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#that they committed against the dunlendings
vakarians-babe · 2 years
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i have a lot of thoughts and feelings about ROP but tbh i will likely not be posting about it much bc for me Tolkien has always been so deeply personal and i want to experience it with as much privacy as i can muster? idk if that sounds weird lmao but i'll summarize some of my early thoughts in the tags and probably promptly not speak about it until it's finished airing.
#it has...promise. it does#am i irritated they teased us with shots of valinor? of the feanorian oath in like majority of promos?#and then ended up showing us like 1 minute of silm content? yea oh my god yea#but i understand its a rights issue#what bothers me MORE though is celeborn not existing and galadriel and elrond being besties#bc it makes me fear a romance plot#and i lived through thinking twilight was good and the bella/jacob to bella/renesmee transition and i will not go through it again#and the reason it bothers me is that celeborn and celebrian are IN lotr. they are included in the rights purchased by amazon.#which is wild to pay millions and not use every scrap#and im honestly deeply concerned by the fact that arondir was the first elf to get called a knife ear#bc why him?#and this just leads me to a larger concern about the way that power relations between races will be handled#bc elves arrived on middle earth first yes and then mostly migrated to valinor before returning to the midst of the humans#and there is a big power imbalance there and it treads the line of colonialism#and i think to tell these stories#the writers should be working closely with sensitivity readers#i already know we'll never really see a redress of the way peter jackson heroicized rohan so completely that everyone forgot the atrocities#that they committed against the dunlendings#whom they colonized#and so im deeply wary of the way these stories will unfold if the writers arent engaging properly with our lived in context#that said!#i love the costumes. i love the world. the soundtrack. the acting.#am i miffed about lore shit? god yea and thats my fuckin cross to bear lmao#but the harfoots <3#i love arondir and bronwyn to pieces and i hope against hope they'll get a good story#so yeah i love parts of it and im concerned about other parts and irritated by some things and love the ingenuity of other things#you can love and hate ROP we exist aspidfjhgs[diufg#this was super long sorry#rings of power#also one more thing
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warrioreowynofrohan · 2 years
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I'm basically Christian LiteTM, and my favourite part of the lord of the rings is the power of mercy (I also share this with ATLA, and my ensuing problem). My ensuing problem, is the necessity of violence, or at least exerting power over someone, which are frequently one in the same. How many orcs did the fellowship need to kill to protect sam and frodo? Would they have succeeded without Aragorn's violence against Sauron, and the battle of the Morannon? Evil will eventually destroy itself; absolutely yes. In the mean time, "good" must commit violence in the name of self preservation. What do you think about this?
I’ve struggled with this, particularly in the current global context (I lean pacifist and think that the vast majority of wars in history were needless and nothing but destructive, but I am present feeling strongly supportive of the Ukrainian resistance against Russian invasion so I am clearly not entirely pacifist), and I haven’t reached a satisfactory answer yet.
Tolkien himself lived during WWII and was not a pacifist, and I think two quotes from The Lord of the Rings are illuminating for his perspective, though I don’t yet know if I morally agree with them:
Faramir: War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.
Eowyn: It needs but one foe to breed a war, Master Warden, and those who have not swords can still die upon them.
We focus on the latter part of Faramir’s statement, and rightly so; yet in the first part he acknowledges he does not regard war in self-defense as avoidable, however little he likes it. (But what precisely do you mean by ‘self’ preservation? Aragorn and the army at the Black Gate do not seek the preservation of themselves - indeed, they all expect to die. They seek the preservation, as Gandalf says in his earlier conversations with Denethor, of anything - anything of goodness, happiness, beauty. Because it is not them, or one city, or one realm, that Sauron seeks to destroy, but anythung in Middle-earth that is in any way good. To me it stands out that Tolkien can create such an absolute war against an evil power and still say: no, we cannot win ‘by any means necessary”, because then evil still wins.)
And one cannot win by force of arms in The Lord of the Rings, and those who try to do so - even those who try to rely on force alone purely for their defense, like Denethor - are misled and corrupted. And the heroes offer mercy whenever possible - not only to Saruman, Wormtongue, and Gollum on multiple occassions, but to the ordinary Men working for the enemy. To the Dunlendings, to the men who fight for Mordor, to the ruffians in the Shire: all who are willing to surrender are set free with few or little consequences, and Aragorn makes peace with the people of Harad.
The most crucial point, though, I think, is that Tolkien is writing a fairy-story, not a war-story. The events of The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion are not intended to map to real-life wars. Not even, I think, in a general sense. They do not teach us how to fight specific, military enemies. They teach us how to reject evil - not evil individuals - and why that matters.
