Utopia and Fairy Tales

You are, I feel, dramatically oversimplifying the problems of representing a fantasy as a utopia.

The point about utopia is that it must be in some sense realizable. Of course, you may say “given the underlying assumptions”, and that’s true. So a utopia dealing with life in Heaven would be based on the assumption that there is a Judeo-Christian God, and since there isn’t, it isn’t actually realizable even though the author might believe in the existence of the God and Heaven.

A Utopia or Dystopia may not be realizable in the most formal sense. Nineteen Eighty-Four was not wholly worked out (for instance, the amalgamation of Latin America with North America, or indeed how North America was going to go socialist). However, it was based on strictly practical principles as far as the author was concerned. Ditto Looking Backward; ditto Walden Two.

Narnia and Middle Earth are not Utopias. They are not realizable and their authors did not deem them realizable. Instead they are representations of how nice things would be if only the fantasy lives of the authors could be made real. There is an obvious crossover between this and a Dystopia/Utopia, but it seems to me that doing away with the real differences in concept between them are serious.

I would say that to be a utopia or dystopia, a work of fiction needs to have intentional political element. (As opposed to an unintentional political element).

That would probably still include C S Lewis’ Narnia (I’d consider the Christian elements political) and Tolkien’s Middle Earth (for its nostalgia for a vanishing/vanished/never really existed England).

There are of works of fantasy I don’t think qualify.

And I’m not sure whether Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun counts or not. The politics of his imagined world is gone into in some detail, but I’m not sure how much we’re meant to see it as a commentary on the real world. (The conflict with Ascia is based on the Korean War, presumably).

Is Chesterton doing what he criticises Wells for doing? He’s certainly pledging allegiance to an ideal (which he chooses to call Liberalism, although he’s not the first person I’d go to for a definition of that word) over and above the messy compromises of politics, but he’s not saying that his ideal can be realised. Nor is it a matter of overlooking (or overleaping) people’s material infirmities; if anything, Chesterton’s arguing that Wells is overly concerned with material infirmities, and overlooks the one big spiritual infirmity. In short, utopia for Chesterton (when he’s in this particular mood) would be a vision of unqualified glory, just as present-day reality is a vision of ineluctable sin; his critique of Wells is that Wells’s present-day reality is a vision of people laboriously squabbling over who gets what, and his utopia is a vision of people laboriously agreeing over who gets what.

Perhaps part of the point about a utopia is that one then debates whether or not it is conceivably realisable as well as whether or not that would be desirable – cf. what Jo Walton does with the Republic. Certainly that seems to be the point of the utopian/fantasy element in Aristophanes.

What’s utopian about middle Earth, by the definition suggested here? It’s a fascist dictatorship of eternal war where once moral worth is racially determined and bound by class, with no technology and no progress. It takes a failure of imagination to see it as better than the world the reader inhabits, even in 1930. Imagine the infant mortality rate in a society where there is no women’s education, no science, no progress and magic is only available to demi gods who only share it with worthy nobles. The world of greyhawk is much more utopian!

ISTM that when someone like Chesterton says Utopia assumes away Original Sin, he really means we aren’t meant to concern ourselves with the political organization of society. When he says each man [sic] will want more than their share, he really means men can’t be trusted to intentionally take the remains of government. Government happens somewhere, somehow, someplace far away, according to rules that just exist, which are implemented by people who somehow exist, or aren’t implemented, probably it doesn’t really matter, it’s just life, after all. His idea of virtue is not concerning oneself about the realms above, in that sense.

The first quote from Chesterton on Wells makes me think about the parallels, analogies, and connectedness between the more common political-focused utopias and what might be called individual-focused utopian literature, about the perfectibility of people rather than societies. Things like the Buddhist idea of enlightenment, or the Christian ideal (variously expressed through Jesus in the Gospels or via The Imitation of Christ or the lives of the martyrs), ethical systems, or heroic archetypes in literature.

To what extent do the SF utopias require or assume a personal utopia, or do they really engage with the question, or do they assume one will follow the other? (And on the flip side, do the dystopias ignore humanity’s virtues and striving for rights and empowerment? Shakier case there, I’d think, given history, but maybe still something.)

