We also should not forget that The Lord of the Rings is an account written from the victors perspective.
Maybe Sauron was simply an entrepreneur who favours meritocracy instead of races and societal hierarchy, thus becoming the boogeyman of the ruling class.
CHOMSKY: But without the pipe-weed, Middle Earth would fall apart. Saruman is trying to break up Gandalf’s pipe-weed ring. He’s trying to divert it.
ZINN: Well, you know, it would be manifestly difficult to believe in magic rings unless everyone was high on pipe-weed. So it is in Gandalf’s interest to keep Middle Earth hooked.
The first chapter of the last ringbearer is extremely funny! It relates the wars described in LOTR from the point of view of Sauron's soldiers (they are regular humans, the "orc" descriptions are a ridiculous libel). Unfortunately, the rest of the book describes the continuation after the wars and it is much less engaging, since you cannot draw parallels with the original story.
I tend to agree (I still enjoyed the rest, and the epilogue was fun as well), but I love the weirdly extended espionage subplot just because it has a oneliner that is such an amazing, amazingly heavy-handed dunk on Tolkien:
> “Because you are an Enemy. You fight on the side of Darkness, so your every word is a lie, and your every deed is evil by definition.”
>
> “You’re mistaken, lad,” Tangorn sighed wearily. “I’m on neither the Dark nor the Light side. If you need a label, I’m on the side of many colors.”
I love the idea of that but do wish it didn’t require altering so many of the basic facts. The most compelling alternate histories use the same set of facts but show how the victors were misguided and misled by their assumptions, because it is more tragic that way.
Then you'll probably love some of these, particularly the early War of the Ring set in 2450 and featuring a fellowship that includes both Saruman and Smeagol.
i think there are a lot of plot points in Tolkien's legendarium where you do not need to change the fact to change the perspective:
- the Elves are a puppet of the Valar, doing their bid in exchange for land and favours in the Undying land. Numenor is even more so a client state - sided with us? you're rewarded with longer life and your own territory.
- while the Valar do not encourage the colonization of the land of the "lesser" races (note: there are "lesser" races) in Middle Earth by their clients - Elves following Fëanor and the Numenorians colonies -, they really do not do much to prevent it. When things go south for their clients, they of course help them survive in Middle Earth through open warfare and pardon almost all of the rebels (so much for not supporting the colonization!). It is not so much different from the US being ostensibly against colonialism but bankrolling France in Indochina.
- they keep their "no direct support, but no condemnation" policy on colonial powers for a while. They do not want to harm their clients when their second-rate clients want to renegotiate their terms (aka the Numenorians wanting immortality) so they call on big boss Eru. In line with their history of not wanting to dirty their hands, but still pursuing their policy objectives.
- when their colonial clients are on the verge of disappearing (Gondor before the War of the Ring), they send CIA political operatives to engineer resistance, coups, and remake Middle Earth in their fashion. My bad, they are "Istari". Those agents have no qualms scarifying the lesser people and getting involved in their politics. I have no doubt that the sole purpose of reinstalling the Numenorian dynasty is to help the war effort (it is well known that internal strife bolsters the war effort), not to replace the current leadership - now quite distant from the Valar - by a man who owes everything to the Valar and their subordinates. He was even raised in a pro-Valar Elven colony! The Dunedain program exists only to have a convenient leader to choose if you want to topple current Gondorian leadership. I mean if, say, the US had hosted the descendants of the Capetian - Bourbon kings of France since the French Revolution and tried to push for France to become a kingdom again under their brand new American-raised kingdom after WWII instead of that pesky de Gaulle, would anyone think it is solely for French interests?
- speaking of which, it is good that Aragorn becomes the King because he was born to become king. Right-of-birth is not a very compelling point. Cheap tricks ("the hands of a king are the hands of a healer!") are used to prop up the new Numenorian regime.
- industrial technology is terrible, because it is direct competition to the nature/magic based technology of the Valar and their surrogate.
