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Originally Posted by The Saucepan Man
You may be right. But just because a cause looks hopeless, it does not follow that one should not seek to uphold it. Where would Middle-earth have been with an approach like that?  |
Thinking about this need to 'defend' LotR, I do think you are right, even though it might make little difference to those who have their minds made up already. Why did I think this? I was thinking back to University when there was a tendency in classes to actively seek out racist overtones (or rather, undertones) in texts. Ridiculous questions would be posed such as why there were no black people in Thomas Hardy's novels, or why he didn't deal with race issues. Merely pointing out that black people weren't exactly common in rural 'Wessex' would cut no ice. And I think that some critics (and potential readers)
will come at it from that angle, unfortunately.
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Originally Posted by SpM
Well, I would say that depends upon how you react to it personally. The closest that we can get to an objective assessment in this regard is by considering the extent to which people react positivley or negatively to a particular interpretation. On that basis, I would say that the interpretation of LotR as a racist work is "incorrect" - certainly as far as I am concerned, but also, I would venture to suggest, for the majority of readers.
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Interesting. Well, fortunately most of us are not racist so in that kind of reader interpretation we are OK with the 'majority' view. However other kinds of reading may be more forceful - not necessarily due to numbers or a majority view, but to cultural and political pressures (and pressure groups' influence on culture) in contemporary societies.