Not sure if there’s anything really fruitful to be mined in this territory, or if it would fit in your lectures even if it could be interesting prism through which to view various utopias. It does tie back into the blog name, though, and Berlin’s explicitly anti-utopian political philosophy. (Which, thinking about it, makes me believe that I’m brainstorming into well explored territory rather than finding anything interesting.)

I think it’s important to acknowledge that reasonable people might disagree whether a particular work meets the criteria of “plausible/possible”. “You can’t get there from here” may be a strong critique of many utopian visions, but I would argue that where you have debate on this subject–there’s your utopian literature.

I doubt that we discard Narnia, Middle Earth, or Hogwarts due to their actual impossibility. If I possessed a magic wand and could realize them, I still wouldn’t call these settings -topian of any kind. There is something about narrative placement in the hypothetical timeline of the real world, and not in a parallel or disconnected world, that seems to be central to -topian fiction. I might say that a work of literature is a -topia if a reasonable person might offer a valid critique of it using the “plausible/possible” criteria. We might still respond that they are missing the point, but we would not react with necessary incredulity.

I’d second the comments of Neville@8….the part of utopia/dystopia that I find most fascinating is the “is this better” part of the imagining.

If a utopia setting was in fact utopia for all there’d be no book…there’s always some motivating conflict that derives from the fact that some aspect of the utopia is in fact, not utopia for everyone concerned…there is a balance that is either threatening to be upset or indeed (from the view of some) should be upset. As readers we’re usually invited to view the utopia as a preferable outcome and something that should be preserved or even enhanced, but cynics will always find flaws and as per Chesterton there will always be someone who wants something different than what they have.

Dystopian works the same way. From the perspective of the generic-overlords of the dystopian system life is good. Its only from the perspective of the common person/protagonist figure that something is obviously wrong and needs redress. The premise of the story revolves around the fact that the reader agrees with the protagonist on the need for change (even if said protagonist has flaws).

The Hunger Games illustrates this pretty well – for those in District 1, the world is a utopia, for those outside of it its dystopia – there’s a whole different series of books that could be written from the alternative perspective of why these “rebels” should be subdued for screwing up their utopia.

Its why I’d see Tolkein or Narnia as fantasy rather than utopian literature. In Tolkein’s world its not obvious that the status quo is perfection, only that under darkness it would be worse. In Narnia we see the possibility of a utopia for the Kings and Queens, but have little insight into the lives of those who support their luxury.

Synchronistically, an article on how to recognise various types of dystopia here.

Kind of off in left field, but Norman Spinrad’s Riding the Torch is kind of a Utopian novel, in that it posits a society coming to grips with, and accepting their nature as a kind of traveling society, unchained to a world, free to create whatever reality they wish.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/680457.Riding_the_Torch

I haven’t read it in decades but it’s stuck with me.

Insofar as fantasy != utopia…I’m hard pressed to think of any fantasy that is utopian in nature; the essence of fantasy is a (often monumental or world-altering) struggle between Good and Evil, regardless of the nature of the particular story, whether it’s LOTR, Narnia, L’Mort d’Arthur, or the 5,763 books of the Wheel of Time series 8-).

Utopian stories are by their very nature polemical; dystopian less so, because they can also be cast into the Good vs Evil, ‘a plucky band of survivors work together to make it out of the badlands’ kind of trope.

I’m inclined to think the interdependence of the concepts of utopia and dystopia is reason to be suspicious of utopian literature as a genre, maybe enough to even define it by it’s inadequacies.

A novel that shows a world, or a possible version of ours, as a *little* bit better or worse is not a utopia or a dystopia. But if so, then when does a grain of sand become a heap? How much better or worse must it be?

My sense is that it must be in some sense categorically different, even if it’s portrayed as a possible development of our world. This is the parallel to its theological influences: there must be pure principle of goodness that grounds the order of a utopia, or a deep, foundational flaw, a root of all evil, that defines a dystopia. Put differently, only people who believe in some fundamental distinction between good and evil write utopias.

