but my Mum and my Baby Sister would have a day in London and pick me up when it was over, so I would not have to brave the mean streets of South Ken by myself. For other people it may even still be the first show that the BBC showed after the 24 hours of enforced mourning after a very terrible event in Dallas, Texas. 

Someone reading this doesn't know what Unearthly Child is, which kind of proves my point. We all have secret code phrases. Detective Comics 27. John 3:16. Child 10/Roud 8.

I once heard an Actor say that Hamlet is not a play: it is a cultural discussion that the west has been having for four hundred years. You kind of see the point. If you go to see Hamlet, you are going to see this particular Hamlet, and you want to know how this particular Hamlet answers questions about the text. Why does this version of the Prince delay, does this Prince really go mad; why did this version of the Queen marry so quickly after the King's death? Every production is in dialogue with every other production and this is true even if you are seeing the play for the first time. And each play is also the protrusion into our dimension of a vast and incomprehensible mass of academic papers, and that is true even if the audience and the producer don't read the Times Literary Supplement. Hamlet matters. Hamlet is a living thing, not a dead facsimile in an academic library. Doubtless the particular collection of words that editors have created out of the folios and the quartos and the pirated prompt copies have objective qualities that have allowed Hamlet to become a text which matters. But it is perfectly possible to imagine a world where a different play had been endowed with that significance. Or where the Legitimate Theatre didn't exist at all.

There was an academic who may have been called Stanley Fish who wrote a clever book about Paradise Lost which may have been called Surprised by Sin which argued that the poem took shape in the subjectivity of the reader. People sometimes say that it is a bit of a problem that Milton's Satan is so heroic and Milton's God is such a thug. Fish, replies, in effect: "You don't say? In a book about rebellion, sin, and the fall, you end up hating God and liking the Devil? Might that not possibly be the whole entire point?" He says it over several hundred pages and I suppose I should read it one day. I suppose I should read Paradise Lost, come to that.

C.S Lewis, incidentally, was both duller and righter when he said that people who say they don't like Milton's God really mean that they don't like God. Devout atheist critic William Empson felt he'd hit the nail on the head.

I believe that Fish also said that he didn't think that there was such a thing as Paradise Lost, or at any rate, that when people talked about paying attention to the actual text, he didn't understand what they meant. It is, of course, an excellent strategy, if you are very clever, to pretend not to understand something which everyone else thinks is very simple and obvious. But one sees what he is getting at. No book. No thing. Just lots of different subjective impressions of the thing; the intersection of all the things which people have said about the thing over the centuries.

I believe there has been an Old School Revival and I believe that some people are producing paper fanzines again. I understand that the OSR has also become in some circles a Colstonian Fetish, there being a suspicion that people who wish that Dungeons & Dragons was more like it was in the 1970s wish that everything else was more like it was in the 1970s as well. But there is no longer any particular need for them to exist. Blogging and Social Meejah and the Tick Tock mean that we are all in contact with ever other like mind person at every moment. There is no longer any need to write a stiff letter to the BBC about Talons of Weng Chiang or submit your review of Deadly Assassin for consideration to the editor of TARDIS magazine, or even to ask Mum to type your review on her manual typewriter and staple it together in SCARF MONTHLY (circulation: 10). You just tweet it.

Do not, please God, confuse "is" with "ought". It might be better if every thought that proceedeth out of the mind of the geek was not instantly transmissible to every mobile phone in the Western hemisphere. It might be better if we made friends with people over the garden fence. It might be better if going to the movies involved putting on your smart clothes and buying pop corn and watching Pathe News and Donald Duck. It might be better if the BBC still closed down at six o clock so all the mummies and daddies could put their children to bed. We are precisely where we are.


I would not in principle, have a problem with a person who said that they were fine with a black actor playing James Bond, a black actor playing Batman, a black actor playing Superman, a black actor playing the Human Torch, a black actor playing Doctor Who, a black actor playing Hamlet, a black actor playing Jesus and a black actor playing Othello, but that the Little Mermaid was a special case and there is some particular reason why Mermaids needed to be caucasian. I would not necessarily agree, but I would not automatically assume that the person had bad motives. But when the same people object to black Batmen, black Supermen, black Human Torches, black Doctors Who, black Hamlets, black Jesi and black Othellos then one starts to suspect that their issue is not with canonicity and fidelity to the original text (which does not exist) but with black people. Don't change an existing character, they say, make up a new character! And when someone makes up a new character, they say that the whole idea of a brand new female Pakistani New York super-heroine is woke and pandering and box ticking. Cast a black man as Hamlet, and they will howl that there weren't any Africans in medieval Denmark; cast a black man as Othello and they will say that great white actors are now BANNED from this role and that from now on only Jews will be allowed to play Shylock and only murderers will be allowed to play Macbeth. 

