LOTR filled with white supremacist innuendo

[Mr. President]

Originally posted by Lord_Davinator
I think Tolkien drew a lot from a lot of different mythological stories... mixed them up added a pinch and created a masterpiece.

cf. Atalante, Avallone, Beorn, Gimli, etc.

[ranskaldan]

Eh, Tolkien is not the problem. His world is full of many races coexisting in peace. One thing though is how the horde comes out of the East - but that can entirely be due to chance.

The real problem lies with other writers. David Eddings for example. I don't know if any of you have read his work; they're pretty good for commercial fantasy, if you ignore the massive amounts of Eurocentricism that seeps in through every part of his work, despite his later attempts to patch them up. (The fact that he directly rips off Earth races does not help.) He admitted it, eventually.

[aaglo]

The fact that the evil comes from east can be explaned thus:

It has to come from somewhere. Tolkien had one 10-sided dice, and he declared: North (1 and 2), East (3 and 4), South (5 and 6), West (7 and 8) and the inside (9 and 10). Tolkien threw 3 or 4 (the exact number isn't known to the public), and thus the evil was destined to be coming from east.

[Lord_Davinator]

How do you get a 10 sided dice?

[aaglo]

Lord_Davinator -

I assume that you have never heard of such games as Dungeons&Dragons...?

[MarkG]

Apolyton: We don't censor idiots, we laugh at them.

Apolyton: We don't censor idiots, we're moderated by them.

t-shirt material

[Hurricane]

As an Elvis fan, I will start my own petition if they dare call the third movie "The Return of the King".

[Robert]

Pherhaps it's very natural for someone who's living on the far-west side of a large continent (EurAsia) that all evil comes from the east........

where else would it come from? There is only east......

[aaglo]

Traditionally, the home of evil is north. Thus Santa Claus is evil.

Thank you, Hurri, for the sig material...

[Seeker]

Tolkien was an anti-industrialist(or more accurately anti-MODERNIST) along the lines of DH Lawrence.

Read some of his letters to the Nazis when the Nazis tried to 'claim' him as an Aryan author.

Directions of Evil:
Even in the Hobbit, the Goblins and Dragons come from the far North.

The Elves were created at Lake Nurnen and originally wandered the eastern shore of the continent.

There are some telling criticisms though to be made:

1.White or 'fair' skin is constantly equated with inner goodness.

2. Tolkien is anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian. Men know their 'place', servant-master relations are glorified, particularly all the loyal and dutiful servants (christianity? thou good and loyal servant...), rulership is passed through the Blood, for example if anyone in Tolkien has the blood of numenor, you just know that the odds are they will be more noble, taller, stronger, and fairer skinned than 'fallen' man.

3. Tolkien has a repressed 19th century English public school boy horror of heterosexual sex, and 'dirty' things.

Sam and Frodo's relationship is the common one of Boy's Own Paper and other Public School Boy genre stories of the 19th century: the David and Jonathan relationship, a 'pure' relationship of 'innocent love' that to an outsider looks like SUCH an example of homosexuality in self-denial that it is self-parodying.

[Berzerker]

Gee, is it racist when black Africans refer to the forces of evil as the dark forces? This goes back to our fear of the dark and the wild animals lurking beyond the campfire waiting for a foolish human to leave the light.

[ranskaldan]

Mordor, on the other hand, has a tendency to be found in the East (the Southeast, to be exact).

[Ned]

I can imagine what Atilla must have seemed like to the Germans, Goths and Romans alike. A great menace growing in the East. The peoples of the West had to unite to defeat him. And even then, it was only a draw.

Couldn't the Lord of the Rings basically be a fantasy version of this very real history?

[Hurricane]

Originally posted by ranskaldan
Mordor, on the other hand, has a tendency to be found in the East (the Southeast, to be exact).

Yeah, and doesn't Sauron and Saruman BOTH sound very much like Saddam!

[aaglo]

Yeah... and saruman looks like a jew...