Iām not trying to play devilās advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what youāre saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesnāt, that is to give the author grace instead of immediately deciding that the racial politics of his work is intentional. I accept Tolkien was a conservetive, but I find it hard to believe that he was exposed to anti racist thought like we are today. I think itās important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because heās a linguist based in a very white part of England, whose background is in European history who did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm. Of course that doesnāt make the text less racist but itās an important thing to consider. Thatās all, I agree with your other points.Ā
Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so Iām snowed under atm ā ļø
So thereās a lot of talk about Tolkien being āof his time and classā but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. āOf his timeā is not a neutral statement and it certainly isnāt applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ānorms of his timeā seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to āwhat Tolkien saidā rather than āwhat was actually happening thenā.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the āthe fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his timeā line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.
I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.
Beyond the Oxford ventures, you have things like Moodyās League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 and organising against colour bar practices in Britain itself. The West African Students' Union had been running since 1925, building a public anticolonial intellectual culture that fed directly into multiple independence movements of the following decades. CLR James was in England from 1932! And so on and so forth! And many in these organisations were white British activists or public intellectuals or writers! This was a live political and literary scene running in parallel with Tolkien's and explicitly arguing against the racial categories his fiction sought to preserve. Which is to say, I think whatās more likely than āthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didnāt know any such antiracist thought existedā is that āthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existedā.
can i say i am so glad the guy was not a lazy writer and also that he disliked direct allegory because if one of sharkyās minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking peopleās cats
Anyway, Iām so tired of how āof his time" just keeps getting used to mean "the time as understood by conservative Oxford dons," when the actual record shows Black British and colony diasporas and white progressives were producing sustained public counter-discourse in the same space the whole time, in his own country, in his own language, in his literal university. So when people say he was "just a product of his environment," I just always want to know which environment they mean exactly, because the one he was actually in very much did sustain quite a lot of anticolonial thought.Ā
Also just to get into the basics again, bro was famously a philologist, ie not exactly a profession where you could plausibly bumble through life without ever encountering race-as-a-formal-category. Philology in this period, and especially in Oxbridge, was literally a primary engine of race science. The Indo-European/Aryan linguistic apparatus that mapped language families onto racial stock was built by people doing Tolkien's exact job, so I really donāt think he passively inherited racial categories without noticing, he inherited them deliberately through years of formal study, with copious footnotes and his own academic judgement. Like I always find it so funny when people, even on that post, refer to the racial dynamics of the legendarium as āunconscious biasā because I just know Tolkien is spinning like a power drill in his grave every single time, because they just implied he was shit at his job š
Anyway, the entire feudal value system of the legendarium runs on inherited blood as a determinant of worth (even within the Shire, ie the most ānormal people not kings of menā place, where Sam is placed as a Good Man Friday), and this is a very well known fact within fandom. Aragorn's legitimacy is genealogical-first and earned-second, the blood of NĆŗmenor "running true" in some lines and "thinning" in others is outright presented as a real, quasi-biological fact about a person's capacity for greatness, and not to forget Faramirās entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the āchildless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gatesā bit.