- Saruman is beyond help because he chose to get power for himself rather than prop up the Valar client states' power. I guess you can make a point that betraying your bosses is wrong, but is a Numenorian disctatorship (whose leader is put into power by one of the Istari) that much better than direct dictatorship by one of the Istari?
> speaking of which, it is good that Aragorn becomes the King because he was born to become king. Right-of-birth is not a very compelling point
well Gondor was still claiming to be a monarchy, ruled by a regent waiting for the return of its rightful king, no? Though I'll agree that Aragorn's claim was made easier by the death of the previous ruler and Aragorn's support by foreign powers
- Stewards ruled for 1000 years. I would wager that the idea that Kings would return and that stewards rule was a temporary thing was a purely ceremonial thing. We do not know (or at least I do not know - perhaps it is stated somewhere in the books) whether the people of Gondor would find a randomly found King more legitimate to rule them than the Stewards' line. Aragorn is a special case, since he had been running a long-con PR campaign well before the War of the Ring, and was acclaimed as a ruler because he was an effective commander in the great war - Dunedain heritage may not have been necessary.
- Right to rule some land because of one's birth is of course wrong. Aragorn pressing his legal (but immoral) right to rule because of his birth should not be praised, and should be seen for what it is: elites fighting to reclaim more power over the common folk.
> whether the people of Gondor would find a randomly found King more legitimate to rule them than the Stewards' line
I think the legitimacy of the rule of Stewards' line was derived from the kings of Gondor, since they ruled in their name, while waiting for the return of a king. Even 1000 after, it was still called a kingdom. And then the heir of the line of the Stewards supported Aragorn, perhaps in part because he was the legitimate heir to the kingdom
> elites fighting to reclaim more power over the common folk.
considering the previous regime had all the trapping of a monarchy, I don't think the situation of the common folk would change in the regions directly ruled by Aragorn (and it would change nothing in the regions which are ruled by vassals of Aragorn, which make up most of Gondor, where Aragorn wouldn't have much say
For the first point, I agree that _legally_ the Stewards rules depends on Gondor being a Kingdom without Kings. But legality and legitimacy are two different things. We can only speculate whether the people & the nobles of Gondor think the Kingdom part matter or if they would still think the Stewards ought to rule even if they did not put up with the Stewards waiting for the King charade.
Perhaps people think it's just ceremonial and the reason Stewards and their lines ought to rule is because they have done so for time immemorial (well, almost) and they've done a great job at it. A wannabe King arguing that _akshually_ they should be the ruler would be met with scorn - a random nobody bereft of any lordship that presses ancient and irrelevant legal rules.
Or perhaps the waiting-for-the-king part is essential, and people think that Stewards ought to rule because they've been appointed by the Kings and are doing a great job keeping the Kingdom ready for the return of any King.
I do not think we have much evidence whether it is the former or the latter. Aragorn - as a leader of the Great War, with the Steward dead and the heir of the Steward owing his life to him - has much more going for him than just being technically the heir. The fact that he is acclaimed does not tell us how important was being the legal heir vs. saving the kingdom vs. being installed by the Steward heir & Valar operatives. Perhaps a random noble from Gondor would have been able to claim the throne in the same conditions, à la Bonaparte. We do not know.
In the end, it's been 1000 years. Not many people support 1000-year-old claims. How many people care about the Byzantine Empire succession, or what the Capetians are up to?
For the second point, I poorly worded what I meant. What is painted as grand achievement and positive thing - the return of the King - is just one noble replacing another noble as the dictator, with a not so insignificant part of the story being about noble #1 campaign to depose noble #2. Hardly something to praise.
I love this. I always preferred a “Wicked”-like retelling of LOTR, where Sauron’s side is one of technology and progress. We’re supposed to dislike orcs because they live in dense cities and are black? Because they chop down trees and fight against eco-terrorists?
I forget where I read this, but I have read that Tolkein was inspired by industrialisation and the destruction of nature when characterising Sauron, the orcs, post-fall Saruman, and the scouring of the Shire.
