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Comment by davidy123 | Hacker News Reader

OK, I was wrong about the very specific influence. But it's ultimately the same thing; flatten the idea of the enemy to make a sport of killing reasonable, and more entertaining stories. That may be an appropriate thing to do in the most dire circumstances, but it's still a disturbing moral choice given that "evil" most often has to be invented.

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The thing you're missing is that Tolkien didn't "dehumanize" the enemy, because the enemy were literally not humans. Orcs are a deformation — a creation intended to be evil from the beginning. They have no inherent good in them, as a fact. I believe Tolkien wrote about this in some of his letters: that the Orcs are really truly evil creatures, by design, and that questioning that fact is against the purpose of their existence in the story. They're a manifestation of the evil of Morgoth.

In contrast, bad men are handled quite differently. Shortly after Frodo and Sam meet Faramir in The Two Towers they find themselves on the edges of a battle between the Rangers and a company of Haradrim (supposedly "evil" men from the East):

> Sam, eager to see more, went now and joined the guards. He scrambled a little way up into into one of the larger of the bay-trees. For a moment he caught a glimpse of swarthy men in red running down the slope some way off with green-clad warriors leaping after them, hewing them down as they fled. Arrows were thick in the air. Then suddenly straight over the rim of their sheltering bank, a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on top of them. He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar. His scarlet robes were tattered, his corslet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood. His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword.

> It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's 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 peace – all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind.

Though this is certainly the most explicit instance of a character questioning whether another is truly evil, the theme is present throughout the novel.

(Excerpt copied from "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit", the fourth chapter in The Two Towers, pages 660-661 in the 50th Anniversary Edition of The Lord of the Rings as published by HarperCollins in 2004.)

The willful creatures in the story are representations of humans just as much as talking ants in a Pixar story. Or, the story has no real relevance at all because it's pure fantasy. You can say the stories are about the humans on one side of war, but there are better examples of war novels with balanced perspectives without the fantasy elements. LoTR probably mainly rose to prominance due to the Hobbit being sold as a children's tale, the provenance my comment starts with.

Another comment includes the phrase "orc-crowd" from one of Tolkien's letters. Perhaps Tolkien (to comment on him personally this time) decided to vilify certain behaviours, which is a common enough response.

> The willful creatures in the story are representations of humans just as much as talking ants in a Pixar story.

No, I disagree. Tolkien was emphatic that his stories were not allegories for anything at all.

If you were right, then why would Tolkien also have bad humans? Why not just make all of the enemy into orcs/trolls/etc? Why have the dichotomy if not to show that humans are capable of being both bad and good, thus separating them from truly evil creatures like orcs?

> Or, the story has no real relevance at all because it's pure fantasy.

Yes, that's correct. The story is pure fantasy; it doesn't serve to "teach" about anything. It's literally just a story.

> LoTR probably mainly rose to prominance due to the Hobbit being sold as a children's tale, the provenance my comment starts with.

I think LOTR became prominent because it literally invented modern high-fantasy and created a gigantic world the scope of which had never really been seen before. The Hobbit touched on it, but LOTR really goes into far more depth about many things than The Hobbit ever did.

> Tolkien didn't "dehumanize" the enemy, because the enemy were literally not humans

I think the GP is saying the same thing, but from another perspective (and I agree). Effectively, the GP says:

the enemy were literally not humans so Tolkien literally "dehumanizes" the enemy.

Another way to to look at it: In the Lord of the Rings, you can identify someone's character by their appearance and 'race': Orcs are evil; odd-looking people (some in Bree, IIRC) are questionable; Elves are just and wise; Dwarves are greedy and sturdy; etc.

It seems to me that this interpretation would only make sense if all of the enemy are orcs/trolls/etc. But that's not the case at all. Tolkien draws a clear distinction between the truly evil non-human creatures and the bad/misled humans.

> odd-looking people (some in Bree, IIRC)

"The Southerner", who is later speculated to in fact be a rather human-looking orc if I remember right.

Just to add on to your very good description, Tolkien himself wrestled with the question of the moral/spiritual nature of Orcs. Are orcs just soulless creations of Melkor/Morgoth? Are they twisted/mutilated perversions of Elves and Men? The latter is the interpretation the Jackson films go with, but it wasn't absolutely firm in the books and the legendarium in general. The question of the ultimate fate of Orcs and whether or not they can be saved or if they have good in them is something Tolkien tried to reconcile with his own faith and theology.

