Tried to paint the maglor I designed. You can see his design here
oh man i fixed this thing almost ten times before iâm satisfied, i hope it looks ok-ish though xâD and if you still see something wrong with it DONâT TELL ME I DONâT WANT TO HEAR IT
music inspiration:Â Baba Yetu by Christopher Tin. 10 years ago today, it became the first piece of video game music to win a grammy PLS LISTEN TO IT
7. The moon was shining in a broad silver crescent. He held up the map and the white light shone through it. âWhat is this?â he said. âThere are moonletters here, beside the plain runes which say âfive feet high the door and three may walk abreast.ââ
I've another tolkien academic article to recommend, though this one is far more easily accessible than 'Wretched of Middle-earth' thankfully, though is also amusingly written by some 'Millers'
"Tolkien and Rape; Sexual Terror, Sexual Violence, and the Womanâs Body in Middle-earth" by T. S. Miller and Elizabeth Miller contains #1 an excellent examination of Shelob's often remarked upon 'monstrously-feminine sexuality' #2 a robust (if still too nervous for my liking) critique of Tolkien's treatment of rape in all his body of work, and #3 a whole new anecdote about Tolkien's medievalist scholarship that I had never heard about. This anecdote is also, crucially, so fucking embarassing for him like it has to be read to be believed.
The paper is (I think?) pretty approachable apart from the quotes that are in middle english. And somehow a bit funny too! Which I understand is strange to say about an article discussing rape but look;
In what follows, we will insist on paying close attention to what Tolkien and his writings say and show about women as embodied beings who desire and who age, even when these women take the shape of outsized arachnids.
this paper is so interesting to me because it is arguably one of the strongest critiques i've read of the ways in which the legendarium treats the question of sexual assault and womanhood, but it also specifically suffers from its cissexual and racial limitations in connecting the dots on the libidinal anxieties being expressed via shelob/ungoliant and eol - and specifically in a way that would ironically have been thoroughly enriched by an engagement w miller's critique of racial hierarchies in tolkien (tho i recognise these guys pubbed before miller's paper was published)
bc what really stands out to me in a glaring fashion, that the authors simply do not touch on, is the multiple ways in which shelob specifically is described as having a sting and wielding that sting to pierce/prick men and then "have her way with them". they even recognise it! observing that tolkien is essentially giving a "monstrous feminine" character a phallus. but the spectre of the monstrous transfeminine remains unobserved in a way that's very fascinating. certainly the figure of both shelob and ungoliant as having feminine genders and yet representing masculine 'rapaciousness' - literally embodied in phallic appendages, in the case of shelob - can't exactly be detached from historical anxieties about transfeminine (or transfeminised) figures, esp. colonial anxieties over gendered differentiation AND then attendant anxieties over upper class suffragetism (satirical depictions of these women always masculinising them or rendering them sexless and oversexed at the same time). there is almost a literal blurriness in shelob and ungoliant - like spiders, but not spiders, but something more and darker and intangible; like a female but possessing maleness - that i think speaks to this anxiety. plus their association with literal darkness and blackness, but also with foreignness & liminality (ungoliant with avathar (itself associated with the south and east albeit in valinor) and nan dungortheb; shelob with torech ungol, a liminal space that is neither mordor nor corrupted ithilien; both lacking a clear origin in space and place) also speaks to some of the racialised anxieties around light/dark and geography that charles w miller contextualises for us in his essay. and like, this racialised transfeminised figure specifically is the source of so much colonial anxiety right? black women and brown women who are rendered both sexually frightening against pure white women, but also mannish and therefore ambiguously gendered against the neat dichotomous genderdness of white women and men; white women whose femininity is defined in opposition specifically to the image of the ambiguously gendered black/brown woman and in opposition to the third-sexed, often transfeminised being.
