A very common interpretation of Tolkien’s work is that the races are not representative of actual race, but rather the different sorts of people that inhabited the UK at the time.
Orcs are not intentionally written to resemble any real race, they are the British urban proletariat, corrupted by industrialisation and reduced to spiteful and self-centred creatures driven by greed and envy.
Hobbits are also not written to resemble any real race, according to this interpretation. Instead, they are the idyllic rural countryfolk, innocent and out of touch and yet to be exposed to the violence and cruelty of industry.
This interpretation can also be applied to elves, who aren’t necessarily humans without sin, but are the landed gentry - the aristocrats. They are ancient and elegant creatures of pure blood, full of tradition and old ways, who harken back to a more civilised time before the country was ravaged by the industrial revolution. They are the last remnants of a long-lost age of chivalry, romance and tradition.
That’s also why a lot of British people cling to the royal family and put them on a pedestal. They’re the last vestige of a bygone and supposedly better era.
While I have no doubt that Tolkien’s Catholic beliefs heavily influenced his writing, I personally believe that his Britishness had a stronger impact.
I should note that this is not a universally accepted interpretation. Another one discussed on Reddit, and one that I personally prefer, is that it was the Ring’s geas on Gollum that caused him to fall while holding the Ring. Here’s the relevant quote:
Then suddenly, as before under the eaves of the Emyn Muil, Sam saw these two rivals with other vision. A crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and rage; and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in white, but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a commanding voice.
‘Begone, and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.’
And so Gollum fell as the Ring commanded him to do, and in doing so, ensured the Ring’s destruction against its will. This ties nicely into one of the major themes of LOTR: evil being self-defeating in its shortsighted pettiness.
If we look into the themes of the Lord of the Rings and the wider setting, there’s more to admire than disdain, I’d say.
The Silmarillion has always been “what if I rewrote the Bible but added armies of dragons, demons, and other spookies throwing hands with great heroes of men and elves?”
It doesn’t turn into a lecture on moral purity, except in the sense of it promoting the values Tolkien believed virtuous – loyalty, bravery, environmentalism, the ultimate triumph of good over evil.
It’s not like he’s wrong about men being weak, either. We’re prone to greed, jealousy, violence, and so on. Elves aren’t immune to this – Feanor was born as most talented and brilliant of anyone ever, and he messed it all up with his arrogance and greed. His brothers, Fingolfin and Finarfin, are presented as his superiors because of their humility.
The elves who remain by the time of the Lord of the Rings are “wise” simply because they’ve taken so many self-inflicted Ls over thousands of years that they eventually learned from it.
I think I like this one better, and it’d also fit well with the movie version of how the Ring perished. Both indeed go with the “Evil destroys itself route”
There was also a kind of natural selection at work. Those too incompetent to survive that long had died out by then, as did those who weren’t nice enough to avoid making mortal enemies. And those who weren’t patient enough to keep investing their effort in a doomed civilization had sailed to Valinor by then.
A Trigger anime about elves and dwarves? Why, that’s coming soon™ with Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi. No release date yet but keep an eye out. Or start reading the manga now. Relatedly unrelated, the artist for the manga is apparently a fan of Baldur’s Gate 1+2, since they redrew all the party member portraits in their style.
My shill cannons are on full blast today, it feels like.
(Also very CHOICE to make Jaheira look happier in BG2 than BG1, lmao, what you trying to say bro…)
As am I, which, incidentally, is why “Laws and Customs Among the Eldar” — admittedly a controversial and secondary-canon document that actually contradicts the published Silmarillion — don’t sit well with me, particularly the parts about romance and sexuality, which is again one of the more prominent places where Tolkien’s own Catholic mores bled in. But purists among the Tolkien fandom swear by this document, so one way or another, so as a fanfiction writer and prospective LARPer I have to form some opinion about it.
Purists (especially in this regard) can eat poop. If I were to ever RP in a Lord of the Rings setting, I would totally disregard anything that explicitly tries to enforce “traditional gender roles”. Throw out the bits that are specific to men/women and retool it into non-gendered stuff.
What Christopher Tolkien doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Besides, I’ll just send him that 4chan meme about his dad discussing sexy Shelob and flee while he has a heart attack.
I mean, Tolkien purists are able to and -will- argue about whether or not a tree stood one foot away from another point, or which shade of green the grass in the Shire is. And scream bloody murder when so much as a fart comes Tolkien’s way.
I get that recent adaptations cough Rings of Power cough aren’t that great, but these people really push it.
What about “elves only fall in love once, for life, and can’t divorce and can’t remarry ever unless one of the partners dies and chooses to stay dead forever”?
Or that bit that, depending on the interpretation, means that:
A friend recently gotten into writing fic for Tolkien elves and from what I can tell most ao3 writers look at it and go “this can’t stop me because I can’t read”
I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the purists. It’s not like he ever 100% finished things so who knows what would have ended up on the cutting room floor in the end
What’s an ao3 writer? I’ve seen the term used here before but dont know what it means. For some reason I keep thinking about Age of Empires 3 but I doubt that’s it…