Tolkien Expressed a “Heartfelt Loathing” for Walt Disney

No, a particular high order of angels (Seraphims) have six wings. Your run-of-the-mill, proletarian angels have two wings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_angelology?oldformat...

They will only be angry if they found those depictions disrespectful/mocking. Perhaps a few will like to point out the inaccuracy.

But most Western art has depicted angels with only two wings: even art by the most devout Christians.

And, iirc, it is a specific type of angel that had six wings (covered with eyes, etc...)

That "decay" interpretation would just as well to our earth: The old has gone, "decayed". You misinterpret change just as in "Today's youth is the worst generation", a theme that can be traced through history.

Which, of course, strikes everyone except Tolkien as hilarious, seeing that he wrote LotR in the 1940s.

I don’t think Tolkien sees this as a fundamentally deleterious development. But I haven’t seen how it ends for the Noldor so I don’t know. :)

As for Melkor, I don’t see him as fundamentally a force of decay. Destruction, yes. But Ilúvatar seems to have constructed Eä such that Melkor will always fail, that destruction will lead to differentiation and new lifeforms: not decay.

I wonder if this is an allegory for the way that life seems to defy the 2nd law of thermodynamics... not literally, the end always comes, but by creating a kind of a standing wave which seems to defy entropy, even if it is doomed to eventually decay.

... the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human 'literature', that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily it can be read 'just as a story'; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it

https://writingishardwork.com/2013/06/19/tolkien-on-allegory...

...

Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

http://askmiddlearth.tumblr.com/post/53933390053/tolkien-and...

But you will see very strong parallels between Tolkien and Christian mythology and pre-Christian myths. Like in Silmarillion you have blatant parallels to God and Satan. Tolkien likely did not consider this allegory. Like the sacrifice of Aslan in Lewis is not intended as an allegory for the death of Jesus but rather as a retelling of the same (universally true) myth - but come on, it is obviously an allegory for Jesus.

> For all we know

No, absolutely not. Rhymes are very important to old folk lore. And to language acquisition in general. And, in a metaphoric sense, to pattern matching over all.

Of course it is possible that the word was obscured from the get go lest it would appear derived. But I don't think it's onomatopoetic, if that's what you mean (I guess you didn't, though). Thinking about that, it's likely though that the word had to be pronounced by children, requiring easier phonemes, so perhaps no th. That gives a lot of leeway to speculate about an original root. Anther thought is that "swarz" (black) should be considered, because mines are inherently dirty, and as a kind of derogative. I agree though, expecting a single root would be too easy. A rhyme compressed into one word would easily obscure the term.

A very sad thought related to small people working in mines is child labor.

> No, it is not obvious. In fact, that is not a mainstream etymology at all.

It rhymes. That is not obvious? The proposed root *werg has hardly changed at all in over 2000 years!

> Nor is positing the initial dental as a “pejorative” prefix, something any recognized scholar of comparative Indo-European linguistics would do.

Was that a compliment? I'm aware that humanities research is full of opinion. That doesn't mean I was pretending to be a recognized scholar, just because I admitted an opinion.

> Furthermore, your connection of ‘dwarf’ and the PIE ‘work’ root to ‘warrior’ is, frankly, crackpot.

I did not read this off from a cracked pot to fill in the missing bits. I attempted internal reconstruction which is admittedly highly speculative.

--

Frankly, I suppose you are, like pretty much every linguist, biased towards your mother tongue, and can't readily accept the rhyme work~dwarf ... because that doesn't rhyme, indeed. Conversely, I have to admit a bias, too.

I couldn't even explain in detail how dwarf and Zwerg could be cognate or how to derive a Germanic root from those and other cognates. So, of course I expected the need to take this with a pinch of salt. But your spoon full was a bit much.

1) Old Disney - The best thing that can happen to girls is finding prince charming.

2) New Disney - Girls are just regular protagonists, sometimes purposefully going against the tropes.

3) Anime - Incredibly variety, top 5% is amazing re: girls or boys as protagonists, but a lot of it written for teenage boys and has women as side characters for sex appeal.

While there are certainly mature, grown-up anime with characters that make sense (try Your Name for something newer than Ghibli) a great big chunk of anime are just childish.

I have not seen the movie.

The problem with the Little Mermaid is that she is suffering all the way through and kills herself in the end, and then the story ends with the moral that every kid who misbehaves will prolong the suffering of this mermaids soul. I don't think even Lars von Trier could make that into a successful movie.