but also re. upper class suffragetism & tolkien's anachronistic victorian/edwardian anxieties - it IS very interesting that for tolkien, the ideal woman is one who reflects the sort of virtues of these upper class suffragetists, who saw themselves specifically as stewards of british virtues and british purity (and therefore, also, for whom neat gendered difference was paramount; one thinks of the early proto-feminism of the bluestockings and women like hannah more who would set the terms for what would later become the tenets of upper class "feminist" thought in britain, framed heavily in terms of religion, spiritual motherhood if not physical, and intelligent virtue, but essentially "womanhood"). i was reading a very interesting paper ages ago abt the panic around "white slavery" at the turn of the nineteenth century which talked about early suffragetes framing the need for women to have the vote in terms of the failures of british upper class men - because of parliamentary corruption etc - to protect them against foreigners corrupting or threatening innocent british women, enslaving and sexually exploiting them. its an interesting recurrent strain in that many of the "empowered" women of the legendarium in some way or the other do represent some sort of stewardship of political virtues - galadriel, for example, and eowyn too in very direct 1-1 ways; varda of course at a cosmological level, as the one who receives the unsullied light directly from eru and stewards it; luthien & elwing at a higher metatextual level (i.e. by reflecting the higher purposes of eru iluvatar and in-turn, becoming quasi-custodians of this unsullied light via the silmarils). but its also interesting that the way gender operates in the legendarium, nearly all the women reflect some aspect or virtue of 19th century white feminine virtues, or else are disciplined back into that differentiation of genderedness (luthien's heroism is later reframed in the text into "the jewel which beren won and luthien wore" and she disappears from the narrative while beren returns to fight in various battles; eowyn becomes a wife; galadriel diminishes and goes into the west; aredhel, whose life has been characterised by "unfeminine" "selfishness" and a desire for freedom that is constantly framed in proximity to the masculine feanorians, dies in an act of other-centred, sacrificial motherhood).
which sort of brings me around to the "not wholly unwilling" problem, which this paper depicts as tolkien's squeamishness with sexual violence and of him wanting to have his proverbial cake and eat it too - which i agree is very much what's going on! but i also think that's a very surface level engagement with what's going on and where an engagement with charles w. mill's work could be so productive. because nowhere are the racial hierarchies that underpin the legendarium so so starkly and clearly enunciated as in the silmarillion, and especially in the story of aredhel and eol (with supplementary text in the essays on quendi and eldar, where there is an articulation of intra-elvish racialisation(s)). bc like, well, you could read "not wholly unwilling" as rape apologia yes, but at a much deeper level if you read it against the way the text explicitly positions eol as lesser (both turgon & curufin call him a dark elf; eol refers to himself as a teleri living on noldor occupied lands), it very much also reads as a depiction of the anxiety that not only might a white woman be enslaved and sexually exploited by a non-white man, but that even worse: she might enjoy it and welcome it more than she might the attentions of the white man ("she was often in the company of the sons of FĂ«anor, her kin; but to none was her heartâs love given"). this also puts it in line with the recurring references to aredhel's marriage as though the main problem is not the marriage itself, but the loss of property (and therefore, power and honour). not exactly indivisible from the anxieties and tensions expressed in texts like a passage to india: the simultaneous sexual fascination and repulsion and the class/race tensions that shape the simultaneous libidinal fascination/repulsion of the text.
which i think is sort of like... its interesting how the chaucer anecdote is described because i think it reflects exactly the ways in which tolkien has deeply conservative sensibilities that very much DO reflect in the legendarium outside of the expunging of overt references to sexual violence, or the sort of equivocating he does w things like "not wholly unwilling". the authors very rightly describe it as bowdlerisation, done ostensibly because of the "mixed" audience. but why! and well, if you look at the sociopolitical history of bowdlerisation, its not just about propriety but specifically the anxieties over reading and the corruption of virtuous, delicate women of sensibility (often the preserve of upper class women who embody this feminine ideal) and therefore about the preservation of an ideal, feminine womanhood. (just think about it: at the time that tolkien is doing this, women authors like virginia woolf and gertrude stein not to mention colette have been writing quite openly about sexuality). which again: this is an anxiety that runs right through all his texts in one way or the other and even reflects in the ways in which he keeps trying to change galadriel's narrative to establish her as an uncomplicatedly pure, virtuous woman. and it reflects also in what specifically is recounted and what is excised or written in extremely elevated allusion in the legendarium's texts AND also in the ways in which the women in the text are gently folded back into neat femininity, once they have fulfilled their ordained spiritual heroic purpose. it is also reflected in, therefore, shelob and ungoliant as these being straddling the lines of gender and with all kinds of racialised anxieties about the figure of the non-white woman clustered around them.
