And to quote some sources: according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_o...):
> Nearly half (49%) of leave voters said the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the European Union was "the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK". ("in the UK." meaning: "by the UK." logically implying: "on behalf of 66 million UK citizens not 508 million EU residents.")
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Shadow
> I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men, it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would have been just that. Not worth doing
I find that writing process fascinating. Begin writing about your world a few generations later. Find you've added some satanists and other assholes to it. Get upset because the world sucks now. Stop writing the story because it wouldn't be a good one to tell.
It would seem he didn't control his own sense of canon and direction. He just had a genuine vision of it all and it was either going to be exactly that or nothing at all.
But he HAD to go back and add that name in later editions because this place and its history was SOOO real to him.
For every story we got from him, he must have built a hundred more in his imagination of that place.
> Tolkien says that the name "Maggot" was a Hobbitish name whose meaning has been lost in history. Maggot should not be understood as the English word maggot or larva. The similarity is coincidental.
Another frankly incomprehensible example.
"This guy's name was Maggot. Readers will probably mistakenly assume that's an artistic choice, but unfortunately that's his name and I, as the author, have no agency to change that"
https://theconversation.com/glastonbury-archaeology-is-revea...
Meanwhile here in Scotland we've just got a rock that someone used as a pillow - but we do have a cool footprint and a nice island with "its cargo of mouldering kings".
That is a pretty impressive lineage, no matter who you are. I know why people see a direct line to this or that ancient tyrant as special, but it is a ridiculously fine distinction, comparatively.
Cryptonomicon
Edit: I was going to say that the name of the book isn't referencing that kind of crypto, but then I remembered that it actually is!
"My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself."
https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-to...
I suppose the Middle Earth in Frodo's times are a reflection of early medieval times. And to some extent that's how it was. Collapse of Western Roman empire was a time of terrible economic downturn.
It's more a question of the elves spontaneously losing the will to live.
Elves do not physically die, but they will enter comas and their souls will appear in the house of one of the Valar. The Silmarillion records this happening to one elf whose comatose body is maintained (but unresponsive) while their soul can be visited and conversed with.
[1] This fails to explain how the Mirkwood elves can live there. But the answer appears to be that they can't, since they leave along with the other elves.
The fall of the West was changing the name on the door. Theodoric could have been a western emperor for all intents and purposes. Even the institutions remained pretty much unchanged.
The only real distress was that the loss of Northern Africa as the breadbasket for Rome meant that Rome itself continued to shrink/decline (a process which had been underway for a long time by the end), and that was only because of the lack of a grain dole, which had been in place for 500ish years anyway, because even the late Republic had significant problems with wealth inequality.
If you want to talk about economic downturns, currency devaluation after mining all of the silver in Iberia, the crisis of third century, independent administration of the East and concentration of the wealth of Egypt/Syria into Constantinople, and the amount of wealth which went into keeping up auxillia/mercenaries are better targets, and those all long predate the fall of the west.
To Briton the Western Roman empire fell hard. There was a marked collapse of urban life, a shut down to bulk trade networks which were relied on for a great amount of the economic activity. Students were no longer sent to "Rome" (or the other metropolitan areas) for education. And worst of all the Roman Military left.
This led to a complete collapse of the system, people went back to sustenance living with the drop in living quality that this, suffered raids from the Picts, Irish and Germanic people's. There was a huge power vacuum that led to local 'warlords' rising in power and a politically fractured island. This also led to the Anglo-Saxon invasion.
It is from the perspective of (comparatively) modern scholars that we get the story of the "Collapse of the Roman Empire" because from the perspective of the British isles is was a collapse.
https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/01/21/episode-on...
Here is another on a general fall of Rome: https://open.spotify.com/show/4uxl02KkkbvH8kYxWtKs8b
Warning its got about 20 hours of content
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (dubious as it may be sometimes), Gildas, and archeological evidence from Essex really don't agree with "fell hard". It very much appears that the empire didn't have enough resources to continue propping up a fringe border province from the death of Julian the Apostate onwards, and that Brittania brought in Anglo-Saxon foederati to help out, who filled a power vacuum after Constantine III left (and possibly invited others to settle).
Particularly under Honorious, fighting between the Vandals and the Franks tied up almost all of the Roman resources in Gaul, which mattered in a way Brittania did not, and the population started to move into fortified settlements, especially after Constantine III took most of the legionary troops off in rebellion. This isn't really that different from what was happening in Gaul.
