Moral and Ethical Issues in LOTR

[Bereta_Eder]

Elfs' foods are highly nutricious.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove


J.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley were all key members of a Christian revival movement at Oxford, but I can't recall tha official name of the group. They all decried the major modern trends of their day, arguing for a return to old values, especially Christianity. By and large they seem to have dodged the down side of the old fashioned values (repression of women, oppressive class system, etc.) It's fair to say I think that they were all Luddites to some degree as well.

thanks

[Verto]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


Gollum sacrifices himself. Or is the tool of the Valar.

He succumbs to his own lust for the Ring, and falls into the Fire. Unless I am greatly mistaken, he had little desire to sacrifice himself and the Ring.

A tool of the Valar would be more accurate.



All in all, I can't stand when the Lord of the Rings is dissected for real life comparisons, underlying meanings, etc. It just irritates me for some reason.

[Kaak]

Yeah, i agree, it could have used more development, but i was under two main constrictions. It had to be under two pages (and that barely fits) and I was on a serious time constraint...I had to write another one after that and have them both done by 5pm my time, which was almost two hours ago

[Immortal Wombat]

You spelt Saruman wrong.


Dr Strangelove: this one?

In 1933, the Inklings, a name given to Lewis' circle of friends, started to meet every Thursday in C.S. Lewis' room, and every Monday or Friday just before lunch at "The Eagle and Child," a local pub. Members of the Inklings included J.R.R. Tolkien, Warnie (Lewis' brother Warren), Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams, Dr. Robert Havard, Owen Barfield, Weville Coghill and many others.

[St Leo]

Tolkien had two basic messages in mind when he wrote LotR:

1) Catholicism 0wnZ
2) Linguistics 0wnZ

Industry and war didn't really enter into it.

[Urban Ranger]

It's quite racist. This about orcs and trolls are all bad and stuff.

[MRT144]

trees will attack you if you cut down their brothers...

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by St Leo
Tolkien had two basic messages in mind when he wrote LotR:

1) Catholicism 0wnZ
2) Linguistics 0wnZ

Industry and war didn't really enter into it.

Tolkien wrote that he absolutely did not mean for his great work to be an analogy for anything with one exception- in a preface he wrote for the Trilogy he mentions that certain parts of the shire were reminiscent of a pristine sylvan pond that he loved as a child. In FOTR Frodo and company return to the shire to find this place despoiled by those who had allied themselves with Sauron just as Tolkien had found his beloved childhood playground ruined by an industrial mill upon returning to the area as an adult. It seems reasonable to me to conjecture that Tolkien's tendency to describe the enemy as black, foul, and constantly burning things represent a personal distaste for industrialism.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
You spelt Saruman wrong.


Dr Strangelove: this one?

Yup. I'm utterly certain that Huxley was a member too.

[BeBro]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
It's quite racist. This about orcs and trolls are all bad and stuff.

I still wonder why there was no outcry amongst them when the book was published

[Mordoch]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
Tolkien wrote that he absolutely did not mean for his great work to be an analogy for anything with one exception- in a preface he wrote for the Trilogy he mentions that certain parts of the shire were reminiscent of a pristine sylvan pond that he loved as a child. In FOTR Frodo and company return to the shire to find this place despoiled by those who had allied themselves with Sauron just as Tolkien had found his beloved childhood playground ruined by an industrial mill upon returning to the area as an adult. It seems reasonable to me to conjecture that Tolkien's tendency to describe the enemy as black, foul, and constantly burning things represent a personal distaste for industrialism.

There are also the following key quotes from The Two Towers.

(Fanghorn) Saruman has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things,

Metal is somewhat generic, but the use of wheels seems quite noteworthy to me. Wheels were used with wagons prior to industrialization, but there were they used on both trains and cars after industrialization. The real key is a mind of wheels evokes the image of gears turning, just as factory machine often used interlocking gears as a key component.

Another noticible description of the area right around Isengard, where Saruman lives.

Once it had been green and filled with avenues, and groves of fruitful trees, watered by streams...But no green thing grew there in the latter days of Saruman. The roads were paved with stone-flags, dark and hard; and beside their borders instead of trees there marched long lines of pillars, some of marble, some of copper and of iron, joined by heavy chains.

I find the mentioning of copper pillars particularly noteworthy since copper was heavily used in electronic wiring and had previously been used for telegraph lines. The critique of industrialization harming the enviroment is readily apparent in the trillogy.

Of course the Ents, representing the forces of nature easily pull down and destroy Saruman's recently built man made works when Saruman chops down and burns one tree too many to fuel his fires at Isengard.

[Uncle Sparky]

Elves may appear dull and noble but are great in the sack.
Hobbits are much better hung than dwarves.
Never p- off (or p- on for that matter) a giant walking tree.

[East Street Trader]

Nice work, Kaak. You should get a decent mark for that work.

The proposition that Tolkien did not like industrialism when it despoiled nature is not too hard to take - who does, after all?

That his writing shows that he was against industry even when not destructive does not stand up. In Middle Earth it is the dwarves who are industrious but they do not despoil. On the contrary, if you recall the conversation between Gimli and Legolas about the caves beneath Helm's Deep Gimli makes it clear that while developing the caves dwarves would take anxious care to preserve and enhance their natural beauty.

Tolkien was adamant that there is no allegory in his novels. The most common propositions have been that the re-emergence of Sauron mirrors the rise of Nazism and that the dangerously untameable power of the ring represents the aweful power unleashed when you split the atom.