which is not to say this paper is not good bc i think its arguably one of the best enagements with tolkien's attitudes to sexual violence, sex and gender more broadly. but also just think what we could have with a transfeminist or critical race-based approach to the text and to also tolkien as a man of his time! this is actually so exciting and interesting to me, okay everyone bye.
Giggling, kicking my feet etc to wake up to transfeminist and racial critique in my reblogs on tumblr dot com. I only have a few things to say since I agree entirely with your analysis of the severe limitations of the article's critical process.
Firstly, don't let them too off the hook when it comes to the publish date of Mills' 'Wretched'! A lot is made of the essay within Tolkien academic spaces (justifiably so, it is an excellent piece of writing) but Roger Echo-hawk published 'Tolkien in Pawneeland' in 2013 if I recall and whilst he remains I think more fond and forgiving of Tolkien's work than Charles Mills was, he still offers a durable framework of racial critique of Tolkien I think. Certainly a better one than Dimitra Fimi's.
And there is a thread of hypocrisy within the article's writing, at once critiquing Tolkien for his squeamishness over excising certain uncomfortable topics from his work whilst themselves avoiding the elephant in the room of Tolkien's racial and wrongly-gendered evils. My post about it was humourous, but it is truly notable to me that hook-nosed and brown-eyed Denethor, in all his self-immolation, his lack of warring desire, his preoccupation with his children and his choice to be 'burned with the house', is described as 'like a spider'. Contrasted with Eowyn's framing as precisely the opposite of him, there is a great deal of transgender analysis to be had! And very few people are having it!
I am reminded immediately of the Queer Approaches to Tolkien book, Sara Brown references this article in her chapter on Shelob's monsterous femininity, and then continues to say that more should be made of Shelob's queer gender and masculinity. But the gender queerness that she evokes is never a trans-gender one, and is especially not a transfeminine one, with her speaking of Shelob as if she is a masculine woman only. And, if I recall, also acknowledging the 'prick' but only in terms of it's described 'feeding' of poison to frodo as a darkly maternal act.
The very next chapter of that book is about Eowyn's trans-masculine Dernhelm adventure. But I confess that when the first paragraph still felt the itching need to state that it 'does not mean to state that Eowyn is necessarily trans-coded' I got so frustrated with the demuring of it all that I haven't read it yet.
All I will say that could be reasonably construed as a defence of such squeamishness is that the Tolkien academic community and the fandom at large is a demonstrably hostile environment to critique Tolkien in at all, let alone apply racial or transgender analysis to him. My own partner was the target of a flurry of abuse online for a transgender analysis and recieved little to no support from the establishment tolkien academic community about it. And, though I think I have seen this racial analysis of Eol reappear on tumblr in recent days, the original blog run by a black woman who spoke about it most often on this site was harrassed into deletion because of it.
So! The environment encourages this extreme nervousness and you will find in most Tolkien articles you read there is always a step they did not take that would have added immeasurably to the depth of the essay. And whilst I do not doubt there is a lack of interest to blame, it is also due to this unwieldy demand to spend a great deal of your wordcount on justifying that you have a right to say anything out of the norm about Tolkien in the first place. Which I suppose I say more to save you from greater disappointment in getting into Tolkien Academia than anything else.
I realise now I could be preaching to the choir I don't know your investment in the Tolkien academic community and to be honest I am also more of a parallel viewer than any kind of literary academic with a position in this space BUT STILL! For any other readers I suppose đ I was frankly just very excited by your reblog! It gave me just enough of flow state energy to reply :)
!!!!! I had NOT heard about Tolkien in Pawneeland, but this is incredibly interesting and I NEED to get my hands on it. I haven't engaged much with Dimitra Fimi's work - I think I started reading her monograph and got frustrated by the fact that it was taking a conciliatory approach to Tolkien from the get go and abandoned it right away.
