it's the bashers again

[calimac]

Time for more ignorant remarks about The Lord of the Rings in the name of the HBO series of Game of Thrones again. This one is from an article whose author is uncomfortable with HBO's Dothraki, who are stereotyped Central Casting barbarians. Yet, she says, many of their individuals are depicted as "noble and upright" (not falling over, I guess), and therefore "while the series is very much about how individuals are shaped by their culture, Game of Thrones doesn't fall into the kind of racial essentializing that books like its forebear, Lord of the Rings, have been accused of."

Well, at least she put "have been accused of," the all-purpose out for writers who want to make crude accusations while escaping blame for making them.

True enough that Tolkien does not show us any good orcs, though he does spend considerable attention on another evil character, Gollum, wrestling with his conscience. (It made for quite a famous scene in the movie, too, albeit the import is very different from the book's.) And while he says that Sauron's soldiers and slaves were not inherently evil, and can be made peace with when out from under his thrall, he doesn't go into any detail on that.

That's because Tolkien's interest is focused strongly on saying something else, with such intensity that it shouldn't be possible to miss it. And that is that every race in the book - all right, except the orcs - consists mostly of "noble and upright" individuals. All but those few who've made the wrong choices. So noble and upright, in fact, that a sufficiently ignorant reader might mistake them for undifferentiated essentialized good guys. But they're not, partly because those aforementioned bad-apple individuals demonstrate that the nobility of the others is a conscious choice - so there's no "racial essentializing" - but also for two other reasons.

One is that they're diverse. The races live entirely different lives that are rather incomprehensible to each other. Legolas and Gimli trying unsuccessfully to educate each other in their own aesthetic tastes is the primary illustration of this. The moral point is that there are different ways of being good. Goodness is diverse. It's evil that collapses into conformity and monotony. Saruman is trying to be a little Sauron, and Wormtongue is trying to be a little Saruman.

The second and most important reason is that the characters don't believe it at first. The entire inter-group story of The Lord of the Rings is that of overcoming suspicion and distrust. It's a continuing theme in the book. The Hobbits mistrust the Rangers; the Rangers think the Hobbits are rather stupid. The Elves hate the Dwarves and the Dwarves hate the Elves with enough passion that they could be a line in Tom Lehrer's "National Brotherhood Week." The Gondorians mistrust the Rangers; the Rangers think the Gondorians are ... well. The Rohirrim are suspicious of the Rangers and the Elves and the Dwarves, in fact everybody except the Gondorians, and they don't even believe the Hobbits exist. The Ents almost mistake the Hobbits for orcs, and everybody is scared knock-kneed of the Ents, as they damn well should be. The Rohirrim treat the Woses like the U.S. Army used to treat the Indians, and the Woses are not delighted.

But under the threat of an outside existential crisis, all these groups of mutually suspicious peoples learn to sink their complaints and suspicions, respect their differences, and work together in a common cause. In Martin's story, the existential crisis only intensifies the squabbling. I suppose Martin's scenario is more realistic, though Tolkien's can happen too. (See English and French, Americans and Russians, in World War II.) But I can read history for that. I read fantasy not just to be told how bad the world can be, but how good it can be, also. What makes Tolkien continually popular is our deep need for the last thing Pandora let out of her box.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Are Orcs a race, then? Are their Orc moms and Orc kids playing in the yard? Or is it a vocation, a job title, and Orcs were recruited from all the other races?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Snarkery aside, Tolkien wasn't actually sure what Orcs really were, and he mulled various possible unsatisfactory answers in his later years. The fact is that it isn't really very important. Unlike the movies, the book isn't fundamentally about the Orcs. Tolkien was much more interested in what he could say about everybody else, far more productive and rewarding characters.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Seems to me that if it was a race, it's a little ugly. If it's a job title, then they chose what they are. That's all I was thinking about.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, and that's exactly where the dilemma lies. Tolkien was never able to find a satisfactory solution.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

A sound argument (and well stated), to which I would add one other point: That Tolkien's "racial essentializing" does not prevent his actively celebrating romantic attraction between different groups. The history of Middle-Earth as a whole is shaped by mortal men falling in love with elf-women; there is the more on-camera love of Faramir with his Numenorean heritage for the warrior maiden Eowyn; there is Gimli's hopeless devotion to Galadriel, with its flavor of the courtly love that (I have the impression) Tolkien didn't much admire in the original, but which in turn is the spring from which flows Gimli and Legolas's friendship. At least in the real world, enthusiastic racists tend to be against that sort of thing. . . .