el ✯ she/her ✯ 24
ao3
"The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance." -Jeanette Winterson
listen to me, this is so so important: you've gotta get used to really giving it your 60% as a default. like don't half-ass it necessarily but try not to go over 70% or so of an ass. you'll feel better and live a happier more fulfilled life, and on the rare occasions where you do need to lock the fuck in you'll be able to pull off bullshit that the sad miserable wretches giving it their 100% can never dream off, because they're busy draining themselves dry and you have energy reserves to spare.
Something about the bastardization of the story time and time again proves that nobody in power really cares about the people who would resonate with King’s Carrie White. A girl so ugly and repulsive she’s been removed from her own story. The societal need for women and girls to be constantly perceived as attractive is what fuels a fair amount of her torment in the book, but that person isn’t even allowed to exist on the screen. We cannot empathize with her; it isn’t allowed. It’s fascinating to me.
and like. girl vampires who are given the same kind of depth as male vampires of reconciling their own monstrous desires with how human they still are or not. and not like. vapid sexy temptresses or whatever. they have their time and place but i want a girl vampire desperately gripping the sink looking into the mirror just to see what isnt there anymore
do you think when Bilbo held Frodo in Rivendell it struck him how small Frodo felt in his arms, as if he was holding a little orphaned faunt again? do you think Bilbo mourned what he had done to his little boy?
I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what you’re saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesn’t, 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 it’s important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because he’s 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 doesn’t make the text less racist but it’s an important thing to consider. That’s all, I agree with your other points.
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 I’m snowed under atm ☠️
So there’s a lot of talk about Tolkien being ‘of his time and class’ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. ‘Of his time’ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isn’t applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ‘norms of his time’ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to ‘what Tolkien said’ rather than ‘what was actually happening then’.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the “the fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his time” 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 Moody’s 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 what’s more likely than ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didn’t know any such antiracist thought existed’ is that ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existed’.
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 sharky’s minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking people’s cats
Anyway, I’m so tired of how “of 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.
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 don’t 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 ‘unconscious bias’ 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 😭
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 ‘normal people not kings of men’ 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 Númenor "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 Faramir’s entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the ‘childless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gates’ 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 ‘birthright citizenship’ as a consequence of a person’s 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 ‘migrant criminality’ discourse, how can you say he didn’t anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration 😭
(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 Fëanorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls don’t jump up my ass 😭)
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 Men™️ 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. It’s not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean ‘he did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm’??? 😭The legendarium isn’t 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 “his time” kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didn’t.
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 didn’t have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does ☠️
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on “unconscious 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 he’s hit. Which is to say, the insistence on ‘Tolkien was of his time and his time was bad’ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about ‘the time’ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.
On a vaguely related note, I also think ‘this fandom gives grace to the author’ 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 you’re in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and it’s doubly baffling considering that he isn’t 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.
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 ‘grateful to the author for this wonderful world’ 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 ‘why the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?’
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.
Whenever I read LotR and reach the battle between Eowyn and the Witch-king, I get the impression that the reason why the prophecy loophole works isn’t that the Witch-king is unkillable except for some illogical weakness nobody had thought about yet for misogynistic reasons, but that the Witch-king himself derives so much of his power from the fear he instills in others and from his own belief that he is unkillable. Eowyn doesn’t fear him, because she doesn’t fear death. When she twists his words right back at him, she’s not trying to exploit a prophecy loophole, she’s just making a play on the double meaning of the word «man» with fairly standard battlefield bravado.
But, crucially, it gets the Witch-king wondering if there might be an actual loophole in the prophecy. He starts doubting his own invincibility. There’s no logical reason why a woman might be able to kill him if a man cannot, but prophecies are tricky things. What if …
And this is what undoes him, in the end. This last minute doubt. The Witch-king, deep down, believes that Eowyn can kill him, thus making it possible for her to do so.
The elves care about the prophecy. The Witch-king cares about the prophecy. All the old, powerful beings of Middle Earth play by the rules of prophecy and live by the logic of Norse Sagas and Germanic legends.
Eowyn marches up to the Witch-king like Jared (19), goes “that sign won’t stop me because I can’t read”, and because the storybook logic, the fairytale logic, of the prophecy allows for her kill him, the Witch-king as a creature of stories and nightmares has to play by his own rules and die by her sword.
As people have pointed out before, the phrasing of Glorfindel’s words about the Witch-king allow for quite a number of the inhabitants of Middle Earth to kill him, if we’re only looking for possible loopholes in the prophecy.
not by the hand of man shall he fall
According to this, the Witch-king could technically be killed by elves, dwarves, ents, hobbits, orcs or maiar. Why doesn’t Legolas kill the Witch-king? Why doesn’t Gandalf?
As mentioned, elves are very aware of the story logic that governs Middle Earth. They see their own place in the narrative, they know which foes are beyond them. Gandalf, too, knows that he cannot be the one to kill the Witch-king, and the Witch-king knows that Gandalf cannot kill him. Through their combined beliefs, the outcome of their fight is predetermined.
Eowyn doesn’t know what she can or cannot do according to story logic. The Witch-king has killed her Theoden. She sees no reason why she shouldn’t avenge him. And when she hears the Witch-king tell her that no man can kill him, she simply decides that that rule doesn’t apply to her.
Eowyn isn’t the only person who could have been the exception to the rule, but she is the first person who decides to genuinely, honestly believe that she is the exception to the rule, and this is why she ultimately kills the Witch-king.
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