Star Wars vs Lord of the Rings - thoughts about Theoden and Palpatine

[Straybow]

Lucas suffered a heart attack or something and everything he's done since is dreck. Obviously he's become a blithering idiot.

[centrifuge]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove


Maybe restoring balance to the force really involved killing off most of the Jedi, who because they had learned to live a very long time were hogging too many midi-chlorians ( who incidently are also essential to keeping your pool clean ) and had become stagnant. Remember that Lucas was a student of myths and religions. If the force was modeled after "Yin and Yang", then you can't have a whole lot of good without having a whole lot of evil. By releasing the midi-chlorians being monopolized by the Jedi their power could be dispersed elsewhere in the galaxy for whatever ends. Perhaps people were getting sick from Pseudomonas or Staphylococcus in poorly sanitized pools and hot tubs.

My thoughts on the whole balance thing has always been that Vader killed/ helped kill off all of the Jedi except 2. This brought balance because you then had 2 light side (Obiwan and Yoda) and 2 dark side (Vader and Palpatine).
Makes perfect sense to me. There's your yin and yang. The prophesy did come true, but as Yoda remarked it was misunderstood (i.e. not such a good thing for the Jedi).

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Tolkien explicitley stated he did not draw his story rom contemporary events. What more do you want?

to actually look at the text. He said it, i dont beleive it. He could have been lying, or more likely, he wasnt, but took a broad, almost subconscious inspiration. Mordor isnt Germany, Gondor isnt France, Rohan isnt UK. Sure. But the necessity to stand up to evil, the disavowal of both pacifism and warmongering, the distrust of industry, etc are clearly all there, and are clearly inspired by all the things in his life.

BTW, in the intro to the Silm, he makes it pretty clear that he thinks his story is broadly christian. Which doesnt mean Morgoth is precisely Satan, either.

[mactbone]

It's also not clear to me when Tolkien finalized the trilogy. I've heard that he was revising it all the way up until the first one was published. I doubt he started off with the design of making his books an allegory but in the process some parts may have turned into that. Having said that his first and clearest influences were Anglo/Norse/Saxon mythology. To state otherwise would be silly. Just looking at terminology and naming you can discover whole larger meanings for everything in the books. There's a good book about this by a professor who has held many of the same positions that Tolkien did called The Road to Middle Earth.

[Dr Strangelove]

Or as I said above the trilogy is actually a secret manifesto of the Luddite movement.

[Straybow]

Yeah, yeah! That's the ticket!

[Impaler[WrG]]

Dr. Stranglove: Dose that aply to BOTH Trilogies?

[Nostromo]

Have you guys read Michael Moorcock's Epic Pooh? Here's the link:

http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.html?id=953

Sometimes, he's unfair to Tolkien. So much so that he's clearly biased. But he makes some good points. It may be unfair, but it sure is entertaining and provocative!

He claimed that his work was primarily linguistic in its original conception, that there were no symbols or allegories to be found in it, but his High Tory Anglican beliefs permeate the book as thoroughly as they do the books of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, who, consciously or unconsciously, promoted their orthodox Toryism in everything they wrote. While there is an argument for the reactionary nature of the books, they are certainly deeply conservative and strongly anti-urban, which is what leads some to associate them with a kind of Wagnerish hitlerism. I don't think these books are 'fascist', but they certainly don't exactly argue with the 18th century enlightened Toryism with which the English comfort themselves so frequently in these upsetting times. They don't ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what's best for us.

The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic. If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob - mindless football supporters throwing their beer-bottles over the fence the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom "good taste" is synonymous with "restraint" (pastel colours, murmured protest) and "civilized" behaviour means "conventional behaviour in all circumstances". This is not to deny that courageous characters are found in The Lord of the Rings, or a willingness to fight Evil (never really defined), but somehow those courageous characters take on the aspect of retired colonels at last driven to write a letter to The Times and we are not sure - because Tolkien cannot really bring himself to get close to his proles and their satanic leaders - if Sauron and Co. are quite as evil as we're told. After all, anyone who hates hobbits can't be all bad.

And the finale:

The commercial genre which has developed from Tolkien is probably the most dismaying effect of all. I grew up in a world where Joyce was considered to be the best Anglophone writer of the 20th century. I happen to believe that Faulkner is better, while others would pick Conrad, say. Thomas Mann is an exemplary giant of moral, mythic fiction. But to introduce Tolkien's fantasy into such a debate is a sad comment on our standards and our ambitions. Is it a sign of our dumber times that Lord of the Rings can replace Ulysses as the exemplary book of its century? Some of the writers who most slavishly imitate him seem to be using English as a rather inexpertly-learned second language. So many of them are unbelievably bad that they defy description and are scarcely worth listing individually. Terry Pratchett once remarked that all his readers were called Kevin. He is lucky in that he appears to be the only Terry in fantasy land who is able to write a decent complex sentence. That such writers also depend upon recycling the plots of their literary superiors and are rewarded for this bland repetition isn't surprising in a world of sensation movies and manufactured pop bands. That they are rewarded with the lavish lifestyles of the most successful whores is also unsurprising. To pretend that this addictive cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling academic standards.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Impaler[WrG]
Dr. Stranglove: Dose that aply to BOTH Trilogies?

I was speaking of LOTR, not Star Wars.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by nostromo
Have you guys read Michael Moorcock's Epic Pooh? Here's the link:

http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.html?id=953

Sometimes, he's unfair to Tolkien. So much so that he's clearly biased. But he makes some good points. It may be unfair, but it sure is entertaining and provocative!





And the finale:

Yeah, C. S. Lewis was an Anglican, but Tolkien was a Catholic. I'm sure that many English Roman Catholics would be upset at labelling Tolkien a Tory Anglican.

[lord of the mark]

Nostromo:

1. Bilbo and Frodo may be comfy rural types, but theyre hardly Colonel Blimps. So the books arent socialist? Or even progressive (other than to neoluddite hippies) So what?
2. I really dont think Orcs are meant to be working class. They are nasty - but well a lot of working class people dont like lumpen - and besides, JRRT makes it pretty clear that the Orcs are exploited as well. Sauron is the bad guy, and whats evil about him is pretty clear in LOTR, and made explicit in the Silm - a limitless greed for power.

2. Yup, theyre not tops as novels. Didnt Edmund Wilson point that out, like er, 50 years ago? and hasnt it long since been made clear that JRRT wasnt so much a novelist as a mythologist. The right comparisons are not Absalom, Absalom or Jude the Obscure, but the Elder Edda and Beowulf

3. Theres plenty of drek (junk, for you not familiar with the elder tongues) in the fantasy genre. Theres also plenty of drek in "realistic" fiction.