Perhaps an interesting comparison might be made to Marx and Engel’s distinction between “utopian socialism” and “scientific socialism.” The former kind comes from some kind of moral claim: here is what we ought (a primary good) or ought not do (a root of all evil), and if we all decided to follow it, everything would be perfect. The latter sees the possibility of social happiness as deeply historically conditioned in ways that cannot be reduced to a single principle of utopia or dystopia (capitalism, e.g., is both a primary principle of good and evil), and that cannot be achieved through moral measures (“oh, that’s good, let’s all do it!”).

By analogy, utopian works mistakenly identify some key principle that defines a categorical boundary that separates them from depictions of merely “better” social orders and dystopian ones. They are defined by their identification of a primary foundation of good or evil, the fatal flaw or cure-all. Which is why the balance of such works is toward dystopia: every utopian work’s magic key inevitably inspires skepticism, appearing as a dystopia in disguise.

It’s a fun possibility: if the “utopian socialism” analogy holds, that there cannot, in principle, be a Marxist utopian novel.

Plato’s Republic, on the other hand, is not a utopia. It’s a thought-experiment, a philosophical illustration. But how to parse those differences?

Perhaps the irony in “nowhere,” aka utopia, is that it is always paired with a dystopia, the here and now, which is a very real place?

In that vein, it seems to me that it wish-fulfillment fantasy is quite different from such an implicit critique. And I think this is true of Lord of the Rings, even if most people would prefer fantasies of agency, like Elric, than Tolkien’s fantasy of being helpless but being saved nonetheless. Well, yes, Frodo gets to go to Heaven but in the main most of us would rather be that corporal who lives? A happy world for the vicarious hero I think is much different from a dream that damns reality.

For all his chatter I think Chesterton, like all conservatives, has no principled problem with an evil world, having made his peace. There is even a schadenfreude I think in Chesterton’s complacent satisfaction that he’s seen through the scams of improvement. Or that despite the disappearance of chattel slavery or the decline in absolute monarchy or the spread of woman suffrage or the relative infrequency of child labor, et cetera, he still has seen through the hubris of claims that people can do better.

The utopia proper as I say tends to hint at a critique of us. One of the more recent examples, Ted Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X, I think provides a beautifully obvious example of this, given that most people would instantly condemn its critique of our sexual mores as hopelessly outdated. The dystopia by contrast is aimed at a particular target in the here and now. It is generally more satisfactory to condemn one enemies rather than oneself. This I think explains why there are more dystopias than utopias.

But I suppose if I really understood these issues I could explicate the relationship between LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, and Delany’s Triton. (Or Trouble on Triton, as the new edition is called?)

How about “The Space Merchants” by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, and the sequel, “The Merchant’s War” by Pohl. It is scary accurate about the rise of global corporate power, first written in or about 1952. “RussCorp” anyone?

Just a tiresome reminder about the etymology of “utopia” as “no place.” I may not grasp the entire tradition, but what I’m familiar with is much more social criticism than blueprint.

Living in a society composed of human beings requires compromises. (Accounts populated by shambling zombies or animatronic dummies get classified as dystopian no matter how smoothly the resulting society functions…) Utopian literature focuses on what might follow from a healthy society, assuming the associated costs to be minor. Dystopian literature is… less optimistic, but explores many of the same themes (sometimes with malice aforethought).

Some religious literature is utopian. Any detailed account of Heavenly/Hellish society trends toward utopian/dystopian narrative. Accounts of Heaven leave the details vague because, well, the blueprints tend not to be convincing. (How many people read all of the “Divine Comedy”?) Literary depictions of Hell are more dramatic – but also more compelling, because dystopia is closer to life experience.

soru @17 has it right, I think.

Best to avoid attempts at an essentialist definition of utopia.

Perhaps Vonnegut was doing both things at the same time? And Player Piano counts as a dystopia, maybe?

Also the shire is given by inequality: all the shenanigans in the run-up to Bilbo’s eleventyfirst birthday (with family politics) cannot exist in a utopia. Again, see the culture!

