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Tolkien wrote the essential story - for our time: An evil force works not by open destruction, but through lies to cause despair and corruption. The good people

Tolkien wrote the essential story - for our time: An evil force works not by open destruction, but through lies to cause despair and corruption. The good people of the world allow themselves to be influenced by it; they embrace despair and abandon goodness and all resistance; or they are corrupted and even help the enemy. The primary actor is a wise old man who travels around, not using great powers, but waking them up, reminding them of who they are and their strength rousing them to action (the scene with Theoden is a great example). How could Tolkien, in the 1940s and 1950s, write a book for the post-2016 era? Remember what he saw as he wrote it: An evil force that heavily used propaganda to spread their horrible ideas, and masses of people not only in Germany or Italy, but the rest of Europe and the US, refusing to acknowledge or oppose the reality of the evil, the grim future; and many even supporting it. Tolkien arguably turned it into a myth for future generations, like the real-life Trojan War was turned (eventually) into the Iliad and Odyssey.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
"The primary actor is a wise old man…" And that is why it is hard to call that a myth for our time. Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights. Moreover, though Gandalf rarely displayed his power, everyone outside the Shire suspected that he did possess power and belonged to an elite, and today there is great distrust of elites. I think a lot of idealistic people today concerned with justice, would prefer a myth by which organizing in pursuit of said justice is bottom-up, starting from the most disadvantaged and intersectional, instead of the Maiars’ top-down.
- smfugit 3y ago
  There are no essential stories for "everyone". Cause everyone is different. What the cactus needs and what the redwood needs are not the same thing. The stories they need will always be different.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    There are no common needs and desires, and no common stories? That doesn't seem to match the data, at all. LOTR, as one example, is among the best-selling fiction of the 20th century.
- teddyh 3y ago
  > I think a lot of idealistic people today concerned with justice, would prefer a myth by which organizing in pursuit of said justice is bottom-up, starting from the most disadvantaged and intersectional, instead of the Maiars’ top-down. Hence the standard trope plot of all JRPGs: “Using the power of friendship to kill God”.
- jl6 3y ago
  On the other hand, while the great old powers were waging fruitless war, it was the little people who struck the decisive blow, so perhaps it’s a lesson for our time of how both bottom-up and top-down can collaborate.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Yes, but in Tolkien it was little white cis males. As can be seen from the recent television adaptation, a myth for our time requires the involvement of, if not the leading role for, women and BIPOC in that struggle. Obviously Tolkien will still have an appeal for people interested in old literature, but it is hard to say that it is the myth for our time with its distinct concerns.
    - getwiththeprog 3y ago
      I don't see the little hobbit as a 'man' or as 'white', but as a small creature of good nature that is innocent enough to carry the greatest of burdens.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    This is a profound misreading; royal birthright, aristocracy, and the ruling class are not taken to task or shown to be "fruitless" at all in Tolkien, and while today we may read Frodo as "the common man" his contemporary presentation is firmly (pastoralist and conservative English) upper middle class. The Baggins are landed gentry, not "the little people".
    - jl6 3y ago
      Reasonable Marxists may disagree on the class status of the Bagginses: https://users.pfw.edu/wootdm01/bilbo.html https://users.pfw.edu/wootdm01/bilbo.html Personally I think that as well as their local status, their class can also be analyzed from a global perspective, where the hierarchy of the wider world goes Eru > Ainur > Maiar > Eldar/Edain > Other Men/Elves > maybe Dwarves > everything else including Hobbits. In global Arda it matters not that Frodo was amongst the wealthiest and highest-status Hobbits - they are viewed as marginal by the other races, and it was this very marginal status that caused the “higher” races to overlook their potential, which is a large part of how they succeeded. I’ll also defend the idea that the military strategizing of Great Men was for nought. We are told quite clearly that the ring is the only hope for free peoples; that even if it is kept from Sauron, his forces will inevitably win. The Elves recognized this hopelessness (as part of the overall decline of “magic” in the world) and were slowly abandoning Middle Earth. Aside from Aragorn and possibly