How to reject despair, and hold onto hope, even when no rational hope can be found. How to keep going, even when hope is lost, as Frodo does. How to hold to compassion, friendship, kindness, beauty, even when all seems bleak. How - like Elrond and Galadriel - to give up even good things that we love, when those things give evil power over us or others. That’s what fairy-stories are for, not teaching us to fight orcs. We are not watching a physical battle that helps us understand physical conflicts, nearly so much as we are watching a physical battle that helps us understand moral/spiritual conflicts.
I think that this is, if anything, even more true in the Silmarillion. Morgoth is completely evil and has hordes of orcs, balrogs, dragons, etc., none of whom appear as anythung other than evil. And yet - attempts to defeat Morgoth by force of arms are frequently what plays most into his hands. Fëanor’s first action in seeking vengeance on Morgoth is to murder and steal from other elves - which benfits Morgoth in sowing division. The Nirnaeth fails. Túrin’s determination to face the forces of Angband in combat leads to the destruction of Nargothrond and of many others. Having fought Angband is no defence whatsoever against corruption and becoming evil, as we see with the Fëanorians. It is not the combat against evil, but the rejection of evil and the choosing of good - Fingon rescuing the friend who betrayed him, Lúthien defying all risks for the sake of the man she loves, Eärendil seeking the mercy of the Valar - that bring victory. I think all of this does fit into the idea of Tolkien’s world as Augustinian (evil as the absence of good) rather than Manichaean (good and evil as opposing forces). As in The Lord of the Rings, salvation comes from grace, as a result of characters (Frodo and Eärendil) showing mercy in the hardest of circumstances, though that grace takes a rather more dramatic physical form (The War of Wrath) in The Silmarillion.
There are other people here who are far, far more versed in philosophy and in Tolkien studies generally amd who could guve you a much better answer, but the best I can do is: Tolkien’s stories aren’t guidlines for how to fight a war. They show characters who display virtues (and vices) that can help us understand how to live, and what temptation looks like and why and how to resist it. They give us a story that tells truths about what the world is: about mercy and grace and redemption.
And I think the most Tolkien could say about the real world and its conflicts is: we live in a fallen, Marred world. The use of force is a stopgap, not an answer; and there are a lot of lines we can’t cross, both in our actions and our attitudes, without giving the victory to evil.
For my own part, I don’t know yet. I don’t know where all the lines are drawn in a war like the one that’s being fought now. But I can see what’s good. Good is people in occupied Ukrainian cities protesting en mass even while the Russian forces shoot at them. Good is people in Russia protesting the war at risk of their lives and freedoms. Good is people in Poland opening their hearts and homes to refugees.
EDIT: I feel like I need to clarify something on the last point.
I, personally, strongly support economic sanctions on Russia until it withdraws from Ukraine, and strongly support strengthening those sanctions to cover Russia’s oil and gas exports. I also support supplying Ukraine with arms.
I am nonetheless not prepared to state “from a Christian perspective, those actions are moral,” because that’s a much stronger claim than I can justify and I am not at all convinced it is true. The question of how “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you and persecute you" pertains to your attitudes towards stopping one person or group of people from hurting another one, when you yourself are at no risk, is one I’ve scarcely begun to grapple with. We have the right and indeed the duty to forgive our enemies; but can we have the right / the place to forgive other people’s enemies?
I really love Tar-Meneldur’s speech on this in “Aldarion and Erendis” in Unfinished Tales, because he really breaks it down well.
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morwensteelsheen · 3 years
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34 & 46 for the lotr ask please~
yaaas, thank you, gonna do these in reverse order so i can drop my obnoxiously long answer to 34 under a cut lol
(also hello welcome back i missed ur presence on my dash)
46. Last but not least, is there anything in the series that you would want to change?
God, yeah, I wish there was more of an emphasis on how fucked up everything was for Gondor. The first impression we get of it is Boromir being told to shut up and fuck off at the Council of Elrond and since the characters who are doing that are ones we as the readers are meant to be sympathetic towards, Gondor doesn’t really get a fair go of it basically until Faramir shows up in TTT and goes all turbocharged Númenor on us lol. There are so many hints that speak to how messed up Gondor’s situation is, but unless you’re actively looking to be sympathetic to Gondor, they're not easy to pick up on. JRRT even acknowledged that — iirc he wrote in one of his letters that he wished he’d softened his portrayal of Denethor more to show that he was, fundamentally, a good ruler, he was just faced with horrific odds.