Fifty years before the "fall" of the West, there was no meaningful military presence in Britain which was not foederati, and before that, the situation was so precarious that troops revolted, leading to its abandonment. As early as the crisis of the third century, Roman Britain's economy shifted to become far more regional, since long supply chains through Gaul were untenable.
The primary exports were extracted minerals. It was, at best, colonial exploitation in antiquity. Raids from the Caledonians had never stopped, ever. Britons convincingly repelled an Anglo-Saxon invasion in 490, and it was primarily peaceful after that (and before that). Balkanized, yes, but hardly subsistence living with roaming bands of invaders.
This isn't any different than northern Gaul, or southern Gaul as the Burgundians, Visigoths, Franks, and Vandals cycled through. Or Illyricum. It happened earlier, but not like you describe.
It's incredibly telling that Gildas had both the time and education to write a somewhat polemical history less than a century after a "complete collapse of the system, (where) people went back to sustenance living", in classical rhetorical style, wherein he mostly seems to regard Britons as still being Roman (despite the "fall" of the West by that time, and the abandonment of the province 100 years earlier), as a Christian, which also tells us that Christianity had not been abandoned yet.
This is utterly at odds with your views. Where and from whom did Gildas receive his education? Why should we disregard his accounts of Mons Badonicus? Why should we disregard the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and archaelogical evidence from Essex, Wessex, and Kent?
This narrative is false.
I always think of history as kind of a tapestry, and filling in pieces (neighboring states, for example) can be reasonably informative.
If I were working backwards, since you're into podcasts, The History of Rome is obviously quite good, and The History of England essentially picks up the historical narrative with the Anglo-Saxon states prior to the Norman invasion. Having a good, digestible background (through these) makes the "missing middle" easier to fit in. There are very few easy/readable histories of it, but there are good histories of the Merovingians, for example, which can inform a lot about the neighboring region.
The focus on the Crossing of the Rhein and the Romano-Briton contenders for the throne seemed a little too conveniently dramatic. Having said that, I haven't read any more scholarly books on this period of history that contradict Baxter’s narrative and reading Coalescent book was a great way to learn about the various factors that caused the collapse of the Empire on the western fringes of Europe.
I've been sitting in this comment for a day or two now, trying to figure out what to say, because I totally get it. In a moment of serendipity, I was reading another book that illustrated I think the core conviction: humanity is not a machine, and while machines progress, people do not.
Tolkien sees in man a great capacity for both good and evil, rejects the notion of man's inherent goodness (borne of his Roman Catholicism and first-hand experience of WW1), and asserts that Good, while perhaps much diminished with respect to evil, is inherently the stronger force. (I think he's essentially Augustinian here--evil is an absence of Good or a mimicry of it, but cannot actually create. It only perverts.)
So yes, there is a sort of depressing aspect of his universe: a rejection of inherent goodness and of progress. People don't change, but their technology unleashes a capacity for evil on a massive scale. At the same time, there is an obvious thread of hope in the series, too. Evil cannot exist on its own, and the nature of the Good is to create anew. There are those touched from the outside whose goodness triumphs over the evil within and without. The eucatastrophe is real.
Notice that it is a hobbit who destroys the ring of power, nobody else could, be he dwarf, elf, wizard, whatever. Not even Aragorn!
Not so depressing if you look at it this way.
The list of atrocities is long - the entire character of the Ents, the entire character of Faramir, the conversion of Saruman from a master propagandist and manipulator to a cartoon villain... Then there was the addition of unnecessary comic and action scenes, and the exclusion of critical scenes (Scouring of the Shire).
Read the books, ignore the Hollywood adaptations.
Any general romancing of past times is not Christian specific.
It's likely that the author was writing though a period of intense instability. Something like a major world war or two. That would for sure be an influence.
The Christianity we know today was the state religion of the Roman Empire. It's core doctrines were agreed on in a council summoned by Constantine the Great. But then the great ancient empire fell. It was replaced by many lesser kingdoms, which tried to keep some old traditions alive, and the Church was the unifying force. But then the Church itself split apart, and the last remnants of the old empire fell to infidels coming from the east. And then the Church split again.
The idea that the world becomes lesser over time used to be a core part of Christian worldview. Industrialization changed that, but Tolkien considered the consequences of industry and technology a great evil.
Roman/Greek mythology:
> Both Hesiod and Ovid offered accounts of the successive ages of humanity, which tend to progress from an original, long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a nearly divine existence to the current age of the writer, in which humans are beset by innumerable pains and evils.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man
Hindu Mythology:
> Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred, or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness.
Your Roman and Hindu examples are spot on.
Progressive thought really is the exception and not the norm when I look at recorded history. You really only see it develop thematically as part of the Western Enlightenment. I think that primarily impacts so-called Western cultures, and in a sometimes contradictory way between sociopolitical and religious beliefs.
Caveat: I am not an expert in any of these topics. Just a hobbyist history/religion guy. I may be way off more thorough academic thought.
I would have a very hard time reading Genesis and then claiming that.
Is your point that, taken as a whole, the overall trend isn't so negative?
The success of European colonial empires started challenging that worldview, but some of the ideas remain strong. Especially in the parts of the world where the dominant church still claims it's the one universal Christian church. Of course, if you are a descendant of Protestants who fled Europe, your ancestors deliberately left that world and that culture behind.
The world degrades from the garden of Eden towards more chaos and finally the reign of Antichrist.
Only after that Christ emerges again, completely transforms Earth for a short while, and abolishes it altogether; the world ends.
I think you are missing a key moment, Christ being born. Christ’s life is the greatest moment in creation.
But Christ is born because the world needs saving. and the world keeps degrading after Christ ascends (returns, in a sense) to heaven. Prophetic activity ceases, miracles become more and more rare, etc.
After Christ, the world still tumbles towards hell, but now it has a hope to not completely end up there.
Quite true. OTOH, the "popular version" of recent Christian theology and myth has the quite un-enviable task of reconciling an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent God, who loves the humans who He created...with the actual (often horrible) reality that humans are stuck living in. Trying to do that generally requires a lorry-load of depressing plot twists, lawyerly double-talk, etc.
The "accuser" (Satan) says people only worship God because they get good rewards. If God doesn't reward them, they'd stop worshipping. God disagrees, and allows Satan to test his theory by inflicting great suffering on a righteous, blameless person (Job). Job's friends say "obviously you've sinned, and this is punishment from God", which Job denies. Job eventually demands God justify his suffering, and God takes him on a walk through all creation, effectively saying "you'll never understand divine justice, because it's way too complicated".
So this is not just a recent Christian question, but one that dates back to early Judaism.
On the other hand, Population II and III stars, the ancient supermassive stars who fused the metals that enabled the birth of Population I stars and the formation of planets, are all extinct now. Only the light of distant specimens, which has traveled for more than half of the univere's existence, still bears witness to their reign.
But at one point, we will enter a Third Age. Light from distant galaxies will dim. Light from the earliest moments in history will grow too far to reach us as the universe unceasingly expands faster and faster. Still, our own little corner of space is still alive, stars still emerge. But they are dim and weak compared to the stars of old. When they die, they bloat and fizzle out. The last supernova in the galaxy was billions of years ago. It will remain like this for a long time.
And then we enter a Fourth Age. The universe is dying. Fuel has ran out for new star formation. Even on the best nights, the majority of the night sky is pitch black. Black holes outnumber everything else. Except for a few galaxies, the rest of the universe is out of reach. The expansion has reached such a velocity that even travelling at the speed of light you will never reach another region of the universe ever again. Every day, another light goes out in the night sky, never to be replaced. This process is slow. The universe's death is immensely slow and dragged out. But it's not inhospitable to life. The vast majority of stars in this age are small, but exceptionally long-lived. They can support planets, and all the elements necessary for life. Seeing as life will eventually arise if the environment supports it, the universe will be booming with it. The overwhelming majority of all that will ever live will live in this Fourth Age. Cosmologists call it the Degenerate Era. To the species living in this age and their civilisations, the mysteries of the universe will forever be inaccessible. They can only observe the diminutive, extinguishing fragment of the universe, now spread out across distances many orders bigger than they are today. It will be a very populated, yet lonely universe.
Eventually, the universe will die. Stars will flame out one after another. Planets will freeze. This phase dwarfs even the Fourth Age. It lasts seemingly forever. Slowly, the atoms in all that exists decompose as even their age starts to show. The universe itself becomes fundamentally incompatible with life. Only black holes seem unaffected.
But even they are slowly dying. Ever so slowly. Not that it matters. Once time itself has lost all meaning, they start to slowly evaporate, until the universe is just a dead sea of energy, with naught but tiny ripples born from quantum randomness.