For me one of the many strengths of his writing is that the world described is wholly self contained. Where love of nature or of homely things or of poetry and song appear they do so because those are characteristics of the world into which the stories draw us, not because the writer is driven to include such things by his nature or because he has some message in mind. It is because Middle Earth is so wonderfully realised, and so internally consistent, that the reader is transported out of his own existence and absorbed so fully.

Indeed so absorbing and self contained is his creation that, like other writers, J.D. Salinger for one, Tolkien himself came to be somewhat dominated by it. Far from him exploiting Middle Eart so as to air his own extrinsic views - whether of Nazism, industrialisation, Nietzian supermen or whatever - he became somewhat obsessed with filling out its detail, and especially with its mythology and full historical context.

[Dry]

You may also talk about the changes, the evolution of every character.

Gandalf was The Grey, the adventure made him The White.
Aragorn was a ranger, the adventure made him a king.
Merry and Pippin grew (not an innocent symbolic image)...


Take almost all characters, Frodo, Faramir, Theoden, and even Sam..., all of them were changed. They were kind of asleep in their everyday life and they woke up. This is very clear in the case of Aragorn.
The sleeper must awaken is said in another great story...

Even Gimli changed after he met Galadriel.

I think only legolas (and other elve characters) do not change. It could be interresting to find out why...

[Dry]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
It's quite racist. This about orcs and trolls are all bad and stuff.

And predestination. When a story involves different races, with different race traits, it implies that they are born to be warrior, nice, bad, smart, stupid, hot-tempered, cool, art-lover, craftman, peasant. And there is nothing they can do about it, it is in their genes.
In human real world it translate to a caste society.
You cannot escape your caste. You are born to lead or to be slave.
But in the story the races are doomed to disappear and the time of men is coming.
Is Tolkien happy or sad about that? I don't know...

[aaglo]

Elves don't change, because they are immortal. And that is their biggest flaw. In their own world they are perfect, but if something should disturb and cause imbalance in their world, they become weak.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by East Street Trader
Nice work, Kaak. You should get a decent mark for that work.

The proposition that Tolkien did not like industrialism when it despoiled nature is not too hard to take - who does, after all?

That his writing shows that he was against industry even when not destructive does not stand up. In Middle Earth it is the dwarves who are industrious but they do not despoil. On the contrary, if you recall the conversation between Gimli and Legolas about the caves beneath Helm's Deep Gimli makes it clear that while developing the caves dwarves would take anxious care to preserve and enhance their natural beauty.

Tolkien was adamant that there is no allegory in his novels. The most common propositions have been that the re-emergence of Sauron mirrors the rise of Nazism and that the dangerously untameable power of the ring represents the aweful power unleashed when you split the atom.

For me one of the many strengths of his writing is that the world described is wholly self contained. Where love of nature or of homely things or of poetry and song appear they do so because those are characteristics of the world into which the stories draw us, not because the writer is driven to include such things by his nature or because he has some message in mind. It is because Middle Earth is so wonderfully realised, and so internally consistent, that the reader is transported out of his own existence and absorbed so fully.

Indeed so absorbing and self contained is his creation that, like other writers, J.D. Salinger for one, Tolkien himself came to be somewhat dominated by it. Far from him exploiting Middle Eart so as to air his own extrinsic views - whether of Nazism, industrialisation, Nietzian supermen or whatever - he became somewhat obsessed with filling out its detail, and especially with its mythology and full historical context.

The copy of the Silmarillion I have included an essay by Tolkien (JRR, NOT Christopher) that is fairly explicit about elves and men representing larger philisophical ideas of eternity, change, etc. It may the case as he famously declared that The War of the Ring != WW2, but I dont think its the case that the entire Tolkien world was self-contained. Silmarillion is very much the story of the "fall", as WELL as the legendary material filling out the languages, et al.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Dry

And predestination. When a story involves different races, with different race traits, it implies that they are born to be warrior, nice, bad, smart, stupid, hot-tempered, cool, art-lover, craftman, peasant. And there is nothing they can do about it, it is in their genes.

If you read the Silmarillion, whats only hinted at in LOTR about the origin of Orcs becomes clear. Orcs are descened from Elves, dark elves who didnt have the faith to follow the Valar, and who were captured by Morgoth, enslaved, tortured, and then bred for evil. They were genetically the same as the high elves - their choices (and natural choices they were, there wasnt terribly good reason to trust the Valar) exposed them to evil, and evil corrupted them and turned them into what they were.

Note that even in LOTR theres no occasion I know of in which a good character spontaneously massacres Orcs - they are always killed in battle. IIRC at the end of LOTR Aragorn sets aside part of Mordor for the Orcs to live in.

[Arrian]

Lewis approached "the North" from the literary side, while Tolkien was a philologist immersed in the sound and history of languages. He could be spiky and opinionated: After their initial meeting, Lewis called him "a smooth, pale fluent little chap -- no harm in him: only needs a smack or so." But by the next year, Tolkien had invited him to join a group known as the Coalbiters, who were devoted to reading the Icelandic sagas in the original Old Norse. (The name was a play on "kolbitars," an old Icelandic term for tale-swappers who sat so close to the communal fire that they were almost literally biting the coals.)

Every Thursday evening the friends would gather by the fireplace, slippers on their feet and drinks at their elbows, to hear "The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki" or "The Saga of the Volsungs" or whatever epic was under study. The Coalbiters faded in the early 1930s, to be replaced by the Inklings, an informal group that lasted over the next three decades, with Tolkien and Lewis as its key members.

...

From Salon.

-Arrian

[Lord Merciless]

Tolkien had low opinions of humans.