How long will LOTR be? what would you like...

Thank you Tater. All respects to Martinez. The only anthem I have is that we understand the cultural venue in which this masterpiece was written. That is all I am after. Schools have banned more famous works because of perceived and/or alleged racial undertones which were not considered fitting for the 'age' of school-goers. I can't explain why this is an issue to me other than in a search for truth. The truth is out there. ;D

Ok. Michael Martinez' latest and very informational essay is When is a movie not just a movie? I highly insist that everyone read it who has an opinion about """"race"""" in Tolkien. I tried to be careful and general with my points; I didn't think they'd be weak intimations or veiled references as if I couldn't articulate an argument. But Martinez must have seen the last straw somewhere, and has chosen to address it.

I wouldn't sweat it, Hernalt. The race issue seems to come up on the news groups at least every two months or so...

Hey hey HeY! Eruve just said I'm sweating it! Gar! ~H squinches his eyes up like E Cartman~

Well, you were the one making fun of my age! :P

I was not. I find older women quite... um.. hm.

No one should take that essay personally. I was pressed for time and was inspired to try and turn a long-standing Tolkien controversy into an interesting question for people who are concerned about the Peter Jackson movies. As it turns out, the story in Variety magazine about George Lucas has been repudiated by the official Star Wars site, as I guess many of you know by now. All of us have our own prejudices, and Tolkien was no exception. But people would be surprised, I think, to learn that his prejudices were in exactly the opposite direction from what is commonly inferred about them. He was first and foremost a devout Christian. He thought of himself as a Catholic, but in his mind the love of God was paramount, and God's love -- so far as the Bible teaches us -- is given to all of us freely despite our short-comings. Acceptance, tolerance, understanding -- these are common themes in Tolkien's stories. THE BOOK OF LOST TALES was intended to be a mythology for England. Tolkien was feeling a bit nationalistic when he began it (in 1916, while recovering from Trench Fever in a hospital). He was, after all, a soldier who had served his country, and all but one of his friends paid the greatest price for freedom in that terrible war. I don't think that anyone should be surprised to see that Tolkien wanted to give something special to his people and his country, and there is nothing elitist or racist in his intentions. But THE BOOK OF LOST TALES became less important to Tolkien as the years passed, and the spirit which drove him was the spirit of story-telling. The stories -- the themes -- from BOLT took on new forms, and eventually became THE SILMARILLION, but the legendarium was no longer intended to be a mythology for England. Nonetheless, because Tolkien continued to tell stories about "the northwest of the Old World, east of the Sea", he had to conform to the expectations of logic. That means the protagonists of his stories would be northern peoples and their enemies would have to be themselves, fantasy creatures, or peoples from other regions of the world. And he eventually ensured that the enemies were drawn from all ranks, all peoples. Heroism in Tolkien is not about defeating other races, but rather about rising above one's own faults and shortcomings to do what is right, and not what is right for one's people or one's self, but for everyone. The defeat of Morgoth benefitted the whole world, not just the northern peoples. And the defeat of Sauron defeated the entire world. That's why Tolkien lost interest in telling further stories about Middle-earth. There was no longer a single embodiment of evil which could threaten everyone. He would just be setting man against man, and his stories no matter how clever would not have been about the fantastic but about the realistic. He felt THE NEW SHADOW could have been no better than a thriller, and he had no interest in writing one.

I still running off RAM, but Martinez is pushing some buttons. >8( ;D To better articulate the nature of my observation: Being that the Elves saw the Light of Valinor and were in the presense of 'gods', they are rendered by Tolkien as the 'true believers.' Whether he intended it or not, this motif most closely resembles, in all of Earth history, the 'true believer'ism of Christianity/Christendom. Scant few of the thralls of Melkor as documented in person, so we don't see into their mental process except for the short statement that "their wills were chained to his." But as a class, the Elves are in character given much more Resistance to Melkor's evil. Ie, Elves/Christians are given much more natural ability to defy being evil. This is what I find sublty painted in light hues and tones so that the cultures East and South, who are MEN, are easily identified, not as the anthropologic Homo Sapien races of Mongolian and Negroid, but as Non-Christian cultures. Christiocentricity scares the hell out of me. ""Racism"" would be too low a device for Tolkien to use, but the matter of Faith was not, considering that addressing and even justifying mortality was his main agenda. I'd have to say that while gleaning some fine, heartwarming points from Western religion can leave a soft fuzzy feeling in the most criminally agnostic soul, the concept of mortality Can be tackled by adequate minds without invoking Western divinity, or divinity at All, for that matter. So indeed it is not an irritant in any way to read Tolkien, the Christian Man, and see where he evangelized his beautiful gospel of Faith and Trust in his Illuvatar, because the magic he created in the telling punctures the professed thick skin of the agnostic. (I don't consider myself agnostic, btw.) What IS an irritant is to see the politicallycorrected modern generation essay that Tolkien was a pure vessel of objectivity. (I'll see how far I can get without opening any books...