Also, VERY interesting point re. Denethor. Very interesting again, because I think that also speaks to a broader Brit lit tendency to position "failed men" in proximity to femininity or as lacking in upper class masculine virtues and to sketch that in by various means. Interesting also because sometimes Tolkien is quite overt and crude about the associations he's working with, but sometimes its mixed in also with the overall sort of mixture of the noble with the questionable especially when the character in question is of a "higher" race. E.g. we are meant to feel grief over the falls of Saruman, Sauron and Denethor (in different ways; I do think Tolkien ends up being more sympathetic to Denethor than the first two for obvious reasons) because of a higher being having fallen; but there's no such sense for, say, Uldor/Ulfang in the Silm or the Haradrim or the Orcs. But also interesting, because I think there could be some value in tracing these thrulines of "gender failures" through the texts to flesh out Tolkien's map of gender more thoroughly, which in turn I think could have something interesting to say about transgender potentials within the text.
And LMAO, I have noticed the defensive crouch and overall conciliatory approach that Tolkien academics seem to take in their works and I find it very interesting from a sociological POV. It is pretty much one of the few places I've seen where the author is granted such authority over the text even in acts of literary criticism and interpretation in a way that strikes me as just extremely odd and conservative even in what people are willing to read Tolkien in association with. Its not even what I'd call a formalist approach, considering???? the fact that people feel the need to defer to him or apologise for him or apologise for themselves. I don't know, its very odd and very jarring. I talked it over with a friend @notasapleasure once and they made a very astute/interesting observation about Tolkien scholarship being heavily influenced more by the norms of medievalism (i.e. searching out biography, or "source" "context" that can explain the text) rather than literary scholarship that really stuck with me, because it was the only sort of explanation I could have for just...the total absence of any kind of literary or critical theory in what little scholarship I could work my way through re. gender and race in Tolkien (outside of a few thoughtful authors here and there). Which makes sense intuitively to me albeit as a not very informed outsider, just from the POV of the seeming change that takes place in scholarship post-Shippey.
I have also noticed the hostility that births this kind of defensive writing that feels the need to apologise for itself lol. I've seen basically every single rhetorical strategy on the racefail bingo happen in Tolkien fandom either in relation to me or friends or just generally and I have noticed the chilling effect it engenders in fan spaces (I am also not surprised that people were bullied/harrassed off of here for breaking with the white feminist reading of Aredhel/Eol, which is about as liberal as this fandom gets). Its an unusually conservative (and white) fandom and atp a lot of my private chats are dedicated to unpicking this lol, but there's very little actual space to do that critique in public without it being treated as "discourse".
Anyway, I'm not surprised this shapes academic spaces! But I do think it produces extremely bad, weak and insular scholarship as a result - a lot of which feels like it is fully twenty years behind literary and cultural/media studies scholarship more broadly as a result. A lot of it feels (as a relative outsider) like there's a lot of energy being spent on reinforcing what ought to be some very basic tenets of critical readings and theoretical structures that are equally dismantled by some very basic and theoretically ungrounded structures that results in a sort of ouroboros of critical stasis. I'm not sure what Tolkien needs to be defended against, given his cultural ubiquity and power, but its frankly frustrating that the scholarship is so resistant to accepting viewpoints outside of the few acceptable and very narrow possible range of viewpoints. I don't think it results in a healthy field of study at all!
Anyway, I have no interest in engaging with that particular problem or untangling it :P I just like posting my thoughts on tumblr because I can't shut up and that particular paper set all my synapses flashing because of all the possibilities within.
as tax for enjoying this cute little drawing, you will now be enduring my THOUGHTS and TAKES.