It is somewhat hypocritical to lobby for removal of the same protections that enabled your own success.

Star Wars is a fairytale of our days, yet no artist can retell the story or expand the universe.

I think this is true of English speakers. In German everyone knows the standard phrase "und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute" ("And if they have not died then they are still alive today.")

It's a sufficiently well known meme that people use it regularly in jokes.

Edit: added quote for clarity

To me the most familiar closing formula is "und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute", which is quite interesting to think about really: what does it tell or suggest to the listener?

Thank you both for the German formulas - there are examples from many languages at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_upon_a_time

The Disney Cinderella is based on Charles Perrault's version which was actually published earlier than the Grimms version. Both are recorded from oral versions. Perrault does not have the cutting off of toes, but have a fairy godmother and a magic pumpkin which is not present in the Grimm version.

Disney put their own slant on the stories of course, just like any other retelling.

There are certainly things to be criticized about both movies, but I think much of the criticism came from people who never saw them.

Walter Francis White's NAACP statement (quoted in the Wikipedia article linked above) is a good example. White didn't see the movie himself, but commented on it based on reports from staff members. As you mentioned, he mistakenly assumed that the film was set during the era of slavery.

The thing that sticks in my mind about Song of the South is that Uncle Remus is the hero of the movie.

To me, the real tragedy of this film - which portrayed people of different races as friends and companions - was that James Baskett, who played Uncle Remus and voiced a couple of the animated characters, couldn't attend the premiere festivities in Atlanta because it was a segregated city. But how could Disney be to blame for that?

And right now I'm regretting having given away my old laserdiscs of Song of the South and So Dear to My Heart. :-(

It's too easy for some Internet comment in a few words to write off the serious, long-held concerns of millions of people, not to mention scholars and many others. Great numbers of people have suffered very great and real harm for generations. Perhaps we should be very concerned about what they have to say, so that that harm can stop. The response of ignoring concerns has a long history, as long as the blatant stereotypes in the movie, and have reliably achieve very poor results and great harm.

> idealic

Ideal for white people - that's always true; race relations have always been ideal (or much closer to it) for white-skinned people. Generally speaking, the predictive model of white-skinned people's view of race relations depends on whether the problems are kept out of sight: If people complain too much about racism, that gets a big backlash; white people become angry. The legal system's abuses, the poverty, the unfunded schools, the lack of services, and African-American people themselves are hidden in separate neighborhoods. As long as it's not bothering white-skinned people, then race relations are good!

Films like Song of the South fulfill many white-skinned people's ideal of African-Americans and of race relations. African-Americans have a long history of being defined by white-skinned people rather than by themselves (as do many excluded groups); almost every one you see is filtered through white screenwriters, journalists, researchers, political commentators, politicians, Hacker News commenters[0], etc. Notice the high proportion of African-Americans in fictional media who are criminals, who are poor, and who speak with a heavy urban slang. Believe it or not, those things are not true of the vast majority of African-Americans; most are ordinary people with ordinary jobs and lives, and speak standard English. Having lived in African-American neighborhoods, watching the portrayal on TV and films can be bizarre - it's an alternate reality written by people who have little experience and just toss in stereotypes.

Characters like Remus are objects, not people with their own priorities but things that exist to make white people happy and comfortable, both the fictional characters in the films and (especially, of course) the real people who buy tickets. Finally, in that film the long-repeated stereotypes are particularly obvious and overwhelming (IIRC, and many others agree). If the parent doesn't recognize them, I encourage them to learn about the issue.

[0] HN's lack of African-American voices is a serious impediment to discussion. It's very rare that any commenters can speak from that point of view. Note that African-Americans are almost always discussed int he third person - 'they' and 'them'.

It's OK to make cuts from a great book in order to fit the essentials. It's NOT OK to completely change the story, like making characters go to Osgiliath for no good reason, making Gimli a constant buffoon and transfiguring every motivation from protagonists, motivations well thought about as Tolkien revised its script during 14 years of writing.

And the second and third movies of the trilogy were not even great movies if you forget about the books. Dialogs half taken from the book and half-written like modern American English, general lack of consistency, and a x-parts ending that did not make at all cinematic sense and was all fan service for book lovers. Except that the Scourging of the Shire was missing. What a mess, really.