Faramir, the ruling Men are depicted as weak and flawed. The elite Elves and Men had ultimately failed - even after defeating Morgoth, Sauron had prevailed; even after defeating Sauron, he had returned. Further battle was positioned as noble but most definitely fruitless, unless the ring could also be destroyed. The greatest contributions of Men are taken to be those that assist or buy time for the Hobbits. No, they’re not taken to task for this multi-generational failure, and royal birthright prevails, but then Tolkien as a Catholic wasn’t aiming to demonstrate anything about class liberation - hence my reading of the story as being one of cross-class collaboration, and the wider point being that achieving meaningful change is likely to involve “big people” and “little people” finding ways of working together.
- gattr 3y ago
  On a side note, I enjoyed Joe Abercrombie's "The First Law" cycle. It subverts the "wise old man enlists young hero's services for a lofty endeavor" trope to great effect.
  - number6 3y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation, sounds interesting
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    I enjoyed the writing and some of the world, but the lore was really confusing and I didn't really understand the beef at the end. Spoilers I guess the main wizard is to gandalf what homelander is to Superman? Like, what if he were more self-interested? I also didn't like how they didn't resolve Logan's story. I guess I'm supposed to read another trilogy to figure it out.
- elihu 3y ago
  > "The primary actor is a wise old man…" And that is why it is hard to call that a myth for our time. Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights. At the risk of making this political, our present era also has an old man who has earned the respect of younger generations by being well-informed, consistent in his views, with a strong moral compass and deeply concerned about the welfare of all people. I would argue that Bernie Sanders is the Gandalf of our times. We also have a lot of Denethors and Sarumans and Wormtounges. Our Dark Lord isn't a person, but maybe it's an ideology -- that if we can just maximize shareholder value everything will work out fine. Tolkien didn't like allegories and insisted that the ring wasn't symbolic of anything, but if it was our ring we can't bring ourselves to cast aside is fossil fuels.
  - Sakos 3y ago
    What's changed is we've as a culture realized that age doesn't automatically bestow wisdom. A wise old man is a valuable part of culture and society. But not all old men are wise and it doesn't seem to be a function of being old. Bernie has held his beliefs for decades. He was wise when he was younger and that's persisted (or developed further with the guidance of time and experience) into his current age. Wisdom is something that has to be cultivated for a lifetime and we simply don't do that as a society or a culture. Did we ever? I'm not sure.
    - elihu 3y ago
      I think there are a lot of people who still care about wisdom and try to work on it. Our popular culture and economic and political systems don't always do a good job of encouraging or valuing wisdom. I think there are probably a lot of old men and women like Bernie out there, they just aren't very visible. What's unusual about Bernie is that he's managed to become famous and is in a position of power.
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      > What's changed is we've as a culture realized that age doesn't automatically bestow wisdom. That's no new realization, but a continuing pattern, generation after generation. The youth of the 1960s took that idea much further than today's kids. 'Every generation thinks they invented sex.'
- watwut 3y ago
  > Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights. Citations needed, really. While young people do not look at old with awe or submissively, claim that they somehow uniquely or unusually look down at us seems wrong to me. And also, the little that exists seems to me more of reactive to hostility some in older generation seems to have quite openly.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    > Citations needed, really. Here you go.[0][1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_boomer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_boomer [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/baby-boomers-greenhouse-gas-emissions-b2043755.html https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/baby-boome...
    - watwut 3y ago
      I do not think this proves that "Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights." Like at all. Especially since it popularity was an actual response to members of older generation bashing younger one. As in, it was literal response to that and relatively rarely used outside of context of the older people complaining about younger ones. I do not see younger generation rejecting everything that comes from older people, definitely not much more then what our generations or the one before seemed to do.
      - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        Your English and your post history suggests that you are not from the Anglophone world. The generational tension I was talking about is a feature of it, I do not claim that it exists in the same way elsewhere.
        watwut 3y ago
        And I am still aware of "do not trust anyone under 30" slogan from 60ties and aware and intergenerational issues of the past in the anglophone world.
croes 3y ago
I don't like the deus ex machina trick of turning Gandalf the Grey into Gandalf the White. That's like Spock's inner eye lid. BTW the primary actors are Sam and Frodo and their friendship where one carries the burden of the ring and the other carries his friend.
- morelisp 3y ago
  I don't think you can criticize "deus ex machina" as a plot device when it's, from go, literally "ex deus" - Gandalf is on a mission (/ missions) from god, and Eru's not gonna let him get off so easily.
  - Ntrails 3y ago
    It's arguable whether you want to describe the wizards as 'Mortal' in the first place. The return of Gandalf never much bothered me, it fit well enough.
  - croes 3y ago
    Just because it's literally ex deus doesn't make it less ex deus. Ex deus is cheap
    - morelisp 3y ago
      The more critical part is "from go" - deus ex machina is considered bad because it's a narrative rupture. In a story of wars openly involving divine beings, there's no such discontinuity. It is also usually associated with stories that wrap up a bit too tidily, and that's also not the case in LotR. Gandalf dies 2/6 of the way through the story and comes back 3/6 of the way through. His death may be the climax of the first two books, but his return is merely a plot beat and many of the remaining problems have yet to even be revealed, let alone solved.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  You don't think the plot was put out in advance for Gandalf to not die in Moria? Or what do you mean? I guess he had to disappear for the fellowship to break up. If I remember correctly, you don't get to know that he technically did die in Moria. That is background lore.
wrp 3y ago
Well...I've read some intellectual biographies of Tolkien, and a common complaint is that it's hard to pin down his views on much of anything outside of literature. He wasn't a systematic thinker, but tended to write what sounded good at the moment without much regard for consistency with what had been written before. He had to do a lot of later editing to remove logical conflicts in his stories. Remember that the impetus for his fiction was to create a world in which his created languages could live. So, positing a coherent ideological message in his story is a bit of a stretch. Also, Tolkien's wasn't one to focus much on real world social and political issues. I think the most notable example of him writing about politics is in a wartime letter to his son, when Nazi antics forced politics into his normally narrow interests. All that said, no good postmodernist would object to modern readers finding meanings in literature that weren't consciously in the author's mind.
- clbrmbr 3y ago
  > positing a coherent ideological message in his story is a bit of a stretch. Also, Tolkien's wasn't one to focus much on real world social and political issues. Maybe this is why I love LoTR so much. It’s just a story!
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  he famously got quite annoyed by people asking him about metaphors or whatever. "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence." He very much did not want to talk about it and presumably intentionally avoided writing it.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    Not writing allegory (a very specific kind of comparison) doesn't mean nothing in the book is a metaphor. It's willful ignorance to pretend LotR has no ideology or non-narrative (moral, epistemic, metaphysical, etc.) content. Tolkien just doesn't want people to say "... and so the orcs are the Germans."
  - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
watwut 3y ago
Evil against good framework is not all that much special, actually.
sBqQu3U0wH 3y ago
>An evil force that heavily used propaganda to spread their horrible ideas, and masses of people not only in Germany or Italy, but the rest of Europe and the US, refusing to acknowledge or oppose the reality of the evil, the grim future; and many even supporting it. Yeah, not much has changed in that regard. Though we likely have very different ideas of what that evil is nowadays.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > we likely have very different ideas of what that evil is nowadays Because you don't know that, I see a comment that attempts to disrupt good people from doing anything, promoting despair. Quoting my GP comment: >> An evil force works not by open destruction, but through lies to cause despair and corruption. The good people of the world allow themselves to be influenced by it; they embrace despair and abandon goodness and all resistance; or they are corrupted and even help the enemy.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