Okay so Iâve been finding Faramir a very interesting figure recently when looking at the racialisation of the Haradrim through a âshadow of Gondorian imperialismâ lens when researching for my fic. Which is to say, in the context of race-in-Tolkien and the context of what is coming in the Fourth Age, I actually find him one of the most ominous figures looming over the upcoming Fourth Age conquest/enforced surrender of Harad/taking of Umbar⊠not because heâs bad or villainous, but because he manifestly is not, and is kind and good and gentle.Â
Because the argument for empire is always most dangerous in the mouth of its kindest defender, and a reading of his âI do not love the arrow for its swiftness etc etc, I love that which it defendsâ quote is just⊠so intriguing when thinking about what happens afterwards, when the orcs will very soon be all gone yet the Haradrim continue to live, have children, maintain economically useful territory (Havens of Umbar) that in the eyes of Gondor âneedsâ to be taken. And Faramirâs choices in the Fourth Age could have consequences that are either incredibly devastating or, potentially, somewhat hopeful.Â
So firstly Iâve realised this guy is actually the most useful character across the entire legendarium in terms of deciphering Westerly racial attitudes towards the Haradrim (yeah the First Age Elves were kind of racist about Ulfang and the other men from the East but also First Age Elves would have been racist about a bumblebee with one extra stripe so ngl their opinions on this front mean very little to me â ïž).Â
Obviously Tolkienâs own deeply conservative views on race are prevalent across the legendarium but itâs exactly that which makes it difficult to pick out, in a Watsonian sense, the individual racial opinions of the Westerly peoples of Middle Earth aside from what the Hobbits swiftly develop from saplings in Scouring of the Shire. And so it is in the section of The Two Towers beginning with Frodo and Sam running into Faramir and his men where we get the majority of any actual dialogue about the Haradrim, as opposed to omniscient narration. Where due to the amount of interiority and political speech afforded to Faramir on this matter, we actually get to see the ideology rather than just its consequences.Â
â...they (the Stewards) made a truce with the proud peoples of the North, who often had assailed us, men of fierce valour, but our kin from afar off, unlike the wild Easterlings or the cruel Haradrim."
(Book 2 Ch V, THE TWO TOWERS)
And itâs actually in the above quote from Faramir that we see it implied that the Gondorians consider the men of RhĂ»n and Harad as inferior/separate even beyond the military sense, because obviously Gondor wasnât exactly friendly with the men of the North either (which he straight up says) and yet they count as kin. And yes, I also wondered whether he might just be referring to the Edain/Blessed Men, but that wouldnât make too much sense since he obviously married Eowyn, whose lineage is not Edain/exiled Numenorean but AtanatĂĄri, ie âmiddle menâ (more on this later).Â
And this isnât just a single moment. I also noticed another quote by Faramir when I was reading âThe Wretched of Middle Earthâ by Charles E Mills (brilliant essay, go read, etc), where Faramir states: ââŠthe enemy increases and we decrease. We are a failing people, a springless autumn⊠childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry.â And again, this language of once-great races decaying as the barbarians bay at the gates is prevalent in a racial ideology that was present in Tolkienâs time, but also absolutely present in contemporary racial discourse, and especially so in Western, Central and Northern Europe, where I can point to you multiple cases of this exact language being used in present-day Germany regarding immigration even by seemingly liberal-minded sources.