George Takei recently came right out and said what everyone already knew: that the word "woke" now simply means "has black representation".

Actually, I would go a lot further. It's a single word that embodies a dangerous conspiracy theory: to call a TV show "woke" is to simultaneously say that it has black people in it, AND to say that unknown operators are mandating the casting of ethnic minorities for sinister political reasons. It means that "they" have forced "an agenda" on the text. We are very often told that non-white, or non-straight, or indeed non-male fictional characters only exist because of an arcane process called Box Ticking. They are only there because some bureaucratic paperwork requires them to be there.

Woke in fact means nothing more or less than n*****-lover; and people who use the former word should be treated with the same contempt as people who use the latter.

I admit that I would have been conflicted in any case. On the one hand, making up new stories set in Tolkien's imaginary time line doesn't seem any sillier than making up stories about Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley; or Richard Sharp and the Duke of Wellington. A particular piece of historical fiction may be sensible or silly, done well or done badly, but Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and War and Peace both seem legitimate imaginative enterprises. You could research the life of a definitely real pioneer and politician named David Crocket, or you could tell a rip-roaring and ever so slightly racist cowboy story about a fella who killed him a bear when he was only three. Photocopier or not, I'm a recovering role-player: tell me that Hobbits used to live with the dwarves near the mountains and then migrated through toil and hardship to the Shire, and my dungeon master brain says "Who are the player characters; where is the map; I want to play that?"

I mean, come on Tollers: Elendil escapes from Numenor before it sank beneath the waves saving a seedling of the sacred tree and and the seven seeing stones. That's not a paragraph, that's a trilogy.

On the other hand, I am concerned about taking the inchoate ambience that Tolkien creates, the vast distances of time looking back into the Second Age and the Elder Days and crystallising them into particular actors and particular stories. An actor playing Gil Galad will thereafter always to some extent be Gil Galad in our imagination, and that will to some extent spoil Bilbo's translation of the old poem about the elven king of whom the harpers sadly sing, because part of the point of that poem is that we its telling a story we don't know and wish we did.

On the third hand, official fan fiction is going to happen sooner or later: whether a TV show or a licensed novel. Control of Tolkien's estate was always going to pass from his children to his grandchildren and great grandchildren and they are not going to be purists in the way Christopher was: and even if they were, texts eventually go out of copyright.

I don't know what Tolkien would have thought about a TV series based on the appendices to Lord of the Rings. I think he would have been pleased that fifty years after his death people were reading them and caring about them; I don't think it is possible that he would have agreed with every point of interpretation that a secondary story teller made up; we know that he would have accepted that a cinema adaptation has to be cinematic. I don't think he would have even understood what computer generated animation meant. Christopher Tolkien thinks that he would not have approved of the published Silmarillion, which is based on his sons scholarly conjectures about how he would have assembled the text. I don't know what Jane Austen would have thought of Pride and Prejudice With Zombies. I don't know if you could have explained it to her. 

"Two hundred years in the future your characters will still be so famous, and so beloved, that a witty writer will write a comical burlesque in which he imagines them embroiled in a shocking gothic romance." 

"Upon my soul, what fun."

But I am pretty sure that what a dead author, or anyone else would have thought is pretty irrelevant; and I am absolutely sure that bad adaptations of their books do not impede their journey through the afterlife, however much people like to imagine them "turning in their graves". I believe that some right wing American pundits think that you should interpret the text of the Constitution based on what the founding fathers would have said. 

"Yesterday" said C.S Lewis "I stopped myself only in time from saying about some trifle 'Joy wouldn't have liked that.' This is unfair to the others. I should soon be using 'what Joy would have liked' as an instrument of domestic tyranny; with her supposed likes and dislikes becoming a thinner and thinner disguise for my own."