Last chapters of LOTR, after the victory. The heroes come back at home and it is destroyed, no nature, no trees, and a big factory in the middle. Takes magic to restore the natural ecosystem.
It takes Samwise Gamgee, a devoted and skilled gardener, spending a year of his life planting new trees to replace the ones that were lost.
Yes, he uses a magical resource he was given as part of his reforestation campaign, but it just speeds up the growth. The real factor is still Sam's tireless labor.
Well, industry destroys the nature and we can argue if 20 years of growth in 1 year of actual work is significant or not, but the main point remains: there is substantial evidence that Tolkin didn't like industrialization. Can we agree on that?
Oh, absolutely. It's clear in the books, and outside that he made it very explicit that he mourned what it was doing to the English countryside he loved.
I was just being pedantic about the events of the narrative, because it's close to my heart.
He specificaly wrote that he despises allegory but appreciates applicability. So he wouldn’t write the Shire as a 1 to 1 allegory about the industrialization of the english countryside, but he would write on general themes like nature vs industry and good vs evil. What he mostly didn’t like was the idea of writing something to have a specific intended interpretation as opposed to readers having more flexibility in how they experienced a work of writing.
This quote often comes up when people discuss Tolkien's works. However:
- either "allegory" is meant to be a very strict one-to-one map, like Gandalf is really Jesus but has a different name in this story. Then the quote is irrelevant to almost discussion because nobody is trying to make such a point.
- or "allegory' is meant to be some loose inspiration, like the War of the Ring drawing from Tolkien's experiences in the Great War, the role of providence being similar in Catholic theology & in the legendarium, or more controversially the description of evil men or women being a product of its times. If such is the meaning of allegory, and Tolkien denied using it, then he is wrong.
I think Tolkien meant meaning 1. In either case it is irrelevant to most claims of some connection between a real word thing and a legendarium thing.
'Allegory' has a pretty specific meaning when talking about literature - the practice of speaking in coded meanings.
Example: I write of a 'garden door opening' but what I really mean is 'penis-in-vagina intercourse'. Or I say 'anthill', but what it really means is 'urban sprawl'.
So no, there are no allegories in LotR; the One Ring doesn't really stand for the atom bomb or whatever.
Right. "Industrialization destroying nature" in the book isn't an "allegory" for "Industrialization destroying nature" in reality. It's an illustrative example.
Jumping from Tolkien to Tolkien-inspired Dungeons & Dragons, consider the textile industry.
The Players Handbook, 5th edition, tells us (a) a square yard of canvas costs 1 silver and (b) a "squalid" lifestyle, one step up from the "wretched" lifestyle where you have absolutely nothing, costs 1 silver per day.
Based on historical rates for weaving, a weaver could plausibility weave 30 square yards of rough canvas a day, but doing so would consume over 8000 yards of rough thread per yard of canvas. A spinner, meanwhile, could only produce, optimistically, 6000 yards of rough thread a day.
Assuming most of the weaver's income was spent on raw materials, leaving them perhaps 2 silver per day for the common weaver to live a "poor" lifestyle, your spinners are going to earn maybe half a silver per day, assuming their raw materials are virtually free.
So how can your spinners survive on less than a squalid income? Well, it would probably help if they were small, like halflings, and so needed less food, or children, who had part of their living expenses covered by their parents. It would be even better if they were both; either would bump you into the "squalid" income bracket, both would bump you all the way to "poor".
Conclusion: the textile industry in Dungeons & Dragons is built on poor halfling children working 12+ hour shifts.
Eh, while D&D had many influences to its aesthetics, the only reason people spent so many years pretending Tolkien wasn't a major one was, lawsuits brought or threatened by the estate that resulted in them filing the serial numbers off enough to stop being sued while pretending they'd never heard of this guy Tolkien.
If you read the original AD&D 2nd ed., you know the tone and subject matter is just completely different from Tolkien. AD&D is "eldritch horror" and "band of rogues", not "epic Greek tragedy in medieval garb".