Now this isnât a personal judgement of Faramirâs character by any means, and Iâm not at all saying heâs an individually terrible character or what not: quite the contrary. Itâs clearly just a product of circumstance, in being tasked with defending what was essentially the border at the time, he and his men pretty much have the viewpoint of any border guard now or then, ie a tendency to demonify/dehumanise those outside it in order to keep the artificial border artificially sealed. And considering that border was also a border with orcs, by whose hand so many Gondorian men have died, who are (in-universe) absolutely seen to be inhuman/subhuman/âcreatedâ... it perfectly gels with him being the one who narratively establishes the racial hierarchy, in which âmen of darknessâ are seen as adjacent to the subhuman.Â
[Sam] was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the manâs name was, and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peaceâŠ
[Book 2 Ch IV, THE TWO TOWERS]
This was actually something that irritated me about the Jackson films: the scene above where Sam in the book looks at the corpse of a Haradrim soldier, wonders if he ever wanted to leave home, what lies and threats must have brought him so far. And itâs quite literally the only moment in the books where a single shred of empathy is shown towards the âswarthy menâ on the other side of the war, yet in the films that scene and dialogue was given to Faramir who says it about a very young Haradrim soldier. I assume it was to establish him as kind/soft-hearted from the moment he appears on screen, an impulse I understand (even though his character establishes it multiple times with his other actions), but I just think itâs pretty unrealistic for a military commander whose men actually did the killing to say such a thing. Whereas itâs perfectly characteristic coming from Sam, a figure who just really fucking wants to go home, who knows very little about the men from the South, and in terms of his class position as well, is well placed to understand people being forced to do things they would not normally wish to do.Â
Like I said in my first paragraph, the argument for empire is always most dangerous in the mouth of its kindest defender, and Faramir is Gondor's most thoughtful defender: a man who explicitly rejects the crude form of imperial ambition, who tells Frodo in that he would not have Minas Tirith be a âmistress of many slaves, nay, not even a kind mistress of willing slavesâ, and who makes this declaration in the same conversation in which he describes a taxonomy of Men that places the Haradrim categorically outside the circle of kinship of Men.Â
He disavows the slave-mistress model of empire while maintaining the ideology that produces it, and so very clearly demonstrating the cognitive structure of the liberal imperialist: the rejection of empire's worst expression alongside the preservation of the framework of racial and civilisational hierarchy, the language which makes empire's gentler expressions feel less like violence and more like stewardship, the natural responsibility of the high toward the lesser.Â
And Iâm not pulling this out of my ass, because this is again seen in Gondorâs history with the Haradrim. Thereâs a tribute system that Tolkien mentions almost in passing: Haradrim chieftains were compelled to pay tribute to Gondor as well as send their sons to be raised in Gondor's courts following Hyarmendacil I's conquests in the early Third Age. Which reads, against the backdrop of the racial taxonomy Faramir establishes here, as darker than standard militaristic tribute systems. The practice of taking the sons of conquered rulers and raising them at the conquering court is obviously ancient and widespread: the Ottomans did it with the devshirme, Rome did it with the children of client kings, the British did versions of it across the nineteenth century in India and Africa etc etc⊠in each case the stated rationale was acculturation, which essentially produced a leadership class that would govern their people in a way acceptable to the imperial centre.
And similarly, with what is said by Faramir read alongside that moment of Gondorâs history, itâs clear that the Gondorian court doing the acculturating held an explicitly articulated position that the people being acculturated were not kin, were not of the circles of higher men, were inherently âcruelâ âmen of darknessâ. And so these boys would have learned Westron, Gondorian law and custom, the history of their own people through the chronicle of their conquerors, essentially learned to see themselves through the eyes of a civilisation that considered them subhuman.Â
That this policy resoundingly failed, ie that the Haradrim returned to Sauron's service repeatedly across the Third Age and that by the War of the Ring they were marching in force toward Mordor is, from within Gondor's own framework as well as that of the Oxford-educated early 20th century conservative, inexplicable, because the framework has no mechanism for understanding violent resistance as a rational response to the âkindnessâ done to the âlesser racesâ. From Gondor and the cultural centres of the âirlâ imperial core (see again: Oxford), the trajectory makes perfect sense: that people who were conquered, tributarised, had their sons taken, categorised as inherently lesser by the culture doing all of the above, would ultimately turn once more to Sauron.
