Rachel Maddow is Wrong About the Lord of the Rings
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- For some reason we find ourselves talking about politics this week, as the Lord of the Rings somehow became a topic of discussion around the vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance when Rachel Maddow brought up his company, Narya.
The Lord of the rings is literally anti fascist literature
Its anti industrialisation too
Anti-communist too.
Ultimately, LOTR is a traditional story and many leftists have come to equate tradition and some of the views that Tolkien had with fascism.
Maddow is often a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Colbert is such a fan of LotR that he has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of Tolkien's writings. I have no doubt he will set her straight when next she appears on his show
Far right like oxygen too, breathing is a political act!
Just want to add, LOTR has great potential to bring both political sides together by focusing on some of the non-political aspects of the films and books we do all agree on. Friendship, bravery, support, community, empathy, explosions ARE cool, etc. I always thought it could be a bridge to talk to my very Christian parents.
Greetings... I am the Tolkienesque novelist D L Lindeman. For me the saddest part about Rachel's ignorance here is the fact that she (as a Rhodes Scholar) attended Oxford.
Added to the irony of this injection of politics into a literary classic like LOTR is the fact that Tolkien absolutely loathed and bemoaned overt political allegories while still alive. Enjoyed the vid! Cheers
The professor was very clear about his distaste for allegory.
Lord of the rings is a story about preserving things, preserving the goodness and beauty, etc.
"Right wing" politics in general are conservative, trying to lower the pace of change as a whole. So it's natural that someone with more conservative views would like Tolkien.
However, to call it "extremist" or "far right" is just a result of the state of both parties - being somewhat conservative on a scale of borderline extremist liberal views, by definition makes you relatively "far right".
Is it? Not really.
Lord of the Rings has lessons about the hubris of believing that the works of humans or even divine beings are superior to the works of God. Two examples are when the Numenoreans attack Valinor, or when Saruman destroys the parts of the natural world to fuel his machinations.
But there are also lessons about accepting change and natural decay. The elven rings are about preservation but the destruction of the One Ring undoes their power. When Galadriel resists the Ring, what she does is accept that her kingdom must eventually fade and that she must accept it.
The message is not "change is bad."
Excellent video. It’s a shame Maddow clearly hasn’t read any Tolkien despite being very well-read & having been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. But there are the unfortunate folks who haven’t read him. (It’s never too late to start, Rachel, you’ll probably love the Ainulindalë, since, like Tolkien, you’re a Catholic.) To me it’s a bigger surprise that no one on her usually talented research team could catch that right wingers are really misinterpreting Tolkien’s politics (and not catch Maddow’s awful error about Narya, which has zero to do with the word Aryan).
Tolkien is on record expressing his contempt for the Nazis and that “ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler.” When they asked for proof of his Aryan heritage to permit a German-language translation of The Hobbit, he suggested responding: “But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” And of South Africa, the country of his birth, he is likewise on record saying “But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones.”
We all know Tolkien was a conservative Catholic. And sure, the LotR has a monarchist story line as part of the story, but it’s also about the little underdogs, not the king, saving the world. And the Shire gets by without a king, yes with a few aristocratic families, but also an elected Mayor.
And anyone who thinks Tolkien was a white supremacist hasn’t read very deeply. Think of Samwise’s sympathetic thoughts for the dead soldier from Harad. Think of Tolkien’s ethical struggles later in life about the redeemability of the Orcs. Think of the Drúedain (the ancestors of the Woses in the LotR who assisted the Rohirrim with a quick road to Gondor). They came to Beleriand in tandem with one of the 3 peoples of the Edain, the Haladin, and lived side-by-side with them. And they went to Númenor with the Edain who survived the wreck of Beleriand. They are commonly pictured as not “white” (though the textual support for that is scant). Think of the “Swarthy Men,” the Easterlings who came late into Beleriand under the influence of Morgoth. Half of them rebelled against Morgoth and fought with the Eldar & the Edain. And amongst the Edain, the House of Hador was pretty much blond & lily-white, but the House of Bëor had skin color ranging “from fair to swarthy” (though Tolkien used that word “swarthy” for a range of colors too).
Here’s a very good example of Tolkien not being of the far-right. In an interview, he was asked what his writings were about. He said the inevitability of death, and to cap the point pulled an on-topic quotation out of his pocket and read it aloud. And it was a quotation from . . . Simone de Beauvoir, one of the premier feminist authors in history and a conspicuous leftist.
Link:
x.com/TolkienWonder/status/1559400368131305472
Posthumous guilt by association with people who didn’t exist when Tolkien died - that seems like a reasonable way to judge an author’s works, don’t you think?
The Tolkien family should sue them for Intellectual Property theft.
I don’t think it’s possible to fully understand Tolkien without being a devout catholic. So Rachel Maddow is naturally going to be repulsed by the story unfortunately.
Correlation is not causation.
American politics have nothing to do with tolkien work
Merci pour cette analyse!
I was raised in the church and knew several people that turned it into far right literature. Some of the things they extrapolated made sense some of them didn't. Either way I like the books a lot.
i feel like if someone were to be inspired politically by lotr they would be a monarchist of some sort. which i dont think alot of people who read him are.
btw when it comes to black Aragorn (though i never hear about this drama) wouldn't that lead to alot of implications like the numanoreans are black and arent like most of the men in middle earth are related to the numanoreans (atleast i think). also that would make the "racist" description of the harad in 2 towers kind of strange and not make sense.
when it comes to the woman lead honestly i find a lot of the modern movies and shows are ruining woman leads. i feel like alot of not too great movies came out with female leads and now everyone just hates woman leads. Honestly a Rohirrim female warrior from long ago might actually be pretty tolkien if she is the ancestor of Eowyn. kind of like a took thing for bilbo in the hobbit. i think that would be neat.
nice video non the less 👍. God bless!
That's definitely not true, because rightful kingship in LotR is based on destiny and character rather than birth. There is providence at work but merely being born into the line of Isildur was insufficient; Aragorn had to be make choices and be virtuous to become king. Those metaphysics simply aren't at play in the real world.
Politics is more than just being about who is in charge and what the nature of their title is.
Regarding "Black Aragorn," it's from a recent card set for _Magic: the Gathering._ And they were pretty arbitrary about how they depicted characters, to the point that they made Éowyn and Éomer different races. I don't think it's meant to have worldbuilding implications.
Tolkien famously had disdain for the far right.
But appropriation of things by the far right is nothing new. Norse symbolism has been stolen by far right Neo-Nazis, particularly Thor's Hammer. But the Nazis also bastardized Germanic culture for their tyrannical propaganda. This is the same reason Tolkien held disdain for the far right.
To be honest, the lack of female characters in the Hobbit book has always slightly bugged me on repeated readings. However, I hated the movie trilogy for their pat modern female additions, among their other ridiculous expansions of the story.
Let the modern film industry never sully Beren and Luthien. Tolkien's Luthien was the greatest of all his elves, who quelled Carcharoth and defeated Morgoth himself in the very seat of his power, who had Sauron helpless with his life in her hands and let him go, who sang so immortally that Mandos wept and the gods made exception to the doom of elves and men, YET . . . who never touched a weapon, who never committed an act of violence: Luthien did all that by being beautiful and good, and she alone of all the Eldalie accepted the Gift of Men and left the world altogether Modern filmmakers can't / won't sell that, because today's world has been bent and the light of Aman has been lost. (Anyway, it would be necessary to do Feanor and the Silmarils first, but they'd ruin that too - ref Rings of Power.)