Moral and Ethical Issues in LOTR

[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.