I totally agree with you. The problem is that you’re hand-waving away all of Tolkein’s vast histories and notes (and there’s a LOT of it) in order to create a false context and intent.
You’d have a much better shot (though still a specious one, IMO) at arguing that LotR is racist, not classist.
Though he was quite classy.
Frodo, more than Sam, Aragorn, Gandalf or any of the elves/half-elves.
Authors are only human. They can sometimes be blind to their own idiosyncrasies, just as anyone else can be.
I wrote that we can judge a work by its author’s intent. That doesn’t mean we have to accept that an author always achieved his intent. Tolkien may have said that it was his intent to create a setting with no connection with the modern society he lived in. But is that really possible? I don’t see how any author can completely divorce himself from his work. And you yourself have claimed that Tolkien’s life influenced his work. The only difference between us is we disagree on the specific directions in which his life influenced his work.
While I’ve said that I see evidence of a belief in a class system in Tolkien’s work, I’ve never said it was the most important part of that work. I stand by my opinion that it’s there but it’s a minor aspect of his work. Overall, I imagine we’re mostly in agreement over Tolkien. So I don’t see why you need to make such a big issue out of this one minor area in which we disagree.
Pretty good post I think.
The majority of stories have “heroes”, and fantasy especially is full of them. And most heroes don’t work very well if they’re not somehow superior to the competition. Saying “Aragorn is superior because Tolkien wrote him that way” is making it too simple. Every story has characters that are superior but what matters is how the author justifies that superiority. And to look at that it helps to effectively treat the story as a historical event reported by the author.
It’s also humour based around language. There’s a lot of this in The Hobbit, because it is, fundamentally, a children’s book.
I’m sorry, but THIS is completely unsupported, and makes you look like you are grasping at straws with your argument. Gondor’s problems ACTUALLY arouse from the arrogance of their king back in the day, and Denethor, Boromir, and the other stewards have been doing a fine job of fighting the good fight hundreds of years. If anything, the problems of Gondor -cause- the difficulties that Denethor and Boromir experience, not the reverse. Similarly, Faramir is rewarded with a princedom for having been a good Steward.
To try to avoid making this a total hijack post, no, I don’t think Sam is “the real hero” or somesuch. I think to say that is to oversimplify the work tremendously. Was Sam of crucial importance? Absolutely. But so was Frodo. So was Gandalf. And none of them follow a particularly archetypical character arc. I don’t think it’s fair to say that any of them are the “real hero” of the tale.
You do realize that’s not the real history of Gondor, right?
Right. Tolkien set up the causes so that he’d have the effect he wanted. And the effect that he wanted (and wrote) is not the effect you said.
Therefore, your argument is still wrong.
Look:
Character A shoots character B.
Character B dies.
Character B died because the author wrote that Character A shot him. We get it. That doesn’t make it okay for you to argue that Character B died because he had sudden heart attack.
Gondor’s problems, AS WRITTEN, did not occur as a result of anything Denethor or Boromir did, OR anything that Tolkien had them do. There is no support for you to say this.
Character starting and end points:
Bilbo: A well-off middle-class Hobbit of good means but no particular amibition, or particular distinciton outside of being fairly bright and fairly well-studied.
Saves a pack of skilled Dwarven fighters several times. Burgles Smaug. Helps arrange a peace between the Wood Elves, the men of Laketown, and the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain. Goes on adventure after adventure and becomes a good friend to Elrond and Gandalf, among other.
Frodo: A well-off middle-class Hobbit of good means but no particular amibition, or particular distinciton outside of being fairly bright and fairly well-studied.
Saves the world.
Samwise: begins as a Gardener.
Saves the world and then becomes Mayor, as well as arguably the true author of Lord of the Rings.
I could continue on, but I don’t see the need. Basically, every character rises not to their “natural station” but to something above what they ever imagined themselves doing, or even being capable of. Gimli and Legolas, slightly altering that idea, more or less forgot their station and went on doing something else instead.
Yeah, in his version.
Sam and Frodo had equal strength over the ring but Frodo was ever held the mightiest halfling who ever lived.