I don’t know how you’d fix this in the context of the story though. The best I can come up with is a conversation between Aragorn and Faramir re: Boromir witnessed by Frodo maybe? Maybe Aragorn showing a little remorse for being an enormous dick to Boromir? Maybe a recognition from Aragorn that the poor wee Húrionath babies got jerked the fuck around for, uhhh, 969 years while the whole rest of M-E was apparently ready to trash them endlessly? Something like that, I dunno.
34. What’s a headcanon or even something canon that you’ve heard that you really just cannot wrap your head around?
(Also I know you and I agree broadly on this one but I love getting to rant about it asjkhfa)
I think NoME (if taken as canon, which I’m certainly going to be doing) solves this problem for me, but I’ve never really been down with the portrayals of all the Mannish characters as Victorianesque blushing virgins. I was sort of principally against that in a historical sense, because though JRRT certainly had his interpretations of Catholicism, Catholic history actually tells us that people were, hmm, not exactly as celibate as the nobles of the robe might have hoped. But I was also against it because it removed a really important means of gendered control over society — sexuality is a really important line on which society is policed, and if you insist that Tolkien’s legendarium features civilisations which are the platonic ideal of virginal, celibate societies, you remove the weight of the emotional and psychological struggles of a lot of the characters. Éowyn is the most obvious example of this, the implied coercive elements of gender and sexuality and its relationship to her lack of power (or perceived lack of autonomy, maybe more accurately) is a really crucial element of her story, I feel.
There’s a sort of Neo-Noble Savages idea that all the Rohirrim are super gung ho about sex while the Gondorrim are demure about it, but I think that plays too much into the idea of a moral continuum that places Gondor at the moral end of the spectrum, Rohan in the middle, and the Dunlenders/Haradrim/etc at the bad end. That’s a very legitimate way of interpreting Faramir’s High Men/Middle Men speech -- and is also a fair reading of the history of Gondor and Rohan/Rhovanion/etc, -- but misses, I think, some of the more interesting nuance in what he’s saying, namely that Gondor and Rohan have become more alike over time. Faramir’s obviously bitching about the vainglory element, but there’s an emotional component to interest in war that is immediately comparable to beliefs about sex and sexuality, and I would argue that this justifies a reading that doesn’t privilege the idealistic Catholic celibacy vibes. In the context of Éowyn, this means her experience of gendered sexuality isn’t only going to be from Gríma (who is a predator), or the Rohirrim (whose culture she ultimately very lightly forsakes), but from a wider array of people with a wider array of levels of moral goodness.
And it’s not just Éowyn either, on a macro scale it makes for some really interesting comparisons between the races. Tolkien has obviously now let us all know that the Elves like to fuck hard and fast -- but only after they’re married. So Aragorn and Arwen suddenly become very interesting, given 1) the moral ‘righteousness’ of the Elves compared with Men; 2) the enormous difference in how Arwen experiences time vs how Aragorn experiences time and 3) what grayness is introduced by Éowyn throwing herself at Aragorn’s feet. Arwen and Aragorn might actually be the one couple in LOTR whose Victorian virginity I could actually believe wholeheartedly in, and that’s because of the combination of Arwen’s Elven background and Aragorn’s, uh, personality. And if that’s the case, then Aragorn’s commitment to celibacy for the 80 or so years (I can’t remember, sorry) between when he and Arwen make their promise and when they get hitched becomes something far, far more similar to the types of sainted celibacy that are praised in Catholic history and that JRRT would have been familiar with; but these narratives of saintly celibacy are only as effective as they are because there’s a recognition that that temptation is ever present, not just as a natural product of human inclination, but as a social temptation too. In the crudest possible terms: it’s not just that your dick gets hard, it’s that other people get your dick hard, lol.
If everyone else around Aragorn (and to a lesser extent Arwen) is pretty contentedly giving in to temptation, then the wait for Aragorn becomes quite a bit more significant! And Éowyn actually gets ‘levelled-up’ so to speak in the role she plays in Aragorn’s story -- it’s not just that she has a girlish crush on him that ultimately doesn’t really impact him emotionally, she becomes a very serious, very tangible temptation for him, one that actually places Arwen’s choice onto his shoulders for once: Éowyn represents the worldly, things that are tethered to the fleetingness of life, while Arwen represents something everlasting, less tethered to the hard soil of the Earth, and that Aragorn then makes a choice (irrespective of how hard it actually is for him, and I suspect not very, though I love Éowyn it’s pretty clear she’s not his type) means that he’s had to have some level of immediate awareness of what Arwen’s going through. It’s not to say that that thread isn’t possible if everybody’s all celibate all the time, but I think narratively it’s less compelling.
Also I feel like I should say that I'm not saying sex is the only way to make a narrative compelling? But I do think given the heavy emphasis on Catholic-inspired moralism in LOTR it's a really fun thing to play with.
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