View Single Post
Old 12-15-2014, 07:18 PM   #15
Zigūr
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
 
Zigūr's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 785
Zigūr is a guest at the Prancing Pony.Zigūr is a guest at the Prancing Pony.
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.
__________________
"Since the evening of that day we have journeyed from the shadow of Tol Brandir."
"On foot?" cried Éomer.

Last edited by Zigūr; 12-15-2014 at 07:29 PM.
Zigūr is offline   Reply With Quote