If anything, the fact that George RR Martin and this vlogger obsess about fictional governance, while Tolkien was more interested in myth and language says a lot about the change in times and what media-makers feel they should contribute to.
To update this, consider Harry Potter. He's part of a secret ruling class with widespread scorn for the 'Muggles'. To the point they're often considered 'not people': they erase Muggle memories, bribe and extort them, even kill them to keep their oligarchy secret. They wage wars using them as fodder. They never, ever consider allowing them self-rule.
When a Wizard is born without skills, they're left alone with an amused tolerance. When a Muggle dares to become a Wizard, it breaks their society in half.
In the 7th book (?) it's revealed that the Ministry not only is in contact with the British government, but that they're warning them of Voldemort's return and trying to help reduce damage to muggle society. The Statute of Secrecy is clearly motivated by centuries of abuse of wizards, witch burning and the like. I don't remember any indication that wizards "rule" the muggles in any way or affect them at all. Prejudice against muggles is the #1 flag for "this person is evil" and is pretty much always decried as wrong by the protagonists. The only thing that really holds is the mistreatment of squibs, but even if it's wrong it makes a lot of sense - they would be hard-pressed to find good jobs in wizarding society for purely practical reasons.
So unless I'm missing something from some extended universe, this is an pretty unfair mis-characterisation of the books...
In contact? Maybe a little. That visit to the Prime Minister is more of a 'royal visit' than peers comparing notes. Remember they insinuate that WWII is entirely a Wizard dispute that got out of hand -50 millions dead.
Then there's the secret police visits to erase people. Heck, Harry's best friend wants to be one when he grows up! Just like dear ol Dad! Who comes home with 'Muggle Artifacts' that they somehow don't need any more - presumably because they had to be put down. I half expected a collection of gold teeth or whatever.
All that made 'disliking Muggles' into a red flag in my reading was, that a segment of Wizard society wanted the cattle to be managed without spooking them - gently and quietly. So they wouldn't be a danger to Wizards, not out of any consideration. The other segment was fine with running them thru the chute to the slaughterhouse. Both opinions were current even in Hogwarts. But neither regarded them as more than cattle to be managed.
And of course Wizard society had the right to manage them, that was never questioned. Such a book could only be written by the British, with their tone-deafness about class and privilege.
Your final comment does make me wonder about two things: first, how the book would be different if set in America and written by an American author, and second, how much of this we would have seen if the book was targeted at adults instead of (pre)teens.
Either way I'm looking forward to the gritty JoeAltmaier reboot :)
It is difficult to explain Gondor's population collapse. Sure there have been plagues and wars but there is no shortage of unused land to farm, no reason why the population could not recover quickly. It is as if Gondor has a dark side, perhaps successively less superhuman Numenorians ensuring racial purity at the expense of all else?
Is it really racism to prefer to prevent the fading and eventual disappearance of ones own unique tribal bloodline through new gene inflow? There’s no ethical reason people should not prefer being around genetic lines most similar to their own and only breeding with individuals who share that line. To force others to do that is wrong but a group that collectively wants to genetically isolate for whatever reason is hardly unethical .
I don't say that it is unethical, I say that it is racist. Like, being based on race.
If you dig deeper, you will find that the racism of our world was excused with "God blessed our people" while LOTR made it true. So, if there is something unethical, then it must be Tolkien who made people not exactly equal. However, I'm not inclined to judge someone's fantasies until they stay there.
In regard to genetic exceptionalism, it is practiced as a policy or unconsciously by many communities around the world. Whether it is bad could be decided when checking the consequences. They are rather obvious in small communities where inbreeding leads to all kinds of genetic diseases and "preserve your genetic line" turns rather ironic. In bigger communities the effects are a bit more subtle because the lack of diversity is not so pronounced. Issues begin when you consider your own as human+, because it is not so far off to consider everyone else as human- which provokes things like lack of cooperation, general hostility, and the occasional genocide.