And this choice is of course intended to be incomprehensible to both the assumed reader and the Gondorians themselves, because to us itâs narratively clear that Sauronâs deeds were monstrous and his service was destructive both physically and environmentally. Which is why the trajectory makes perfect sense to both audiences: the Haradrim, the Oriental stand-ins, make such a choice because they are ontologically irrational. They will always choose evil, because that is their inherent nature, because they are subhuman, only a few steps removed from beings created for the purpose of evil. Where the tragedy is that everyone had reasons to choose what they did, and frankly Iâm not a big Sauron guy at all but Iâll be honest, if all my sons and fathers and everyone was sent to the Gondorian courts to be taught that they suck ass and that Iâm bad at Westron class because Iâm adjacent to an orc, I might just reconsider and be like okay then fuck it if you bitches say Iâm an orc then you know what, Iâm an orc.Â
Anyway, that taxonomy passage and the childless lords one are some of if not the most explicit statements of Gondorian racial thinking anywhere in the books, and I found it so fascinating how it comes from Gondorâs most morally admirable character. Faramir divides Men into the High (NĂșmenĂłreans and their kin), the Middle Peoples (those who have had contact with Elvish influence and the Edain tradition and are simply not Edain due to geographical reasons or choices made in the Beleriand days), and the men of darkness (the Haradrim and the Easterlings explicitly, those who repeatedly served the Enemy of their own free will).
And itâs such an interesting statement because it converts a geopolitical and historical situation, where peoples born within Sauron's sphere of influence across many generations, conscripted into his service by the full apparatus of a dark lord's coercive and violent power (do we believe he wouldnât use orcs to quell rebellion within the Haradrim?), into a statement about moral character/will, something essential instead of contingent. And thatâs imperial ideology in a nutshell, where the historical is turned into the ontological, so that the people on the âwrongâ side of a military power relationship appear to occupy said âwrongâ position because of what they are instead of where, or who, or why they are there.
And the reason I called this âominousâ with reference to the Fourth Age instead of just interesting is because of Faramirâs institutional position after the Ring War. Heâs the Prince of Ithilien, ie recovered border territory that would become a frontier zone due to its adjacency to the near south, as well as Steward of Gondor under Aragorn. And due to this position, where Aragorn is obviously now in charge of multiple administrative zones and aside from his Thorongil ship-burning adventures in Umbar, had little prolonged contact with the Haradrim unlike Faramir whose adult life was spent maintaining that border, would make it very likely that Faramir would be made one of the primary architects of the relationship between the Reunited Kingdom and the peoples it is expanding into, ie the enforced surrender of the Haradrim and the retaking of Umbar.
Where the man who builds the policy toward Harad holds a considered view that the Haradrim freely chose âdarknessâ over and over and are not kin, who is a good man who would not be cruel about it but thoughtful and just and entirely convinced of the justice of what heâs doing, genuinely in love not with the violence but with the White City that must be protected. And I find that chilling because cruelty in a text that abhors wanton cruelty can be identified and condemned and ultimately is meant to produce shame and repentance. But the version of imperial ideology as seen in the Faramirs of the world only engenders more Faramirs, each one more and more considerate, humane, and better able to articulate justifications for the same outcome.Â
And like I gestured to earlier, his relationship with Ăowyn, the hopeful and triumphant nature of that relationship budding in war like no other has (with A&Aâs relationship obviously having started decades prior) just makes this even more interesting. Faramir's taxonomy places the Rohirrim in the middle tier, so not the High Men of NĂșmenĂłrean blood, but the Middle Peoples who came under Elvish influence and are adjacent to but not fully within the circle of the Edain, though they are not fully kin in the way the DĂșnedain are kin. The implication of the Gondorian racial categories, ie that intermarriage between DĂșnedain and Haradrim would represent a crossing of a civilisational and biological boundary, obviously sits in kind of, er, uncomfortable proximity to his marriage to a woman who is not of NĂșmenĂłrean blood either and is one of those Middle Peoples distinguished from the High.
And yet the racial framework doesnât collapse under this: partly because of course, the Middle Peoples are viewed as slightly âlesserâ but not of darkness, where they are absolutely still human and viewed as almost-equals, where a liaison represents hope and progress⊠and partly because the racial categorisation just accommodates Ăowyn through the mechanism that such frameworks always use to accommodate their exceptions, which is to accept the individual while maintaining the category, extending to a specific person the humanity that their designation withholds.Â
Which is something that happens in the book itself⊠think again about that single poignant moment of empathy extended to the Haradrim youth through the character of Samwise, in a book that so adamantly maintains the impermeability of racial boundaries⊠or how ârace mixingâ is seen as hopeful when it comes to Sindar/Noldor or beautiful but tragic when it comes to specific cases of Elf/Mortal romances, yet the racial boundaries are never broken with the âunpalatableâ races. Faramir looks at Ăowyn and sees Ăowyn, looks at the Haradrim and sees the men of darkness, and the distance between those two operations is where the Fourth Age begins.