"The primary actor is a wise old man…" And that is why it is hard to call that a myth for our time. Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights. Moreover, though Gandalf rarely displayed his power, everyone outside the Shire suspected that he did possess power and belonged to an elite, and today there is great distrust of elites. I think a lot of idealistic people today concerned with justice, would prefer a myth by which organizing in pursuit of said justice is bottom-up, starting from the most disadvantaged and intersectional, instead of the Maiars’ top-down.

smfugit 3y ago
There are no essential stories for "everyone". Cause everyone is different. What the cactus needs and what the redwood needs are not the same thing. The stories they need will always be different.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  There are no common needs and desires, and no common stories? That doesn't seem to match the data, at all. LOTR, as one example, is among the best-selling fiction of the 20th century.
teddyh 3y ago
> I think a lot of idealistic people today concerned with justice, would prefer a myth by which organizing in pursuit of said justice is bottom-up, starting from the most disadvantaged and intersectional, instead of the Maiars’ top-down. Hence the standard trope plot of all JRPGs: “Using the power of friendship to kill God”.
jl6 3y ago
On the other hand, while the great old powers were waging fruitless war, it was the little people who struck the decisive blow, so perhaps it’s a lesson for our time of how both bottom-up and top-down can collaborate.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Yes, but in Tolkien it was little white cis males. As can be seen from the recent television adaptation, a myth for our time requires the involvement of, if not the leading role for, women and BIPOC in that struggle. Obviously Tolkien will still have an appeal for people interested in old literature, but it is hard to say that it is the myth for our time with its distinct concerns.
  - getwiththeprog 3y ago
    I don't see the little hobbit as a 'man' or as 'white', but as a small creature of good nature that is innocent enough to carry the greatest of burdens.
- morelisp 3y ago
  This is a profound misreading; royal birthright, aristocracy, and the ruling class are not taken to task or shown to be "fruitless" at all in Tolkien, and while today we may read Frodo as "the common man" his contemporary presentation is firmly (pastoralist and conservative English) upper middle class. The Baggins are landed gentry, not "the little people".
  - jl6 3y ago
    Reasonable Marxists may disagree on the class status of the Bagginses: https://users.pfw.edu/wootdm01/bilbo.html https://users.pfw.edu/wootdm01/bilbo.html Personally I think that as well as their local status, their class can also be analyzed from a global perspective, where the hierarchy of the wider world goes Eru > Ainur > Maiar > Eldar/Edain > Other Men/Elves > maybe Dwarves > everything else including Hobbits. In global Arda it matters not that Frodo was amongst the wealthiest and highest-status Hobbits - they are viewed as marginal by the other races, and it was this very marginal status that caused the “higher” races to overlook their potential, which is a large part of how they succeeded. I’ll also defend the idea that the military strategizing of Great Men was for nought. We are told quite clearly that the ring is the only hope for free peoples; that even if it is kept from Sauron, his forces will inevitably win. The Elves recognized this hopelessness (as part of the overall decline of “magic” in the world) and were slowly abandoning Middle Earth. Aside from Aragorn and possibly Faramir, the ruling Men are depicted as weak and flawed. The elite Elves and Men had ultimately failed - even after defeating Morgoth, Sauron had prevailed; even after defeating Sauron, he had returned. Further battle was positioned as noble but most definitely fruitless, unless the ring could also be destroyed. The greatest contributions of Men are taken to be those that assist or buy time for the Hobbits. No, they’re not taken to task for this multi-generational failure, and royal birthright prevails, but then Tolkien as a Catholic wasn’t aiming to demonstrate anything about class liberation - hence my reading of the story as being one of cross-class collaboration, and the wider point being that achieving meaningful change is likely to involve “big people” and “little people” finding ways of working together.
gattr 3y ago
On a side note, I enjoyed Joe Abercrombie's "The First Law" cycle. It subverts the "wise old man enlists young hero's services for a lofty endeavor" trope to great effect.
- number6 3y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation, sounds interesting
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  I enjoyed the writing and some of the world, but the lore was really confusing and I didn't really understand the beef at the end. Spoilers I guess the main wizard is to gandalf what homelander is to Superman? Like, what if he were more self-interested? I also didn't like how they didn't resolve Logan's story. I guess I'm supposed to read another trilogy to figure it out.
elihu 3y ago
> "The primary actor is a wise old man…" And that is why it is hard to call that a myth for our time. Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights. At the risk of making this political, our present era also has an old man who has earned the respect of younger generations by being well-informed, consistent in his views, with a strong moral compass and deeply concerned about the welfare of all people. I would argue that Bernie Sanders is the Gandalf of our times. We also have a lot of Denethors and Sarumans and Wormtounges. Our Dark Lord isn't a person, but maybe it's an ideology -- that if we can just maximize shareholder value everything will work out fine. Tolkien didn't like allegories and insisted that the ring wasn't symbolic of anything, but if it was our ring we can't bring ourselves to cast aside is fossil fuels.
- Sakos 3y ago
  What's changed is we've as a culture realized that age doesn't automatically bestow wisdom. A wise old man is a valuable part of culture and society. But not all old men are wise and it doesn't seem to be a function of being old. Bernie has held his beliefs for decades. He was wise when he was younger and that's persisted (or developed further with the guidance of time and experience) into his current age. Wisdom is something that has to be cultivated for a lifetime and we simply don't do that as a society or a culture. Did we ever? I'm not sure.
  - elihu 3y ago
    I think there are a lot of people who still care about wisdom and try to work on it. Our popular culture and economic and political systems don't always do a good job of encouraging or valuing wisdom. I think there are probably a lot of old men and women like Bernie out there, they just aren't very visible. What's unusual about Bernie is that he's managed to become famous and is in a position of power.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    > What's changed is we've as a culture realized that age doesn't automatically bestow wisdom. That's no new realization, but a continuing pattern, generation after generation. The youth of the 1960s took that idea much further than today's kids. 'Every generation thinks they invented sex.'
watwut 3y ago
> Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights. Citations needed, really. While young people do not look at old with awe or submissively, claim that they somehow uniquely or unusually look down at us seems wrong to me. And also, the little that exists seems to me more of reactive to hostility some in older generation seems to have quite openly.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > Citations needed, really. Here you go.[0][1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_boomer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_boomer [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/baby-boomers-greenhouse-gas-emissions-b2043755.html https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/baby-boome...
  - watwut 3y ago
    I do not think this proves that "Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights." Like at all. Especially since it popularity was an actual response to members of older generation bashing younger one. As in, it was literal response to that and relatively rarely used outside of context of the older people complaining about younger ones. I do not see younger generation rejecting everything that comes from older people, definitely not much more then what our generations or the one before seemed to do.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      Your English and your post history suggests that you are not from the Anglophone world. The generational tension I was talking about is a feature of it, I do not claim that it exists in the same way elsewhere.
      - watwut 3y ago
        And I am still aware of "do not trust anyone under 30" slogan from 60ties and aware and intergenerational issues of the past in the anglophone world.

