Quote Meme

[fpb]

Quote from LOTR when you read this.

The words of this wizard stand on their hears," he growled, gripping the handle of his axe. "In the language of Orthanc, help means ruin, and saving means slaying, that is plain. But we do not come here to beg."

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

If I weren't so overwhelmed with stuff (and burning eyes from smog) I'd quote the line about tears being the wine of blessedness. Oh, that hits me harder every time I reread LOTR.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Tolkien's politics were poisonous, but in Saruman he did incarnate a spirit - an evil spirit - that lives in modern politicking. People are often more in the right in what they criticize than in what they exalt. And Gimli's words have long seemed to me the perfect description of "the evil speeches that comfort cruel men", from Republicans revelling in "shock and awe" to Democrats justifying the killing of full-born infants, to Peter Singer, to Pat Buchanan. There are so many targets for the description, it will never go out of style.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Peter Singer is seriously scary. I was horrified to see how he takes his utilitarianism to its chilling conclusions. Awful.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

However, he did perceive the perils of trying to put things to right by force, to compel people to be good, and how it would inevitably turn foul and destroy the very thing it was trying to preserve. I don't have time right now to search through Fellowship of the Ring for the scene where Galadriel refuses the One Ring saying that she would become a Queen great and terrible and all would see her and despair, then says sadly that she would diminish and go West. But I once used it in an essay on the perils of power.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. As I said, he was more often in the right in what he condemned than in what he exalted. But there is a reason why extreme Fascists in my country adore LoTR and spray-paint the name ARAGORN on the walls among Celtic crosses and swastikas.

[marielapin.livejournal.com]

Could you elaborate on this a little more? Why do extreme Fascists adore LoTR and Aragorn? This may seem as a naive question but as of right now I'm not understanding this.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

LoTR is basically an authoritarian book. Its theme is the rediscovery of the rightful King, whose rule will heal all things. The consent of the people is limited to a ritual assent to his entering Gondor and reigning therein, but Aragorn is repeatedly shown to be a master, a King, by nature. He tames the Palantir, which the immortal Maia, Olorin/Gandalf, had felt to be beyond him; his mere appearance at the top of the beleaguered walls of Helm's Deep cowes the men in Saruman's army (though not the Orcs, who are too ignoble to feel his majesty); he commands even the ghosts of MOrthond and their king. Again and again, it is his gift to lead and command that saves the good party. This figure of the Born Leader was one that haunted the imagination of the first half of the twentieth century, and I need not underline who tried to incarnate it.

Besides, there is the racism. The value of blood is repeatedly stressed, with the blood of Numenor and of the few marriages with Elves being superior by nature over that of others, and distinguished by racial characteristics - pale skin, grey eyes, black hair. It is the noble Faramir, one of the spokesmen for Tolkien's own ideas, who reveals that there are three kinds of Men - the high, the men of twilight, and the men of darkness. This is confirmed by the fact that the black men of Harad and the Easterlings of Khand - obviously African and Asiatic - are never said to have done anything to resist Sauron, and come pouring over the West in armies in his service. The highest breed of men is, consistently, the Westerners of Numenorean origin, whose home had once been in the view of Paradise while the rest of mankind lived in ignorance and darkness.

Then there is the obsession with "tradition", which is the be-all and end-all of modern Fascism. While some Fascists before the war were Catholics, practically all serious Fascists today are neo-pagans. Now, of course Tolkien was Catholic, but the themes and setting of his work appeal at least as much to neo-Pagans.

Actually, the most popular character among extremists seems to be Eowyn. Women's groups and camps have been named for her. The reason seems to me obvious. Old fashioned Fascism, that of Mussolini and Hitler, wanted women kept in the home (except for their part in the mass groups and athletics the regimes loved), which no modern young woman, even if a Fascist, will tolerate. Eowyn provides a convenient image for young women who want to cast themselves in the militaristic Fascist image without reducing themselves to their grandmothers' status.

In all this, you have to remember that modern Fascism is a different animal from pre-war Fascism. It is not, and rarely dreams to be, a mass movement; it is rather a grouping of like-minded fringe persons, unsuited to or unwilling to live in the normal world, pursuing a kind of putridly romantic nightmare. You will tell me that this is an abuse of Tolkien, and to a very large extent it is. Tolkien was a civilized man. But he was an open enemy of democracy and egalitarian principles, and it can be read in his work.