The tragedy is that Faramir is, by every measure, the best Gondor has to offer, and just makes me think if this guy cannot see it, the structural likelihood of anyone else seeing it is not high. Tolkien leaves him at the end of the primary narrative as Prince of Ithilien, rebuilding the border territory, married to Ăowyn, presiding over what is presented as a kind of grace note of hope after catastrophe. And there absolutely is real hope in him because he is not Denethor, not someone driven to madness, the decaying custodian of a city turned inward on its own glory, and his rejection of the slave-mistress model of empire is not nothing, and is imo the slender thread on which the Fourth Age's better possibilities hang. Because he is a person who repeatedly chooses goodness, always reaches for the less cruel option.Â
But the taxonomy is also still built into the foundations of everything he will build when Gondor goes south. So perhaps Fourth Age Gondor will have Faramir's values and Faramir's categories simultaneously, except the categories will outlast the values because categories are structural and values are personal. And so itâs just as possible that the children of Haradrim chieftains will once again be sent north to be raised as hostages in the courts of Gondor, and the only question to ask would be âwhat lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home?âÂ
i have several thoughts on translation and tolkien. not just the textual role of translation in the conceit, no, i want to read the two towers in arabic because some things about the rohirrim would really, especially resonate in arabic. for example, the lament for the rohirrim, and the style of the old english lament that tolkien borrows to evoke maximum nostalgia, grief, and distance from the past, is almost perfectly an echo of the arabic rithaâ.Â
i found a translation of the fellowship that used the word jinn as a translation for elves, and several people took issue with the choice, but i found it simply perfect. elf, in english, has two connotations in the same way that the word jinn does, and the translator chose this word for a reason. i found it a clever choice.
âelfâ can evoke either galadriel and fĂ«anor or santaâs little helpers, and you would not swap out this iconic, useful word for another because of either connotation, would you? âjinnâ can likewise evoke figures of great mystery and mystique in worlds far removed from our own, or it can evoke horror stories told around a campfire. not only does this match the word for elf in english, in a sort of way, it perfectly captures the sheer difference between elves in the silmarillion and elves in the lord of the rings.Â
now, i should love an arabic translation of the fall of gondolin that captures how extremely ancient baghdad it is of turukĂĄno to craft two trees from silver and gold in a city that will never be finished, that will be built and rebuilt forever in the memories and the art of others.Â
I think much is made of Tolkien being a medievalist, but what Kuzu said earlier when we were discussing this is that he's really more like a classicist, but for northwestern Europe rather than ancient Greece & Rome. and I think that that is a really smart analysis of the way that... what makes someone a medievalist or a classicist is less about their particular area of interest, and perhaps more saliently about their own cultural positionality, because those things are defined within the cultural framework of Western academia. Like, I will sometimes see people talk about the fact that he says that he was motivated to write a lot of stories for the Silmarillion because he thought that it was very tragic that northwestern Europe did not have a written "canon" of mythology the way ancient Greece does. but I do not think I have ever seen any analysis of what that perspective implies when it is being held by a white British man born in the latter half of the 19th century. Like....do you understand me? it's important.
Thinking about starting a collection of screenshots of usamericans fundamentally misunderstanding some basics of historical class signifiers in the UK and can't decide whether the most egregious offenders are Tolkien fandom (including greatest hits like the hobbits are anarchists) or the average regency romance fan, Austenites included (greatest hits include literally anything to do with defining poverty)
If one believes that Tolkien's work is applicable enough to have wisdom for us in the current age, then you actually have to accept critique of his work levelled through the lense of the current age also.
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