There is a discussion to be had about ethnicity in Middle-earth. We know that there is a land in the South where you could find elephants and dark skinned people. The first official Tolkien roleplaying games included a map of the whole of Middle-Earth, even the bits Tolkien never wrote about and inferred an Africa-shaped land sticking out of the bottom of the map. Years later Christopher Tolkien reproduced a sketch map of the whole world drawn by his father, it turned out that Iron Crown Enterprises guess was pretty much on the beam. So either some accelerated process of evolution changed Men's secondary characteristics after they had migrated to the South; or else some of the Second Children of Illuvator were black to begin with. (Unless Africa-analog only came into existence after the world became round; and Illuvator created new darker skinned humans to populate it? But the idea of just creating new beings doesn't seem to fit in at all well with the idea of the ainulindale.) Hobbits are a sub-class of men, so if there were non-white humans there were non-white hobbits, and if not, not. 

Tolkien was a white English dude, and represents himself as quite freely translating an ancient text. Hobbits didn't really speak English, and certainly not English with regional accents, and they didn't really have umbrellas and post offices. A white English dude naturally chose to represent the halflings as white and English, but if the Red Book and been discovered by a Scotsmen or an Indian, it might have been very different indeed.

A couple of years back the BBC did a quite good adaptation of Les Miserables with all the songs removed. Some people affected to be confused that Gavroche and Javert were played by not-white actors. No-one was at all confused that they were speaking English, with English accents, and that Thernadier sounded cockney. TV is an illusion; an exercise in the imagination. The map is not the territory. 

Gender is a bit more complicated. Tolkien was certainly a catholic, and certainly had traditional catholic views. (He felt that C.S Lewis's views on Christian marriage were a good deal too liberal, and actually got the better of the argument.) A lot of people have pointed to his description of the Valar (the secondary gods of Middle-earth) as implying a kind of trans-friendly outlook, although I don't think it really does. (He says that bodies are to the gods as clothes are to humans: a human is not necessarily male because they are wearing pants; a god is not necessarily male because he is wearing a male body.) And he is very clear that Elves only really do sex for procreation: and that once they have made enough babies, they mainly lose interest in it. But that said it is reasonable to ask how a Catholic academic in the 1940s would have described the relationship between, say, two homosexual servicemen and the answer is "exactly as he describes the relationship between Frodo and Sam. 

Once you claim that your book is a translation or a description of real events, you destabilise the text; you let us ask what is "really" going on.

 

But now is not the time to have that interesting discussion. Now is the time when white supremacist keyboard warriors tell me, directly, that if an actor would not be appropriate in a film of Beowulf, they are not appropriate in Tolkien, and if I cannot see that I obviously have never read Lord of the Rings. (I rather flounced out of the Facebook C.S Lewis group at this point.) Now is the time when a tie-in edition of Lord of the Rings triggers a cohort of fragile white snowflakes to say "We hates you forever, precious, the professor is turning in his grave." Now is the time when the Lord of the Rings is an accessory for a certain kind of weirdo white nativist activism. 

There was another story about a Ring. It became an accessory for another group of Fascists. They ruined Wagner for fifty years; for some people they ruined it forever. Tolkien called Hitler a bloody ignoramus and a blasphemous tyrant; but there was genuinely something in the Ring Cycle that allowed it to be appropriated by the Nazis. Maybe there is something in Lord of the Rings which allows it to be appropriated by born-and-bred kith-and-kin white nativists.

So, anyway: that's the article I've been trying to write. The Rings of Power has been subsumed into the backlash and the backlash against the backlash to the point where it is debatable whether the TV series exists.

Stewart Heritage made the point in slightly fewer words in an essay in the Guardian:

So here we are. It is now impossible to remain neutral about The Little Mermaid. You are either opposed to the idea that a mermaid might not necessarily always be white or excited to watch it out of principle because you don’t want the racists to win. It’s one or the other. The lines have been drawn, and that means the film won’t be properly evaluated on its merits until all the noise has died down, which won’t happen until long after its release.

So here we are. I ought to be looking forward to this stuff, throwing myself into reviews and critiques. But I haven't summonsed up the strength yet. The fascists have sucked all the joy out of it. Of course they have. That's their job. 

I notice that Disney+ has put up three seasons of Gargoyles. Maybe I'll watch that instead.

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

Thanks for reading.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job. If you enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article). If you don't like small amounts of money come out of your bank account each month, you can also give me a one-off tip. 

Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Make a one-off tip.