This blog post makes the case that Rivendell is the utopia, and I’m inclined to agree. We don’t really even see the Shire at any point in the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings – it’s a barely described agrarian idyll, but that doesn’t make it a utopia and in the absence of description of its social order or its technology, but in the presence of voluminous evidence that it’s a heirarchical society with a lot of flaws, I don’t think it can be classed as a utopia.

My problem with describing heroic settings as utopias is that a utopian novel describes a social setting, not a place or environment. A setting where people get to express certain characteristics might be a good or important thing but it’s not a utopia. Otherwise, I should point out, xvideos is a veritable cornucopia of utopias, in which men and women display robust character and physical traits that are well beyond the normal, and we should see porn as a field of utopias. No, a utopia is a vision of a social order, not a setting for humans to excel.

The Shire isn’t a utopia, and I’m very skeptical that it was meant to be one. It’s a peaceful place, but a small, petty one, and both Bilbo and Frodo come back and find themselves unsettled there, wanting more. Sam comes back and marries his sweetheart, but after she dies he moves on as well.

Same goes for Gondor. It’s a more prosperous, happy place after Aragorn takes over, but he’ll die and that will eventually pass as well (just as with Numenor in all that supplementary stuff Tolkien wrote in his spare time). The closest thing he ever wrote to a sequel to the trilogy hinted at problems in Gondor.

SusanC 23: “The Lord of the Rings has both a utopia (The Shire) and a dystopia (Mordor).”

I would argue that the social structures of both the Shire and Mordor, as well as the Elve societies, Gondor and Rohan, are not sufficiently elaborate to make them a meaningful utopia. In Mordor there is no interesting structure at all, it’s an absolute tyranny ruled by an evil despot. Gondor and Rohan are versions of feudal monarchy. The Elve kingdoms are happy places because Elves are inherently good people (although according to other Tolkien books they have also acted very foolishly), not because of any interesting social or cultural features. Also, we learn next to nothing about the economies of any of these places.

Re the definition of utopia as “a fairly detailed narrative description of an imaginary culture”. This is obviously highly subjective but how detailed is “fairly detailed”? I would expect a utopia to specify to some detail social arrangements that are to some extent novel. Many fantasy stories, including Middle Earth and Narnia, are more or less based on feudal/medieval models, with some magic and fantastic creatures thrown in. If that counts as utopian, maybe any historical novel should qualify as well. Although the culture described in the latter is supposed to be based on historical reality, not imagination, still from the point of view of the modern reader it’s a very unfamiliar reality – “an alternative reality that critiques theirs by opening intellectual and emotional spaces that encourage readers to perceive the realities and potentialities of their cultures in new ways”. Perhaps all compelling literature does that to some extent.

The contrast I remember vaguely from somewhere was a Gricean square (cross?) of

Utopia Arcadia and their opposites Pandaemonium and the (Land of Flies? Deadly Jungle)

All are imagined worlds but Arcadia differs from Utopia in being nostalgic and involving a return to an uncreated and essential Nature. I think the distinction is important if not critical*, and I would put Tolkien and Lewis and perhaps Morris in the Arcadian corner of imaginary worlds.

*Is racism an unnatural technology or a natural inclination, for instance.

“I think a utopia has to be a vision of a social order in which humans can excel.”

This to me doesn’t seem very specific as a criterion. Much, probably most, literature is concerned with human characters who excel, or fail to do so. The argument seems to be that in LotR, the excellence of the characters (some whom are very flawed of course, as they are in most literature) is somehow enabled by an archaic social order. This thesis I think requires elaboration. And again the archaic social orders depicted in LotR as well as Narnia aren’t particularly different from the real world, except for the magic.

The definition quoted in the OP btw doesn’t seem to imply a judgment of better or worse, or excellence or valor, it just requires an “imaginary culture” that provides an “alternative reality”. It seems most commenters disagree with that part. In any case Middle Earth seems too ambivalent to fit into either the utopian or dystopian category. Even after Sauron’s defeat, the world will be a better place but it won’t be paradise. IIRC, Gandalf says something along these lines in his speech before the battle.

