I can forgive his subconscious if his conscious mind was in the right place.

So LotR was created by automatic writing? Who knew? andre Breton would be proud.

Induction from one was very commonly used to justify and support the other during the period we’re talking about; hence the renewed vogue for phrenology in the early century, for instance. But of course, pointing out the obvious features of the period is dirty pool, since it’s plainly impossible that this cultural atmosphere had any influence on writers. My bad.

But the boundaries are blurry, whether you like it or not.

But I didn’t intend to get into this discussion in the first place, so that will be it from me.

We’ll see about that!

Guilt by association, in other words.

Inasmuch as I am interested in Tolkien’s theory of group identity and propensities, as expressed in his young adult fiction(1) I’m interested exactly in the blurry line between race, ethnicity, nation class and political affiliation – partly because these all seem like categories that get blurred together here in the real world.

Clearly, race, ethnicity and nation refer to/identify different groups of people (although, if we can possibly separate the idea of nations from that of nation states, I’m not quite sure what the difference is in imagined community between ethnos and nation). Also, it might (just might) be possible for an individual to disavow their nation (?), but it’s famously not possible for them to do the same with race.

Is there, though, any meaningful difference between the kinds of chauvinism that attach to the three categories? Is there any difference in the things people do or abhor on grounds of race, ethnicity and nation? Is there a reading of Tolkien (whose books are, in the end, immured in ideas of race, ethnos and nation) that can help us understand these categories? Tolkien really doesn’t present us with a discussion of these things: just a world constructed out of them. Can we deduce ideas of personal choice or the tyranny of the superego from a comparison of the Balrog and Gandalf, both of whom are presented as maya spirits with their agendas set for them by higher powers?(2)

I’m thinking that Tolkien doesn’t quite give us the tools to do so, which is why we end up trying to puzzle out his own cultural structures and assumptions, as reflected in his fiction. Perhaps there’s another sort of discussion to have, though: one about the cultural hooks he uses to present his various racethnotional groups and their behaviours: one that takes his categories seriously, for the purpose of discussion, and tries to work out what he is saying with them.

(1) I’m fairly confident in this anachronistic label, since I believe he wrote at least partly for Christopher and was reviewed pre-publication by Unwin’s 11 year old son.
(2) And they end up in some weird fiery passage through death and resurrection, fighting all the way down, in an aside from the main plot, so god knows what’s going on there. Probably religious, like we needed that in the discussion.

is not racism, it is something else. The fact that there may not be a sharp line between this other thing and racism does not show that they are the same thing.

Long time since I’ve read Wells or Huxley, sorry.