[marielapin.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

I was talking to my husband the other night about Eowyn. I used to think that I was somehow like her, and now realize about eight years later that I never really was like her, nor would want to be her. I understand how she could be adopted by women's groups, however I find it ironic that she was never happy or comfortable in her being a woman until she returned Faramir's love.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It does. But he would not be the only one. The British upper middle class produced more than one articulate enemy of democracy - just think of Eddison, the author of the Zimvavia books, whose authoritarian message is even stronger than LoTR's. It was that kind of age; in the thirties, there was a definite effort in various quarters to invent a Catholic Fascism, whose leading expondents were Dollfuss in Austria and then Franco in Spain. Tolkien quarrelled with Lewis over the Spanish Civil War. Lewis took the view that both sides were tyrannical and murderous. Tolkien not only was on Franco's side, but, incredibly, he took Lewis' principled refusal to take sides as a result of Lewis' Ulster prejudice against Catholicism - as though Catholicism were bound up with Franco's explicitly tyrannical cause! Tocqueville and Bernanos could have told him otherwise. As for the fragments of rural idyll bound up in the picture of the Shire, remember that they are as much as anything else a polemic against modernity in all its forms; he says as much. And the hatred for modernity is both at the heart of all his romantic primitivism, and a necessary though not sufficient condition for the formation of a Fascist mind.

There remain the many evidences of humanitarian and hujmanly decent attitudes scattered through his work, his praise of pity and rejection of power for its own sake. All that these show is that Tolkien would have been pretty bad at setting up the kind of state he envisaged. He was too rooted in the civilized world of England and English Catholicism. There are two curious parallels with his attitude in his time. George Orwell (AKA Eric Blair) started out as a committed revolutionary, and in his early writings it is easy to find passages that imply that to kill, say, a landlord or a Cardinal is a good thing. But his innate decency, the same thing that had originally led him to revolt against what he had seen of the British Empire as a police officer in Burma, also led him to reject Communism when he saw it at work, and to fight an ever more open and radical war against the contemporary incarnation of the Proletarian Revolution. He kept his hope for an increasingly vague and distant Socialist renewal of society, but in actual fact cooperated with the authorities in fighting and resisting Communist encroachment. At the same time, GK Chesterton's cousin - Arthur Keith Chesterton - proclaimed himself an outright Fascist, only to quarrel with every other Fascist in Britain on the ground of an innate and fundamental decency that none of them shared. He did not seem to realize that Fascism and dishonesty go together, because of the naturalist and immoralist presumptions of the Fascist ideology. He was himself a scrupulously upright and patriotic English gentleman, happily married to a devout Socialist, who denounced Hitler when Hitler invaded Bohemia and was actually surprised and annoyed to find himself suspected and investigated when, at the break of war, he volunteered his services to his country. People are curious things, and never more than when their morality fights against their convinctions.

[marielapin.livejournal.com]

"But he was an open enemy of democracy and egalitarian principles, and it can be read in his work."

Yet he thought of the Shire as his idyllic place, and their leaders were elected, and the Ents, who were the most ancient creatures, used Entmoot to decide things. I know that as a man he was against a pure democracy, and political egalitarian regimes, but I never picked up any hint of hostility towards Christian egalitiarianism. That would go directly against his Catholicism.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I just posted an answer to the original of this, above.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As for Entmoot, it is unlike parliamentary assemblies in the most basic way possible: it is intended to produce, not disagreement and debate, but a mystic unity of purpose that makes all the Ents one. The essence of liberty is debate and division, and that is what enemies of liberty can never forgive it. Proper parliamentary procedure respects and even encourages disagreement. The Ents, on the other hand, strive to be One. That is typical of the Fascist attitude: they gloried in their unity (the most recent incarnation of this ghastly belief is the Chinese emphasis on "harmony", seen at the Olympic Games, and eager to harmonize all dissidents and dissent to death). Practically all FAscist governments have had parliamentary assemblies of some point, but their purpose was not to represent the various views and interests of the country, so much as to embody and display its unity.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I used a quotation from Tolkein as my graduation quotation when I graduated from high school.

It was,

"In every wood in every spring, there is a different green."

[marielapin.livejournal.com]

“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, that is memorable too. And it is curious that such a good argument against the death penalty should come from a writer as reactionary as Tolkien. Evidently, Catholic influence and/or a civilized Oxford background have some effect.

Good and Ill

[southindian.livejournal.com]

'...How shall a man judge what to do in such times?'

'As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not change since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.'