And Tolkien’s real utopia of course is the legendary Valinor, while Middle Earth is just as flawed as our own world.

Martin and others are fantasy writers who try to make their worlds “realistic” with political squabbles and concerns about banks and loans and sadistic violence and how to pay for wars and as a result nobody thinks Westeros or Essos represent any sort of Arcadia or utopia or whatever word people wish to use. I gather Mieville is also reacting against Tolkien in a different way, but I haven’t read his fantasies.

Which brings me on to the definition of utopia as a setting where people can excel. It’s not enough! Most literature is about people excelling. Conan excels, Patrick Bateman excels, I’ll grant you Thomas the Tank Engine doesn’t but that’s a pretty low bar[1]. We need something else, some additional thing. I think it has to be about a social order aimed at eliminating pain, grief and suffering, or something like that. Again I say, pick books everyone agrees are utopias and work back.

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fn1: Actually for Thomas it is a utopia, because he fucks up and people still love him. Maybe he’ll become president!

I love Aragorn the character. I just want to make it clear that if someone in the real world claims to have the right to rule over some political entity based on his lineage or because he comes from a race that was granted extra longevity by the gods I will probably look on that person with some degree of skepticism and may even refuse to support his claim.

The thing is, I cannot see that The Lord of the Rings is a critique of industrial civilization, though it has one in it. It’s not even about miscegenation, since in the long run all the other races disappear. Also, the elves are angels, or they are nothing, and that doesn’t fit the racism. So I don’t see how issues of utopianism arise at all. There is a certain tension between Christian morals and the morals exemplified in Theoden’s speech before his last battle, to be sure. But I’m not seeing this as a critique.

As for Narnia…look, if anything it’s dystopic. It starts off with the triumph of an allegorical Christ, an imagined victory over the unbelievers. Another ends with the ethnic cleansing of Narnia (all tangled up with religion and nationality, but so is ethnicity in real life.) Lewis was I gather a very quarrelsome man prone to bitterness and hate, so yeah, fictionally paying off things he doesn’t like about now, which as I say seems to me to be the essence of dystopianism. You might say, a dystopia is the ironic condemnation of the enemy. A utopia is a contrast to now.

As for Hogwarts, and other romanticizations of chldhood, or youth? They aren’t places. Utopias are places, whether nowhere to be found, whether good or bad.

Arcadian pastoral is merely a dead genre, Do literary people still go on and on about the true essence of epic and tragedy? But yes, it was the equivalent of utopian literature when a pastoral life could still pass for an improvement on the squalid “cities” of the middle ages.

By the way, re the notion that utopian literature is uniquely Christian/post-Christian? What ever then is Hyperborea? What was Aristophanes mocking in Cloud Cuckoo Land?

Thomas the Tank Engine is arguably very like More’s Utopia. You very frequently have the engines ganging up on one another to teach them moral lessons.

I don’t think that Tolkien even remotely intended to create utopias. Middle Earth is a flawed, troubled and conflicted place and its inhabitants are flawed, troubled and conflicted, including the nobles and kings, superhuman wizards and demigods (Sauron himself is a fallen (demi)god, as was his former master Melkor/Morgoth). Rivendell is described as a happy place, especially in The Hobbit (already less so in LotR), but it’s a tiny oasis and what is it that makes it a happy place? Its ruler is wise and good and has magic powers. That is a magician’s trick, not a utopia. It doesn’t provide an “alternative reality” and doesn’t open “intellectual and emotional spaces”. And observe that at the end of LotR, the elves have left Middle Earth. Apparently, this “utopia” by author’s fiat was not sustainable.

A thought I am having right now is that Middle Earth is an Utopia because it is a place where you have (or had, if you were a participant) meaning and purpose and magic. Not like in this world, where you are just a hapless, meaningless, and very much not magical ordinary dude. You hit the news now and then via a statistic – and that’s it.

In Middle Earth, even the grass on a plain has meaning and purpose and is magical.

A world where you are magical and have dignity. Wow.

