Gummed up works or got lives?

Andrew Mason · 16 Dec 2011, 17:08 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

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From: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:08:08 +0000
Subject: (urth) Gummed up works or got lives?
Message-ID: <CAM3O41LCDkzqfgKHWGy0QQV4+Vfz7mS74f-vSsyMoZwyogiaLQ at mail.gmail.com>

David Stockhoff wrote:

> On 12/15/2011 10:21 PM, Lee Berman wrote:
>> I think, by todays standards, Tolkien's geo-social biases might not be
>> considered so
>>
>> policially correct. I mostly mean his implication that those dark-skinned
>> types from the
>>
>> south and east are evil and not to be trusted. Conversely that north and
>> west are the "good"
>>
>> directions, not to mention those wonderful (american) eagles who always
>> fly in at the last
>>
>> crucial moment to save the day. If he'd used falcons it just wouldn't have
>> worked the same,
>>
>> I think.
> Dead on. Much of our Western myths, and as they are perpetuated today by
> Hollywood, involve the brave and capable few who are besieged by the
> weak and cowardly many. This has little basis in reality, of course, and
> it has always struck me as a bit pathological. And so often the few are
> blond and big and the many dark and small. So too with Tolkien.

West is certainly a good direction. North less so - in the first age
material the North is the seat of evil (and it's not Tolkien's fault
that wasn't published first). By the time of LOTR the region has been
devastated.

It is indeed true that dark-skinned people from the South, apparently
Africans, figure among Sauron's hordes - though that's because they've
been subjected by him; at the end of the war they are liberated. It's
also true that the Uruk-hai, Man-orc crosses, have dark skins. On the
other hand there are plenty of light-skinned villains as well. (It's
not clear that the easterners are dark-skinned; they can be read
simply as eastern Europeans. Though that might bring its own
problems.) As for small. the principal heroes, the hobbits, are small,
and some, though not all, of their opponents are unusally large.

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