Or if you prefer a Silm example, (note: the context of the exile and whether or not you think they deserved what they got is irrelevant to this point) but the Doom of Mandos and the Noldorin re-entry ban, when viewed as a mechanism detached from context, is fundamentally just the ontological excision of a ābirthright citizenshipā as a consequence of a personās actions. Idk how big this was outside the UK but remember when Shamima Begum was extensively groomed as a child and fucked off to join ISIS and the UK decided to strip her of citizenship and leave her stateless? This is basically just that, ie the legitimisation of an ontologically confirmed birthright citizenship that can be granted to exceptional cases at the behest of the ruling body (see: Hobbits, Peredhels) due to their extraordinary actions, but also can just as easily be taken away by the same ruling body in response to a transgression. Like this is literally just present-day āmigrant criminalityā discourse, how can you say he didnāt anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration š
(once again to the reader, please let me reiterate i am simply comparing the mechanism of the exile alone, i am not saying that the FĆ«anorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls donāt jump up my ass š)
Tolkien wasn't writing this in a vacuum where phrenology was a fringe pseudoscience nobody respectable touched, it was institutionally embedded and state sanctioned British science well into the interwar period, with its own society and journals, and an enormous presence in Oxbridge. Moral and mental character of Great Menā¢ļø being first fixed by descent and the subsequent positive/negative shaping of character by choices and environment being seen as a somewhat effective yet undeniably secondary mechanism, is literally the loadbearing premise of race science. Itās not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!Ā
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean āhe did not anticipate a world where migration is the normā??? šThe legendarium isnāt a product of 1937 alone, bro was notoriously still tinkering with its genealogies and societal architecture well into the 1960s and early 70s and pretty much until the day he died, like a fucking dweeb (for once, complimentary), hence why it takes the fragmented form it does. That's a working lifespan that runs through major global decolonisation, Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, through literally the entire long and convoluted and drawn out process by which Britain had to publicly and unavoidably reckon with the idea that the empire's subjects were now their neighbours. At some point we need to truly engage with what "of his time" means, ie we have to reckon with the fact that āhis timeā kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didnāt.Ā
And to bring up the same example from my original post but in a different light, Tolkien was completely capable of precise and deliberate racial argument the second it was framed as being about himself rather than his fiction. In said well known example, in 1938, some German publisher wants confirmation of his "Aryan" descent for translation rights, and Tolkien's (drafted) response is sharp and furiously specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of him by the Nazis and exactly why it's grotesque. Compare that to the total absence of literally any comparable interrogation applied to the Haradrim or orcs, or the entire chronology and geography of Middle-earth where evil consistently arrives from the same two compass directions wearing the same coded features. Man like. Tolkien was honestly a pretty clever guy, and ngl I feel it does him a (very funny) disservice to assume he didnāt have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does ā ļø
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on āunconscious bias of the era" does not actually originate in a true desire to absolve Tolkien (fair enough, because this is a man who has never once asked to be absolved of the opinions he holds strongly enough to work into his narrative at such depth) the individual, and but rather in the interests of keeping the emotional crutch of loving a beloved childhood text without having to acknowledge that the person who made it was making choices in the same way Rudyard Kipling or Rider Haggard was making choices, and yet very few people offer Haggard this kind of protective custody in present day.
Almost nobody aside from hardcore conservatives sits around saying King Solomon's Mines just "reflected the assumptions of empire" as if Haggard had no hand in shaping said assumptions himself, we read it (correctly) as a deliberately shaped ideological project worth taking seriously as an argument. Tolkien, specifically due to the fandom culture around him both then and now, often gets a pass that even Kipling doesn't, and imo it's not because the textual evidence is thinner but because the fandom loves him more and flinches harder when heās hit. Which is to say, the insistence on āTolkien was of his time and his time was badā being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about āthe timeā Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.Ā
On a vaguely related note, I also think āthis fandom gives grace to the authorā should not be treated as a complimentary statement, especially because one of the elements of the Tolkien fandom which genuinely baffles me is the general air of author-genuflection across the board regardless of what fandom pocket youāre in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and itās doubly baffling considering that he isnāt exactly a sensitive up and coming artist but a dude who has enormous mainstream cultural impact and, crucially, has been dead as a doornail for decades.Ā
Like it is quite funny but also on a serious note, whilst the sentiment is understandable because yeah the world and its languages are as immense as the work he put into it and it is very important to so many of us, I think a publicly performed culture of āgrateful to the author for this wonderful worldā is one of the things that preclude a deeper critical understanding of the legendarium itself. Amusingly, this is literally the only thing that makes me miss the bloodsoaked battlefields of anime fandom, because Masashi Kishimoto may have painstakingly drawn 3 billion pages of Naruto, but 95% of the fandom would probably, upon meeting the guy, tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly on the head with a rubber hammer going āwhy the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?āĀ
I have a longer post cooking abt the historical elements of Tolkien as a man of his time re ideological genealogies and contemporaries, but in the meanwhile I just want to say by his own letters (letter 83, written in 1944), Tolkien was an avowed supported of General Franco, which a) most writers of his generation were in active and public opposition to Franco and b) Tolkien spends a not inconsiderate part of his letter bitching about how the notoriously conservative C S Lewis himself is opposed to Franco and infected by "Red propaganda" and c) if it comes to fellow Catholics, Graham Greene himself opposed Franco, even if he was unhappy abt murders of priests. And I also think it is very important to note re the stewarding of these conversations that there are exactly two papers on Tolkien's support for Franco, one by an independent scholar and one by the head of the Tolkien Society in Spain, who managed a private interview with Priscilla Tolkien and who cited her godfather having been a Francoist himself - and THAT author is, guess what??? a fucking Francoist himself. The conversations and scholarship about Tolkien are NOT happening in a neutral and "normal" space.