69: As I said in 68, I don’t believe Tolkien attempted to create utopias. If anything, the Middle Earth saga is a tale of fallen creation (as a conservative Christian might put it). The initial state (this goes way back before LotR) was a paradise or golden age that was increasingly corrupted by hubris, greed and so on (but observe that this initial paradise isn’t much talked about – it would be boring). Nobody is immune from this corruption, neither elves nor gods (or whatever one wants to call the Valar and Maiar).

Tolkien was a conservative cultural pessimist who may have believed that things used to be better before factories and train stations, but he would have rejected any notion of utopianism (as I think most conservatives would).

70: As fn points out, only few of Tolkien’s characters have meaning, purpose and magic. Maybe one can argue that Middle Earth is Tolkien’s idea of a perfect place because he approved of the inherent racism, inequality and so on and perhaps even the bloodshed because that is how the good characters can turn out their “excellence” and “valor”. But then, this is just a version of our real world of racism, inequality and bloodshed – minus the train stations!

77 “Clearly feels good to a lot of people”

Your criteria for what constitutes utopian literature are getting wider and wider. Anything with magic in it, anything with heroes fulfilling meaningful tasks in it, anything that makes readers feel good. That has nothing to do with the conventional meaning of utopianism.

Those who argue that Middle Earth is a literary utopia: would you agree that all or most fantasy literature fits that definition as well? If not, what is the distinction? Is magic and heroes enough or does the author also have to write dismissive diatribes about train stations? What about any literature set in an idealized or romanticized past, does that also count as utopian? If you think so, fine, but I disagree. If not, then I’m curious to know what criteria you are employing.

78: Once more the definition: “a fairly detailed narrative description of an imaginary culture”. I think “fairly detailed” implies a narrative elaboration of what makes the utopian society different from ours and what makes it better or worse, and the “imaginary culture” implies some real novelty in terms of social arrangements. With those qualifications (which I already explained in 44), fantasy literature doesn’t fulfill the definition. It’s not enough for a story to be set in an imaginary world if that world is based on a conventional social organization.

I would suggest insisting that literary utopias be intentional communities – planned societies

I agree. The way I see it, a utopia (and to some extent a dystopia) is a depiction of the answer to a particular political question, and in particular, a utopia has to have a conceivable opposition in the political sense, or, just like Neville Morley and Trader Joe pointed out above, it has to be debatable (in political terms).

“Is heaven utopian?” In lecture today I argued: not!

And by so doing, I think you followed the classical political theorists of the Renaissance who argued that politics (conceived by them as the exercise of sovereign power) started after the Fall, as there could be no conflict, and else no politics in the Garden of Eden (I can dug out the precise reference if you want to, it is a beautiful text but it slips my mind at the moment).

But, all the same, we don’t usually call […] Hogwarts – Utopia.

If we follow the definition of utopia above, Hogwarts would in fact be an anti-utopia (not a dystopia). A utopia is an illustration of the answer to a political question, Hogwarts is an illustration of the fact that even if magic were real and more importantly but in a more subtle ways even if all Muggle/adult values were subverted, then all the political questions we are familiar with would remain pretty much unanswered in exactly the same ways.

What critical writings in this vicinity do you find particularly insightful/interesting?

Not critical writing per se (though maybe the second qualifies) but there are two famous French sources you might want to have a look at if you don’t know them already: one is chapter 52 of Rabelais’s Gargantua – which is probably one of the earliest anarchist utopia written – and one is Perec’s novella W (which I now notice Neville Morley mentioned above already) which, if you don’t know, I really suggest you read (and which I really suggest you don’t rush to look at the Wikipedia page, it is really the kind of book you want to start reading with the minimal amount of prior knowledge).

bs 81: “it’s implied that things once went better, and could still have, absent that choice.”

Yes, see 74. There once was a golden age. But Tolkien’s literature isn’t concerned with how life and society were in that golden age and how we could get back there, which I would think is the point of utopian literature (to show us a better world).

Also, it wasn’t a mortal that messed up the golden age but one of the gods, and the way I read it, the world from that on was irredeemably corrupted. LotR makes it very clear that there is no way back.