Coincidentally, there’s a new article just posted today at the Cracked website. It’s about how people can be influenced by fiction without realizing it. It’s mainly about movies not books but I think its points apply in general. The article even uses Frodo and The Lord of the Rings as an example (although of a different issue). He also points out how resistant people are to acknowledging how much they are subconsciously influenced by fiction.
Moreover, what we see in the books is not so much “belief IN a class system” in the sense of advocacy of a class system, but rather recognition of the well-entrenched existence of a class system as part of the social norms appropriate to a work of fiction that is consciously assuming the mantle of archaic mythology.
That is, I don’t think the class roles in LOTR necessarily tell us much about Tolkien’s own views concerning class in modern society. They do make it clear, however, that Tolkien saw such class roles as indispensable to the type of legendary-saga storytelling he was trying to do.
Trying to write an epic that evoked ancient Germanic folklore and bardic genres, without putting in kings achieving heroic deeds, jolly peasants, bustling bourgeois, and so on would be simply silly. I think anything Tolkien might have been trying to say or even inadvertently proclaiming about his opinion of the class system(s) of his day was outweighed by his desire to avoid anachronism.
Not sure, but he did comment on class in old-fashioned rural England, which engaged him much more than modern society: “To tip your hat to the squire is damn bad for him, but it’s damn good for you.” In other words, the upper class has their egos fed, which is a bad thing because too much egotism is a bad thing, but the lower classes sensibly prune their egos with the stratified class system, and are better people for it. Not sure what I just said. But he seems to be supporting it while subtly criticizing it.
Tom-Tom Bombadil: “Meesa gonna stink up da WHOLE movie…”
Of course some of the Shire squirearchy are the right sort for all the hat-tipping. The Took, as Thain of the Shire, objects to Lotho’s antics even though he himself hasn’t attempted to exert his theoretical privileges in living memory, and makes the Took country a no-go area for Sharkey’s men regardless of inconvenience, and the Master of Buckland seems blameless too. It seems to be mainly those who are asquiring to stations above their proper one who are prone to the damn-badness - although in the lower strata things can go badly wrong too; Ted Sandyman’s on a par with Sam Gamgee but ends up a venal sneak and quisling.
I knew some people hate Tom Bombadil but this is taking the bullying too far.
Sure, I don’t deny that Tolkien had his own personal views on the class system of his day (and the traditional social patterns immediately preceding his day), and I don’t dispute any biographical evidence that at least some of those views were positive. I’m just skeptical that we can reliably discern anything significant about those views from his portrayal of class roles in LoTR and the rest of his “mythological fiction”.
He was trying to create for LoTR a world that would seem to contemporary readers both archaic and alien and yet natural and familiar. The Middle-earth works were supposed to produce some of the same responses in Anglophones that the genuine ancient Norse sagas and their ilk did in other Germanic or Celtic peoples: both “wow, this is completely unrealistic and mythical with all the trolls and fairies and magic swords and what have you”, and also “ah yes, that’s us: this is part of the history of my own people”.
There’s no way Tolkien could have given Middle-earth that aroma of strange half-recognition for English-speaking readers without incorporating into it some form of the traditional social class structure that was such an integral part of history for them.
Lotho was of the local gentry and felt entitled when he took over Bag End and declared himself Boss and went all Oswald Mosely on the poor little hobbos. The closest literary parallel I can think of it Senator Trueba (a powerful rural landowner) in The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, who supported a brutal right-wing coup thinking it would bolster his class in society, but found out too late the ruffian forces he’d help unleash would destroy him too.
Exactly. Along those lines, I think it’s telling that his “damn bad” and “damn good” diction in that quote is so clunky-sounding, you can’t even recognize the writer of that sentence as the author of *LotR *or Silmarillion, author of polished and elegant prose like
or
I guess the quote shows that in his off hours, when he wasn’t wearing his Mythopoeic Subcreator hat, he may have privately subsided into the persona of Cranky Old White Guy. I’ve seen it happen to <sigh> so many brilliant minds.
Gosh, Johanna, that is a remarkable bit of insight. Thanks.