Of course, the topic is much larger. I haven't talked about diversity of communities and cultures, what makes humans a species, and so on, but I spread myself well enough, I think.
Possibly, but to fair I don't think there is a reason. The shire is similarly inexplicitly underpopulated when hobbits have been peacefully having large families there for 1400 years!
Perhaps all that magic is reducing fertility rates?
After all, magic requires power, sometimes quite large amounts, and no power source is to be seen. This means it's either beamed, or otherwise dispersed through the environment. This could have negative implications for health and fertility.
Or a more sinister reason: canonically, magic is powered by sacrifice - and most powerfully, human sacrifice. Sure, Tolkien skips over the child-snatchers, the sacrificial altars, the charnel-pits behind the Valar-temples, but we well know the true cost of the Numenorean theocracy.
Well maybe after the more fanatical followers couldn't follow through on the demanded blood/power/life offerings the powers that be continued to levy their sacrifices in an indirect way, that manifests itself as low birth rates or particularily high infant mortality?
Can someone provide the TLDR for why GRRM was wrong to question Aragorn's tax policy? The linked article seems to assume we all know this but I can't see why it's not a valid question.
I think it's because the author of acoup interprets Gondor as a feudal state. As such, Aragorn would have little ability to set the tax policy, since he can only tax his vassals a small number of high ranking nobles who in turn set their own taxes on their vassals and so on until the lowest nobles set their taxes on the common people. Additionally since all of these nobles are running their fiefs as de-facto independent states there would be relatively few things Aragorn could even do with the taxes. Now I have read most of a coup and this is my interpretation of why the kings tax policy is a less important question. Of course I am not an expert in history and I may be incorrect.
TL;DR : Westeros is an impossible mix of early middle age vassal politics and imperial rome / early modern bureaucracy, economics†, and excesses of power. And to boot with pretty much a nation state (but a vassal one ??) in the form of the North without the required printing press. (By contrast, Gondor makes much more sense.)
†Also, my own comment : the biology is likely to be very different from ours if the winters are so long - does GRRM ever explain that in the books? (And does he really use multiple "years" for a single season ?)
Tolkien was a linguist who created a fantastical medieval world as a place to toy with imaginary languages, then turned fantasy author writing a classical "epic poetry" (word is no longer used in that way) As such Tolkien writes fiction - and can just say "Aragon became king and ruled wise and good" and leave the rest to the imagination.
Now GRRM wants his medieval saga to be more cynical - there can be no "wise and good king" - the very concept is foreign to GRRM - everything must have tragic downsides, be a metaphor for a real world thingy and ultimately be about wealth, power, status and sex.
Over-analyzing Tolkien looking for such motifs is not wrong, just a bit stupid, because it favors quick and wrong conclusions that miss the obvious - the genre. And GRRM knows perfectly well that parts of the community are anal and take things like this far to serious, while being blind for the obvious.
GRRM seems to ask fans to over-analyze Tolkien for "bad aspects" and also immediately jumps from taxes to orc genocide. The whole thing looks like an attempt to smear a business rival, an attempt to describe himself as the better author for having a more "cyncial/realisic" style.
(look at the original interview, the question was about power and his characters wielding power badly - and GRRM goes "whatabout aragon")
More than that, at least as far as acoup is concerned Tolkien knew a lot more about medieval history and his writing is far more accurate than GRRM's, even though GRRM claims his fiction is historically realistic while Tolkien makes no such claim.
Amazon's not going to cancel the TV show over internet nerd rants about historicity, and GRRM's financial concerns would have been much more productively supported if he'd spoken up against D&D's massacre of his IP, not trying to massacre Tolkien's
Sorry, I'm just an internet pedant picking up the point that although Tolkien is dead, there are several people / institutions with a big stake in the legacy of his writings.
I only started watching the show when it was almost over because of the hype and checked out the books because I was disappointed in the final TV seasons.