The following StackExchange post illustrates further the questions that Tolkien was trying to figure out: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/26725/what-is-the-...

except that when it was enemy men who died, the attitude portrayed in the Lord of the Rings was markedly different. Orcs were Morgoth's primordial perversion of the light. Tolkien, who experienced first hand the horror of the Great War, was no war mongerer. Read his letters.

I think the point davidy is going for is that Tolkien was dehumanizing the enemy by making them the "evil other" much in the same way that the Japanese soldiers did. Essentially, by making the enemy into faceless monsters, it's easier to make sport of killing them than it would be if they were men with similar backgrounds and lives as their killers.

Whether you see this as Tolkien glorifying warmongering or him commenting on the psyche of war that made such acts possible is up to each reader to decide.

Remember that he fought in a war where it was Democracy vs Dictatorship.

It was very much a good vs evil feeling at the time. You can look at propaganda pieces of the time.

Tolkien was not of the opinion that war propaganda represented absolute truth.

Here's an example of his thought on WWII:

> I have just heard the news. Russians 60 miles from Berlin. It does look as if something decisive might happen soon. The appalling destruction and misery of this war mount hourly : destruction of what should be (indeed is) the common wealth of Europe, and the world, if mankind were not so besotted, wealth the loss of which will affect us all, victors or not. Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children pouring West, dying on the way. There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted. The destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of the most appalling world-catastrophes. Well, well – you and I can do nothing about it. And that shd. be a measure of the amount of guilt that can justly be assumed to attach to any member of a country who is not a member of its actual Government. Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter – leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What's their next move?

http://www.tolkienestate.com/en/writing/letters/letter-chris...

If you read his full letters, you will discover that davidy's ideas about what Tolkien thought, and what he represented in LotR, are tremendously wrongheaded.

I haven't said anything about what Tolkien thought or his wartime experiences. What I have commented on is his fantasy stories and similar types of story, which are staples for some audiences (and in this case apparently beyond reproach). They are separate things. Tolkien may have been a great, balanced humanist in his letters, but his stories are about good and evil, surviving grim circumstances, glorious battles and magical kingdoms. It's very likely his books were moderated by his publisher, who would specifically ask that nuance be removed.

There are plenty of examples of nuanced war stories, with more consideration and without requiring the use of "evil," for example by Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller. But the path of reading those books starts in adulthood.

If you read his Letters, you will understand that you are absolutely not correct. Tolkien's views are bound up entirely with his stories. He explains precisely how and provides interpretations on many occasions. You are seriously misrepresenting his fantasy works, not just his personal views. To all appearances, you are speaking whereof you know close to nothing. I apologize if this comes across as adversarial, but this is a serious mis-reading of a man who felt very deeply about the subject.

> more consideration and without requiring the use of "evil,"

Unfortunately, whether you like or or not, there is a such thing as evil for most people. You appear to like "nuance", which appears to be code for some sliding relativistic scale. Yes, dehumanization is bad, but that's not what Tolkien is doing when he talks about evil, whether you think so or not. That's why, for example, torturing information out of Orcs is unjustifiable in-story regardless of circumstance - because to engage in such an act is to be an Orc, which is a mode of being (alluded to in the Letter I quoted)- or why taking up the Ring causes good to be perverted into evil.

I don't think propaganda pieces are going to contain full reality, practically by definition. Which is not to say the times weren't dire. But Tolkien's work is fantasy and considered deeply moral under contrived circumstances. Viewed as a simple story it's fine, but given their stature I'd rather watch x-men, which has more nuanced characters, or something that tries to be accurately and considerately historical, or something that isn't about finding excuses for glorious battle.

Hmmm. What in the Tolkien canon, or in his letters, suggests that any of his works are propaganda?

That was meant to be a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17248468

Ok. Your preference is your preference - and I don't think anyone's going to suggest that you shouldn't watch X-Men if you want to. At the same time, one might reasonably read your comments and come to the conclusion that nuanced stories are better than ones that are not.

There is evil in the world. Auschwitz was evil. The Famine-Genicide in the Ukraine was evil. The Gulags were evil. The death of (tens of) millions of Chinese during the Great Leap Forward was (the result of) evil. One could go on. Many people, and I'm one of them, would reject any nuance that tried to diminish and explain away these evils. Do I want to understand what I can do to prevent them? Sure.

There should be room for both nuanced stories and grand narratives.

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