@71 I don’t agree that there are no humans other than Aragorn in Middle Earth who can use magic. Denethor, Gríma Wormtongue and the Mouth of Sauron were all humans who worked magic in the course of the Lord of the Rings.

The assertion that women aren’t educated in Middle-Earth is no more than that – an assertion. There’s no evidence to suggest that any of the women in the Lord of the Rings were denied an education.

I can’t agree that Tolkien condemned miscenegation either. Of the three weddings in Lord of the Rings, one is between a human and an elf, and one is between a Gondorian and a Rohirrim. And of course in the Silmarillion, the major love story is the Lay of Leithien, about the love of Beren and Lúthien – which is also a reversal of one of those mediaeval stories about a knight going on a quest to prove himself worthy of marrying a princess where the princess has to repeatedly rescue the knight from trouble.

Pureborn Númenoreans are hardly paragons of morality in Tolkien either. Even before Númenor turned to Morgoth-worship and human sacrifice, it notoriously subjugated and oppressed much of mainland Middle-Earth.

86: I agree about the definition of “utopia.” It feels like an attempt to “rescue” the critical purpose of utopian fiction for people who object to the premise of utopian fiction. Though maybe just an answer to the question “why can’t I read LotR as a utopia novel?”–“well, go ahead, if that’s what you want.”

I think it’s entirely possible Tolkien knew less than nothing about childhood mortality or death in childbirth and believed basic cleanliness and “virtue” (sobriety, basic cleanliness, sensible diet, hard work to acquire a minimally decent income, acquisition of basic social norms to allow a job to be gotten and kept, etc., etc.) were sufficient. I don’t know whether death in childbirth was still frequent enough among the middle classes to make it seem as random as it must have been a century or two earlier. Even the idea that trains are the heighth of technology, regimentation, conquest of the countryside is inherited wholesale from the 19th century. That wasn’t Tolkien’s talent, to make original statements about modernization and its discontents. He wrote a novel, with unreconcilable points of view presented, unreconciled.

fn: I agree with a lot of you say but I would also allow more nuance to Tolkien. Not everything one of his fictional characters says expresses his personal opinion (re Elrond’s speech).

I think the worst Tolkien has done is to invent humanoid races that are inherently evil and must be killed whenever possible. After initially enjoying his work, that part is what put me off forever.

Re “purposeful political organization to solve a political problem”, “intentional communities”: It seems to me those criteria are needlessly restrictive. As I stressed, I expect utopian literature to expose us to alternative, novel social arrangements. Those arrangements are obviously purposely invented by the author but in the narrative, they don’t have to be planned or purposeful. It doesn’t necessarily matter how they are arrived at IMHO.

On one level I hate how this thread is turning from talking about utopia to talking about how horrible Tolkien is. Also, why can’t I ever spell his name right? I know that I get it wrong every time, but even when I try to be careful it is always Tolkein. GACK.

Anyway. It is frustrating to see Tolkien repeatedly thrown into the “people like him so he must be torn down” barrel. But at least if you are going to do that, stick to what he actually did instead of terrible literature analysis. A lot of it seems to be trying to shove motivated readings in, or confusing character voice with authorial voice, or failing to attend to the fact that it is a work heavily informed BOTH by Christianity AND by other myths.

So for example the orcs. Tolkien offers various explanations for their origins: that they are captured and enslaved elves which were magically and technologically twisted into a race of slaves, that they are captured and enslaved humans which were magically and technologically twisted into a race of slaves, or that they were both. First of all this is clearly a part of the recurring Christian influenced theme that the Devil can’t really make anything of his own but instead has to twist good things into bad things. That is almost certainly the main purpose of that type of origin. If you absolutely must shove a political meaning into that, it is only a reflection of that fact that you don’t like Tolkien that you settle into a “it proves he is such a racist who hates black people” idea. It seems an even more natural interpretation to see it as showing the evils of colonizing and enslaving people. Oh look, now he is an anti-colonialist and anti-slavery! I don’t actually think that is a particularly good interpretation either, but once you see it there is evidence for it in the way that kings who try to rule beyond ‘their’ people seem to get into serious trouble in Tolkien’s world. (Is ‘their’ people an inherently racist trope? Maybe, but it isn’t the kind of orcs=black people=evil thing that you were peddling earlier). Also, as far as internal tropes go, it is much easier to argue that orcs are another case of how technological meddling enslaves people (see also The Ring and how it twists its bearers).