I couldn’t tolerate ASOIAF. I can’t recall even one instance of feeling joy or mirth in all of the first book. GRRM comes off as a bitter old and somewhat misogynistic man. There are no normal women characters to be found anywhere that aren’t raped or murdered or otherwise broken in some way.
I just skim through the wikis to get the gist of the plot without having to suffer the tediously cynical prose.
It's OK not to like something, but you embarassing yourself by disparagingky dismissing it. One could also say that Tolkien is racist with tediously florid prose.
I thought I made it clear that I was talking about how I perceived it.
> Are the men treated any better?
Please. Right off the bat Eddard Stark is a paragon while Caitlyn Stark is kind of a bitch.
There are still some male characters with plain personalities regardless of their backstory, whereas the women get their story and their personality twisted up sooner or later. Every female is or becomes weird in some way, to say the least.
Thanks. That makes sense from a literary standpoint. Taking the historical angle I thought the acoup link might have been implying there's something about taxes in feudalism that should have made GRRM's question redundant.
acoup just gives a very tongue in cheek quip: "if GRRM knew more about medieval times + lotr, he could answer that question for himself"
In some way i agree with that: part of the idea behind ideal heroes is that one should answer for oneselve what a good and wise kings tax policy would be like, but that is not what acoup said.
I don't think he's wrong to question it, but people have taken that questioning and lack of answering to be a failing of Tolkien and LOTR when in reality that's just not the scope of the book. It's a mythical battle of good and evil, not a true-to-life description of a society that happens to have magic. Both LOTR and ASOIAF try to say something about humanity by holding up a funhouse mirror, just one produces an "ugly" and "gritty" distortion and the other produces a "stylized" and "ideal" distortion.
Are there any fictional worlds where exploring economics is a major theme? Given the large variety of actual economic systems in history it seems that "truth is stranger than fiction" applies.
That's because Tolkien quite possibly did not base Gondor on Arthurian myth and popular conceptions of the Middle Ages, unlike many of the conventional fantasy works that succeeded him. Instead, he may instead have based it upon Rome:
> Tolkien had far more imagination than most of those who followed him. A common criticism of the worlds described in fantasy novels is that they are “just like mediaeval Europe, only with magic”. They have knights on horseback, an aristocracy of nobles under a king, and so on, coexisting with magicians, fantastical creatures and items of cosmic power beyond belief.
> You won't find any of these feudal European elements in Gondor. The only identifiable vassal state of Gondor is Dol Amroth, otherwise the kingdom is unitary. The army of Gondor fights on foot, even the nobility like Aragorn and Boromir. Faramir rides a horse during his retreat from the Pelennor wall, but he doesn't participate in cavalry charges, despite what Peter Jackson may have shown you. The couched lances of Arthurian tradition are strictly a Rohirrim technique. In fact there are references to there being only one company of cavalry in the entire army of Gondor.
> I think Tolkien had a particular culture in mind. These features are much more reminiscent of imperial Rome than of feudal Europe. To be honest, the army is more reminiscent of early imperial Rome than of Byzantium, but I never expected this to come out perfect.
Tolkien actually wrote "Elf-Latin" in an early draft. It's kind of transparent. It got dropped when he dropped all references to the real world as a policy.
> That's because Tolkien quite possibly did not base Gondor on Arthurian myth and popular conceptions of the Middle Ages, unlike many of the conventional fantasy works that succeeded him. Instead, he may instead have based it upon Rome:
But then the video argues the opposite, specifically about vassal fiefdoms ?
>> Arthurian myth and popular conceptions of the Middle Ages
> But then the video argues the opposite, specifically about vassal fiefdoms ?
I think an assumption of the video is that the popular conceptions of the Middle Ages don't exactly show the vassalage system (and its relationships between vassals and lieges), instead showing kings as a rulers with absolute power.
Maybe Sauron was simply an entrepreneur who favours meritocracy instead of races and societal hierarchy, thus becoming the boogeyman of the ruling class.
Please take a moment to consider an alternative account of what actually happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer