Oppose Tolkien!
When Waterstones named JRR Tolkein’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ as the best novel of the twentieth century, Germanie Greer offered a lament. "Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and encountered a tribe of full-grown women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies and babbling excitedly about the doings of hobbits," she said, "it has been my nightmare that Tolkein would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has been realized."
And we haven’t woken up yet. The BBC’s ‘Big Read’ competition to find Britain’s favourite book reaches its climax this week - and Tolkien is odds-on favourite to win. The success of his dire trilogy obviously cannot be attributed to literary merit. The great critic Edmund Wilson called it "balderdash" and "juvenile trash" when it was first published, and it’s hard to disagree. Tolkien’s insufferable obsession with describing a fictional landscape borders on the autistic, as does the almost total absence of women or sophisticated emotion from his work. No, ‘Lord of the Rings’ is not loved because it is a good novel, but because it taps into some of the most atavistic and ugly impulses of our times.
The most obvious is racism. The purely evil Orcs are, in Tolkien’s words, "squat, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant-eyes." The enemy is the Dark Lord and he lives in the Black Land. The heroic hobbits and elves are, by contrast, uber-Aryan and ethnically pure. Ideals of ‘blood’ and its purity are always sloshing around his narrative. For example, the Men of Gondor - "the high men" - are descendants of the Numenorians, the greatest of all warriors. Over the centuries, they have become ‘degraded’ because of breeding with inferior races. When their bloodline is pure, as in Aragorn’s descendants, the strength and power of the original Lords of the West is retained. Alarm bells ringing yet? As the academic Dr Stephen Shapiro explains, "Tolkien was not a Nazi but he was a Nordicist in that his works hark back to England’s original culture before the Norman invasion. The Lord of the Rings makes a claim for a pan-Nordic identity or a paradigm for Great Britain and a lament for the disappearance of these races. This speaks to a long-standing European anxitiety about being swamped by non-Europeans. Tolkein was a real traditionalist in this way."
Some elements of the US and Israeli far-right have tried to use ‘Lord of the Rings’ to promote their ‘West vs The Rest’ world-view. Rod Dehrer, writing for the National Review, the Stateside equivalent to the Spectator, claimed recently: "The trilogy explores the nature of individual heroism in the midst of an epic clash of civilisations, one that pits freedom-loving peoples of the West against merciless totalitarians from the East. As the hobbits Frodo and Sam make their way across the bleak and hostile land of Mordor to destroy the Ring of Power… their companions in the West rally a coalition of tribes to wage war against Sauron’s minions living among them. We are fortunate to have these books in the present moment, to give us hope and a reason to dig in for the long fight ahead."
The popularity of this reading of the story - which proliferates in chatrooms and discussion boards across the web - reminds us of a terrible wrong direction the War on Terror could take, and one which has thankfully been avoided by the Bush administration thus far. Tolkien presents his readers with an absolute enemy who must simply be destroyed: purely evil and incapable of human feeling. Of course, no such war can ever happen; it is a pernicious Tolkienian myth. The war against Communism and the more recent war against Ba’athist fascism in Iraq were battles where the vast majority of people on ‘the other side’ agreed with us and sought freedom from their own dictators. They were not Orcs; quite the opposite. A recent poll showed that 90% of Iraqis want to create a democracy in their country. Anybody who tries to confect a Tolkien-style dichotomy where Arabs (or anybody else) are our absolute totalitarian enemy is making a crazy mistake. ‘Lord of the Rings’ offers no ethical or spiritual road-map - it offers a landmine-strewn path in entirely the wrong direction.
Indeed, the agenda encoded within the novel is entirely reactionary. Tolkien was animated by a visceral hatred of modernity, and its glorious embodiment, the cosmopolitan city. He is part of the Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment, an enemy of science and progress who is trying to recover myths and rehabilitate mysticism. Tolkien said his preferred political system was "unconstitutional monarchy", and admitted he was not a democrat. He sought retreat in a feudal world of deference, aristocracy and hierarchy.
Science Fiction writer David Brin has exposed the dark values of Tolkien’s world by coaxing us to imagine the point of view of the evil wizard Sauron and his troops. "Sauron’s army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colours of humanity, and all the lower classes," he explains. "Might they have imagined they were the good guys, with a justifiable greivance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy toppled by invader-alien elves and their Numenorian-colonialist human lackeys? Sauron, champion of the Middle Earthling!"
Yes, it might seem absurd to take Tolkien so seriously - but the worlds we choose to escape to reveal a great deal about us. So please - when it comes to the Big Read, vote for Salinger, Tolstoy, Bronte - anyone but Tolkein - and sign me up for Sauron’s army while you’re at it.
POSTSCRIPT: This piece prompted a huge amount of response, mostly from conservatives and pro-Tolkein writers. The seriousness with which they take LOTR is revealing. One of them, Paul Burrel,, for example, wrote:
"I read with interest, your article on LOTR and the deeply embedded ideology contained therein.
Of course, from the age of 11, when I read the trilogy (something many votaries of that saga have failed to do), I was struck by the correspondence between the fantasy world of Tolkein and the real world in which we all actaully live. Certainly, those diffident literary commentators from The Big Read are disinformed by ignorance. How many voters, do you suppose, have actually bothered reading the trilogy, rather than depending upon the film to air an 'opinion' of LOTR?
On the question of alligning yourself with Pollution, then I am sure that your being a homosexual, you can find an easier alliance with the objective forces of evil than the rest of us could.
We don\'t want the equivalent of the Orcs polluting our world. And no, for all the disparagements of Tolkein and his committment to a metanarrative that precludes such pollution, I do not think we need a liberal agenda that, ultimately seeks to destroy all that truly Civilised Society has endeavoured to bring about.
I\'m sure it is possible to critique Tolkein\'s personal agenda from the position of a neo-liberal metanarrative, however, I find it difficult to believe that you can truly find fault with his analysis; despite it\'s being dressed up in terms that are fanciful and remarkable in their remit.
Ultimately, we do face a final battle with the forces of darkness and evil and, unlike the cosy narrative of an expanded fairytale, there is the very real threat of a dreadful cancer within, undermining all that we truly beleive in.
As you are a writer yourself, I'm sure you are aware that it is all too easy to disparage someone by critiquing their failure to engage with 'contemporary nomenclature' with sufficient sincerity and political correctness.
You do not need hobbits spouting mugger/rapist/burgler sentiments or
rap-speak, when there are Liberals of the 'real' world, not to mention
Orcs of the imagined world, legitimating such an outlook on life."
This was one of the more sane responses.