croes 3y ago

I don't like the deus ex machina trick of turning Gandalf the Grey into Gandalf the White. That's like Spock's inner eye lid. BTW the primary actors are Sam and Frodo and their friendship where one carries the burden of the ring and the other carries his friend.

morelisp 3y ago
I don't think you can criticize "deus ex machina" as a plot device when it's, from go, literally "ex deus" - Gandalf is on a mission (/ missions) from god, and Eru's not gonna let him get off so easily.
- Ntrails 3y ago
  It's arguable whether you want to describe the wizards as 'Mortal' in the first place. The return of Gandalf never much bothered me, it fit well enough.
- croes 3y ago
  Just because it's literally ex deus doesn't make it less ex deus. Ex deus is cheap
  - morelisp 3y ago
    The more critical part is "from go" - deus ex machina is considered bad because it's a narrative rupture. In a story of wars openly involving divine beings, there's no such discontinuity. It is also usually associated with stories that wrap up a bit too tidily, and that's also not the case in LotR. Gandalf dies 2/6 of the way through the story and comes back 3/6 of the way through. His death may be the climax of the first two books, but his return is merely a plot beat and many of the remaining problems have yet to even be revealed, let alone solved.
rightbyte 3y ago
You don't think the plot was put out in advance for Gandalf to not die in Moria? Or what do you mean? I guess he had to disappear for the fellowship to break up. If I remember correctly, you don't get to know that he technically did die in Moria. That is background lore.

wrp 3y ago

Well...I've read some intellectual biographies of Tolkien, and a common complaint is that it's hard to pin down his views on much of anything outside of literature. He wasn't a systematic thinker, but tended to write what sounded good at the moment without much regard for consistency with what had been written before. He had to do a lot of later editing to remove logical conflicts in his stories. Remember that the impetus for his fiction was to create a world in which his created languages could live. So, positing a coherent ideological message in his story is a bit of a stretch. Also, Tolkien's wasn't one to focus much on real world social and political issues. I think the most notable example of him writing about politics is in a wartime letter to his son, when Nazi antics forced politics into his normally narrow interests. All that said, no good postmodernist would object to modern readers finding meanings in literature that weren't consciously in the author's mind.

clbrmbr 3y ago
> positing a coherent ideological message in his story is a bit of a stretch. Also, Tolkien's wasn't one to focus much on real world social and political issues. Maybe this is why I love LoTR so much. It’s just a story!
RugnirViking 3y ago
he famously got quite annoyed by people asking him about metaphors or whatever. "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence." He very much did not want to talk about it and presumably intentionally avoided writing it.
- morelisp 3y ago
  Not writing allegory (a very specific kind of comparison) doesn't mean nothing in the book is a metaphor. It's willful ignorance to pretend LotR has no ideology or non-narrative (moral, epistemic, metaphysical, etc.) content. Tolkien just doesn't want people to say "... and so the orcs are the Germans."
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago

watwut 3y ago

Evil against good framework is not all that much special, actually.

sBqQu3U0wH 3y ago

>An evil force that heavily used propaganda to spread their horrible ideas, and masses of people not only in Germany or Italy, but the rest of Europe and the US, refusing to acknowledge or oppose the reality of the evil, the grim future; and many even supporting it. Yeah, not much has changed in that regard. Though we likely have very different ideas of what that evil is nowadays.

wolverine876 3y ago
> we likely have very different ideas of what that evil is nowadays Because you don't know that, I see a comment that attempts to disrupt good people from doing anything, promoting despair. Quoting my GP comment: >> An evil force works not by open destruction, but through lies to cause despair and corruption. The good people of the world allow themselves to be influenced by it; they embrace despair and abandon goodness and all resistance; or they are corrupted and even help the enemy.