I did my PhD in a fish lab, and one time I was emailing a fish company, and the guy emailed me back with the signature āBest fishes,ā followed by these guys
asked one of my coworkers how she's doing today and she goes "could be better, could be worse," and another coworker nearby who was eavesdropping chimes in with "could be a lil bit o' alligator curse!" i have no idea what he meant by that but i do know that it has been immediately added to the lexicon.
I can't believe we live in a world where there's an AI company unironically called "Palantir," and it isn't a parody. It's a real thing. I remember seeing a picture of an advertisement on here and thinking, "This HAS to be a joke. This is too on-the-nose to be real. They wouldn't honestly name an AI company Palantir, after the Seeing Stones from Lord of the Rings that are supposed to offer knowledge, but famously also might be feeding you misinformation from evil sources because 'we do not know who else may be watching.'" But then here I am listening to the BBC News discussing why the CEO of Palantir just published a Manifesto that sounds like it was written by a supervillain.
But also itās kind of rude to assign gender roles and sexual preferences to someone just because theyāre masc. just because she wears a snapback that doesnāt mean sheās a top or able to fix your car or whatever.
and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.
^^^ PEOPLE ARE STILL THERE. There's a metro station across the street from the colosseum where i found a hair in my pizza slice. We drove by ruins of an amphitheater next to a motorway in greece once. It's literally just real places where real people live and have lived. It's not mythical perfect lands that once existed. I went to Itacha in 2023 and there was not enough parking space.
and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.
#bury your gays and women in refrigerators and the black guy dies first are all about treating marginalized people like props#to further the story of the (white straight male) protagonist#that's not the same thing as a tragedy! some stories are tragedies! whose story has weight and meaning - that's the question
Iāve been reading through the notes and I just have to say that I absolutely promise, promise, promise you that nobody in the dental surgery is there to judge you, and weāre certainly not mad at you. Cavities happen. Even to dentists. You think your dentist has a mouth full of virgin teeth? Unlikely! Theyāve all visited eachotherās surgeries to get a quickie filling (ooh, saucy) between patients. They understand that life can get in the way of oral hygiene sometimes. They understand that lifeās too short not to eat chocolate. They understand that youāve got to live. I swear to you that everyone in that room is just there to help you. Please, please, please donāt stop going to the dentist because youāre worried theyāll be mad at you. Itās really not the case. They understand. Itās fine. Itās really, really fine. Please go to the dentist. I promise you itās ok.
I had some badly bleeding gums awhile back after a depressive episode and my dentist has access to my prescriptions and I was on an anti depressants and antipsychotic at the time
he asked if my mental health was a factor and when I admitted it was he said āI can understand that it gets hard to do things like brush your teeth at times like that. Just do the best you can and brush your teeth at least once a day whenever you have motivation but if you canāt donāt beat yourself up. I know youāre doing your bestā
I tell this to the kids I treat so often when theyāre old enough to ask what getting a cavity means for them. I tell them, āIf you get a cavity, the only thing that happens is that we fix it. Iām not gonna be upset, Iām not gonna think you did anything wrong, Iām just gonna help you fix it.ā
Itās also worth noting that even with the best dental hygiene routines, sometimes things just break down. My dad took really good care of his teeth his entire life, and yet he still had to have several teeth pulled because they had become too decayed. Another friend of mine has a degenerative bone disease that means that his teeth have needed multiple root canals, and that started happening to him when he was still in his 20s. He expects that he will need dentures by the time heās 55. Developing a cavity does not necessarily correlate to your dental hygiene routine; genetics also plays a huge factor and sometimes you just pull the short straw. Do the best that you can with what you have and understand that bodies age and wear out and do weird things, and that is OK too. ļæ¼
