Comment by david_b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by david_b | Hacker News Reader

> The Moorcocks now divide their time between Paris and Austin, Texas,

It's alway good to know where people talking about fascism actually live - it gives a sense of perspective about their opinions (jodhpurs: nasty and evil / state run by nutcase defending dildo bans and religious commandments in front of state capitol: totally ok).

> “In Tolkien, everyone’s in their place and happy to be there. We go there and back, to where we started. There’s no escape, nothing will ever change and nobody will ever break out of this well-ordered world.”

Has he even read the books? Nothing changes? I'll give him that the manichean world Tolkien created is certainly somewhat uncomfortable to anyone with a worldview that includes shades of gray (although I don't think that the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit are as black and white as they are made out to be) - but calling someone a crypto-fascist is really harsh.

> Science fiction/fantasy author Michael Moorcock has suggested that the Gor novels should be placed on the top shelves of bookstores, saying, "I’m not for censorship but I am for strategies which marginalize stuff that works to objectify women and suggests women enjoy being beaten."

I want to hear him on Fifty Shades of Grey...

Yeah, I have to wonder where people are coming from when they claim the LotR to be racist. Where do they feel that hobbits fit into the scheme of things - they don't seem to be good or evil, just people. And Ents? What do they make of the sequence with the Druedain? The Rohirrim are openly racist towards these peoples, only to be shown the error of their way by the Druedain themselves.

Dwarves and Elves openly hate each other, throwing racists epithets like daggers whenever they meet - think of Thranduil in the Hobbit, or Gimli confronting the elves on the borders of Lothlorien. Yet both are supposed to be goodly races that we empathise with easily.

Then there are the orcs. Some of them, particularly those that Sam and Frodo cross as they enter Mordor, are quite sympathetic characters.

There is definitely racism displayed by characters in Tolkein's writing, but I don't feel that there was any special racism demonstrated by the author himself - indeed he seemed almost to want to underline the idea that people should be judged by their acts, not by their appearance.

Austin isn't Texas though. Austin and Paris sounds characteristic for who he wants to be?

And nothing (or rather no one) really changes in Tolkiens books. I think that is a fair point. People ARE (good, evil, shadowy, treacherous, wise) they don't become or evolve and are not typically multifaceted.

Unless the people are humans or elfs (hence orcs) or dwarfs or hobbits - then they aren't influenced or changed at all by the power of the ring. The fact that the characters are somewhat like woodcuts might also be owed to two things:

- Tolkien was a linguist, not necessarily well-versed in the craft of literature. Writing good believable characters is extremely hard; moving stick puppets around (Dan Brown comes to mind) is practicaly the default-state, entry-level of writing.

- the books were his answer to the edda. I can't find a sources on this but I believe part of what he wanted was England to have a set of epic myths commensurable with those in the edda - this motivation certainly influenced the overall style of the stories.

I wouldn't call the analysis necessarily wrong or completely unconvincing (the pdf linked here shows his ideas much better), but I would call tendentious in that it looks like everything that doesn't fit conveniently is left out.

Well, the changes in Tolkien books are always to the worse, or restoring the order, but a little worse than it was in the beggining.

Social and ethical equivalent of 2nd law of thermodynamics basicaly, and loses are converted into stories instead of temperature

Reply on news.ycombinator.com