Vaguely interesting BBC Culture article
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/201...nd-the-hippies
Has anyone read this? It's pretty lightweight and insubstantial as they go, mostly just cataloguing a bunch of references to The Lord of the Rings in 60s and 70s culture (it also erroneously assumes that pipe-weed was a hallucinogen rather than ordinary tobacco), but it raises a couple of curious points. Quote:
At the same time, it's not as if The Lord of the Rings is some kind of manifesto for a better society, although it may suggest better ways of being as individuals and communities. |
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All of that counterculture stuff is just a different interpretation of his works which is neither right nor wrong; it just is. |
The essay mentions pipeweed as an hallucinogen as you mention. The Lord of the Rings claims instead that pipeweed was “a variety probably of Nicotiana”. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotiana .
So was Tolkien pushing consumption of tobacco as a good thing? Probably not. Tolkien himself was a user of tobacco, and was writing at a time when smoking tobacco was the norm. Tolkien in The Hobbit had made Gandalf a smoker, probably because in folktales smoking had also become a norm. Consider in particular the Grimm fairy tale “The Blue Light”. See http://www.authorama.com/grimms-fairy-tales-48.html . Merlyn is also a tobacco-smoker in T. H. White’s novel The Sword in the Stone. Nor despite indicating that his hobbits were fond of beer, is Tolkien really pushing beer drinking. But there is more indication in The Lord of the Rings that Tolkien was pushing tobacco-smoking and beer-drinking than that he was fond of rock music or the Beatles or Led Zeppelin or drug use. What happened is that Tolkien’s books were popular because of their excellence, not because they partially agreed with the supposed sentiments of those who read them. The essay is, as indicated, “lightweight and insubstantial”. Nowhere does The Lord of the Rings put forward any “alternative lifestyles or radical activism”. The writer then puts down Jackson’s films, but does so for no reason that makes sense to me. I personally dislike parts of Jackson’s films, but not because the “narrative arc has been scaled beyond its original humanity and reduced to CGI eye-candy.” An essay could be written explaining where Jackson has ignored the “original humanity” of the tale, but the writer does not even try to do this. Is the “original humanity” ignored when Gandalf is rescued by a giant eagle or when Gandalf comes back to life? If the “original humanity” is so important, then is Jackson’s omission of Tom Bombadil a good thing? I suspect that by “CGI eye-candy” the writer means merely “CGI that I dislike”. Personally if by “CGI eye-candy” the writer merely means CGI that is pleasing to the eye, then what is he complaining about? Would the films have been improved by less CGI that was pleasing to the viewer? The writer claims: This ground-breaking music mirrored the mind-expanding drugs, magical excursions, pagan celebrations and Bohemian lifestyle associated with the counterculture – and characters in Tolkien’s books.Where in the books or in real life does Tolkien or “characters in Tolkien’s books” push “mind-expanding drugs” or “pagan celebrations” or “Bohemian lifestyle associated with the counterculture”? |
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Smoking tobacco is very much how smoking is today. A lot of people do it. I don't think there is any relation between regular tobacco and hallucinogenic drugs. It's plausible that who the writer was talking about just wanted someone well known to support their ideals, even though it was like claiming that the US Government is the Illuminati, using convoluted logic. |
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Having read the piece, I have to conclude that this Jane Ciabattari is a pinhead. |
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A few elements do come to mind (some of which relates to what I've already said):
1) Professor Tolkien's writing was to a degree, intentionally or otherwise, a rejection of the twentieth century literary establishment and literary orthodoxy. At the same time, he does have things in common with the Modernists. 2) Similarly, the texts tend to reject authoritarianism and denounce tyranny. 3) The Lord of the Rings does, in my opinion, suggest the value of a lifestyle or society which is more harmonized with the natural world. Firstly, however, I don't understand why this article was published now. Secondly, it doesn't really make an effort to explain why Professor Tolkien's work influenced this culture, particularly because as jallanite has said the arguments of the books are hardly identical to a "hippie philosophy." I can see the point the author is trying to make but I think instead of saying "Tolkien and the hippies both took issue with some of the institutions of their day" it seems to imply that The Lord of the Rings is some kind of covert hippie manual just waiting to be decoded. |
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Given that Tolkien explicitly loathed hippies, free love, drugs, Marxism and rock music.... In fact the man was pretty reactionary even by the standards of his Edwardian generation. An unrepentant monarchist and hyper-Catholic, to the extent he was a contrarian and rejectionist, it was for opposite reasons from the hippies. Even his anti-industrial agrarianism was a nostalgia for "a well-tilled countryside" not "back to the Pleistocene."
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Also what separates a "hyper-Catholic" from your common or garden variety Catholic? :p I suppose his resistance to the decisions of Vatican II for instance. Quote:
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And now for something completely different-
From the very same BBC/Guardian lefty-trendy axis, an article arguing that The Lord of the Rings is a reactionary political screed disguised as a fantasy, with whiffs of fascism:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...itical-fantasy Quote:
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Tolkien to me has always come across as remarkably open and "tolerant", and the popularity of his works across such a diverse pool of racial, political, and philosophical factors in his readers would seem to torpedo ideas like the Guardian rubbish. |
I was writing a whole post scrutinising that article but it's obviously not serious enough to be worth the time. I do think that there are criticisms of Professor Tolkien's work which are sustainable from a particular political point of view but that article seems to be much more interested in claiming the idea of the Red Book of Westmarch could represent a piece of unreliable propaganda; in which case, given that The Lord of the Rings is fiction, surely it would have to be knowingly unreliable and therefore satirical, and thus Professor Tolkien would actually support the article author's political views - but he doesn't seem to have reached that step in his analysis.
The thing is, any political ideology can make any text support its arguments if it's presented in the right way. It'd be pretty easy to write a similar article arguing for the merits of The Lord of the Rings as "liberal" or "progressive" or "Leftist" or whatever meaningless "us-and-them-ism" term is the opposite of what this person thinks The Lord of the Rings is. Then one might dig up Letter 83 or something and argue in refutation of that but ultimately I think that The Lord of the Rings as a text, and Professor Tolkien as a person, are just not the kinds of things which can be pigeonholed into a single, and current, understanding of a particular ideology. I might actually add if one considers Letter 83 that at the end of the day for Professor Tolkien one of his main loyalties was his faith (obviously in this case it's rather a complicated issue), which I think ties back to the idea that The Lord of the Rings is much more a spiritual than a political text. |
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