I’m reading “The Inklings” right now, about C.S. Lewis and Tolkein at Oxford. A big debate of their time (1930s) was whether the English Lit curriculum should include books written after 1830 or instead focus on ancient and medieval texts and language. Great parallels to this article.
I suspect that JRR Tolkein was just trying to piss off his fellow academic authors. 😇 www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...
L I Wilder, E Blighton, B Cleary,Tolkein, Asimov, Poe, Arthur C Clarke, Anne McCaffrey, Rowling, Gaiman, Courtney Milan, Tessa Dare, Sarah Maclean, Beverly Jenkins, Jessie Mihalik, Martha Wells, Sue Grafton, Connie Willis, Gail Carriger, Marcus Borg, JD Crossan, Rob Bell, Matthew Fox, JS Spong,
Without falling in the rabbit hole of tolkein lore and implied lore, it is basically this. The world is constantly at war. Many people are evil. The thing they don't love is the one dude bringing the evils together. And yea, the Uruk definitely eat dogs. And babies. Anything in the "meat" category.
It's been 25 years since I read them last but I vaguely remember the morality of Tolkein being; if you just kill people you're good but if you kill people and eat them you're bad.
Now I'm not a Tolkein guy by any stretch but my initial thought is that it's Sarumon and Sauron who are the really evil ones because their goals are domination and slavery. Everyone else just kinda works for them and doesn't have great job prospects elsewhere.
So, is Rings of Power a great adaptation of the many Tolkein prequels and source materials? No. Is the writing great? Sometimes yes, alrhough much of the dialogue remains atrocious, third-rate fanfic stuff mixed with knockoffs of Jackson script bits. But its high points stick with me.
In both the three Tolkein books, and in Jackson's films, Sauron remains alien & opaque, a legend plus a flaming eye. ROP's Sauron appears in flesh and blood, can alter his appearance, can interact with people. ROP uses this to give us Sauron as the ultimate abusive partner
One of the things that bothers me most about Tolkein is the emphasis on how *completely evil* the bad guys while being vague as hell about it. What, they kill people? Everybody in these books kill people. Like, what are they doing, raping kids in Angband? JUST TELL ME.
I can hear Tolkein rolling in his grave.