After that, it will take an infinity of time for anything to happen. But anything can happen, and maybe, eventually, by pure quantum randomness, all the energy in the universe may coalesce into one point, and it can all start over again.
You know. No pressure.
https://equitablegrowth.org/agriculture-the-worst-mistake-in...
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist...
Agriculture made us a lot unhealthier and shorter in stature (monoculture/unbalanced diets), and it also lead to massive power imbalances -- modern people spend more of their lives working.
This is a very mainstream observation -- it's also supported by Sapiens, the popular human history book of the last 5 years (recommended by Obama, Gates, etc.).
David Graeber's recent book argues that many early human societies purposely avoided agriculture, and then got "trapped" into the inequality of agriculture.
The argument is that there is enough for everybody, but agriculture leads to power imbalances, which make most people's lives miserable.
It's true that they were more miserable say in the 1500's in Europe than today. We have "recovered" from Europe of the 1500's, but that doesn't mean that this is the best time ever!
And entertainment, joy in the arts, categories of aesthetics have vastly improved as well. Look at art and film and music in the past five hundred years. Look at the works of Bach and anyone before him, he's clearly the greatest musician known in the world up to 1750, and since him in just 275 years, we've had hundreds of phenomenal musicians that outrank any before Bach. This is one mere slice of culture which is evidence of the vast improvement in human capability in modern times.
Then I see it on the big screen and the landscapes and flora were all familiar to me. If I hadn't seen similar stuff in person, I'd seen them on local TV advertisements for beer, butter and toyotas.
So I try and ignore them these days, and cling on to the LOTR that I first saw in my head that looks nothing like home.
The most stark contrast I’ve seen is in the indie film Lady Bird where (SPOILERS) there is a setting change from a very small rural American town for most of the plot to New York City at the end of the film, with it’s subways, density, and architecture that felt familiar to any watcher from an urban area.
Similarly, the suburban Texas setting of the King of the Hill deliberately contrasts itself with New York-based shows (referring to Seinfeld as, “I'll tell you what, man, them dang ol' New York boys. Just a show about nothin,’” with other joked about the disdain of many Texans of New Yorkers).
However, I remember the depiction of Sacramento in the movie was intended to stand in contrast with a bigger city (which is why a major conflict is about the protagonist wanting to move away).
Reviews by several critics also described that setting as a small town, and I remember reading discussions around the release about how other perspectives of Sacramento could view the place as much larger and diverse.
The film’s writer and director Greta Gerwig more precisely described her view in an SF Chronicle article (https://www.sfchronicle.com/movies/article/On-location-How-L...): “It’s not rural, but it is not like a New York or a San Francisco either. It is somewhere in the middle.”
There is a lot of regional variation, but the difference is quite a lot smaller than in other places in the world.
It is indeed harder to imagine a different world because we are culturally isolated, but our isolated world is quite a bit larger than I would bet would be easily imagined coming from somewhere else.
"The Book of General Ignorance" talks about an example of this with frogs:
> There are 4,360 known species of frog, but only one of them goes "ribbit." Each species has its own unique call. The reason everyone thinks all frogs go "ribbit" is that "ribbit" is the distinctive call of the Pacific tree frog (Hyla regilla). This is the frog that lives in Hollywood.
> Recorded locally, it has been plastered all over the movies for decades to enhance the atmosphere of anywhere from the Everglades to Vietnamese jungles.
Frogs don't sound like that here but that's not something that ever seemed incongruous to me until it was pointed out in a book.
America as shown by Hollywood is a different world.
My European relatives get equally excited when they visit Australia, but for me it's like... meh... I just work here.
In their defense, as a film score alone, disregarding the source material, at least they had a score—unlike most subsequent action/adventure movies, e.g. 21st century DC and Marvel movies with some incidental mood sounds in the background but never a melody to be heard.
But yes, I've only read Hobbit and the first few chapters of Fellowship, but to me Bo Hansson's 1970 album better evokes Middle-earth than Shore's score.
Seemingly every JRPG style game has some confluence of magic and technology with a prior ancient civilization being better at all of it
And it's also not limited to fantasy, as it's also there in sci-fi
But the observations that vanquishing threats to society dont necessarily raise the standards of living is some pretty well in the Witcher franchise. Very nihilist.
I've read the book many times, but recently, I can't enjoy them anymore like I used to.