Your New-Caught Sullen Peoples, Half-devil And Half-child

[pompe]

From james_nicoll's journal I note that the Libertarians are out finding targets for the Hall of Fame award.

http://www.lfs.org/2009HoFFinalists.html

This year, both Kipling and Tolkien are in. (It's the Libertarian Futurist Society, to be specific. Tolkien and Kipling!You vaguely feel

Comments

[pompe]

Come on. The Shire is watched over by an outside agency - Rangers - they can't affect or even be a part of. They don't even know it exists. You could use the Shire analogy to defend some sort of benevolent surveillance system with a "Protecting a Naive Populace Against Things They'd Better Not Know About" - logic. The utopia of the Shire depends on outside protection and ignorance and a good deal of social control about what to do and not do (witness how the Baggins and Tooks and Winebucks are slightly suspicious simply because they travel or have some sort of drive). It's as libertarian as a gated society where no one knows what security corp actually monitors the gates.

Tolkien is also pretty clear that the Lords of the West bred with weaker people and the pure blood lines thus fail. The racist and bloodline supremacy theme isn't ambigous as much as it is made slightly more complex by additional material, but we're still seeing an overwhelming theme of blood-logic, nobility and their unquestioned right to rule, racial purity and all sorts of reactionary-conservative issues. The entire setting is reactionary-romantic.

The thing here is that Tolkien by any sensible read isn't libertarian, socialist nor progressive, even though you can find minor things which can be read as libertarian, socialist or progressive. But it is silly. One has to look at the big picture. Sure, Samwise becomes mayor from humble beginnings - that doesn't make it a progressive novel - and Eowyn has a sword - that doesn't make it a feminist novel - and there is an anti-totalitarian theme about the corruption of Very Great Power (if not by a royal crown itself) - that doesn't make it a libertarian novel.

[notthebuddha]

Maybe there's some kind of revisionism at work, and Sauron and Saruman are actually the charismatic leaders of a pan-racial freedom movement, liberating Middle Earth from its authoritarian despots. The pits of Isengard birth the technological wonders possible with unregulated research and industry.