And reading the whole Elrond thing as being straight forward authorial support for a racist concept is the kind of thing that we make fun of when someone watches a play and thinks that the villain is going to actually kill the actress. It is a classic story: he’s the father trying to get between lovers so of course he is going to throw whatever he can to try to convince his daughter to stop. He’s a king who doesn’t want his daughter marrying the wrong guy. We aren’t supposed to think that everything he says is uncomplicatedly endorsed by the author. The fact that he chose Elrond to be the father is genius. Elrond is the well meaning, relatively powerful king who nevertheless just retreats into his (very nice) hole and assumes that eventually his kingdom will be choked to death until it turns out that the Ring is dropped into his lap. He is wise, but like all wise characters in Tolkien he has enormous blind spots–see also Gandalf and Saruman the Wise!!! It is almost the whole Christian thing shading the story. Huh…

And the class thing. Yes it doesn’t fit with the modern sensibility, but lets not overplay it. If Elves are high class, Hobbits are low class. Guess who saved the world? Frodo is at best middle class. If you want to criticize class dynamics there is always Sam, and there at least you are really dealing with the text. But even there Sam has a vast amount of nobility that stands in direct contrast to the much more whiny Frodo. If you think it was Tolkien’s intention that we valorize Frodo and dismiss Sam, you’re not looking closely enough.

Which brings us back to the utopia question. I would tend to say that trying to read it as a utopia is a false reading which leads to weird misinterpretation. If you’re reading “the most evil character in the book captured and enslaved people, manipulating them ‘genetically’ through magic, torture and technology to control them better THEREFORE Tolkien didn’t like black people” you’re falling along the interpretative wayside somewhere. TLOTR is much closer to “in a fallen twisted world, by grace sometimes things turn out sort of ok even though we are still scarred by what we lived through”. Which still isn’t perfect, but is a lot closer.

@83 kindeystones 10.19.17 at 12:03 pm:

I can’t think of a soul anywhere who would want to live in absolutely equal society. No looking down one’s nose at anyone, ever, except those in the past? I’d say that would be a form of hell for one or two names that come to mind.

That’s the first thing that comes to mind as the downside?

This sounds like the need/desire/impulse to dominate others – to have a clear, even-if-arbitrary, hierarchy – that Corey Robin describes in The Reactionary Mind. (In the Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin edition, anyway – I have not seen the new edition yet.)

Perhaps an interesting test case for -topian fiction (and maybe it’s not surprising it hasn’t come up in 100-odd comments, because it’s left no cultural impact despite producing three big-budget films) is the Divergent series: no real political statements, no real worldbuilding (from what I’ve heard and seen of it), no real plausibility or sense that said future is going to happen – but clearly a work of dystopian fiction. Perhaps the whole subgenre is at root a set of signifiers, and LOTR isn’t utopian or dystopian because it lacks those signifiers.

TM

Also, it wasn’t a mortal that messed up the golden age but one of the gods, and the way I read it, the world from that on was irredeemably corrupted.

The concluding words of the Silmarillion (in the published version edited by Christopher Tolkien):

Here ends the SILMARILLION. If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended, Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos.

I can’t figure any way to reconcile that with a classification as a utopia. Tolkien was a Catholic, and there are references not only in the Silmarillion but also in The Lord Of The Rings that Middle-Earth is a world affected by a Fall in the conventional Catholic sense.

Which brings us back to the point that a book is not a utopia because a few characters show great personality in the breach. A books is utopian if it is about a society striving to get rid of the breach.

(And dystopias don’t just happen from good intentions gone wrong – the rulers of 1984 are evil and they know it).

Sorry, and of course ‘Nothing But Flowers.’ Cheers.

@107 Faustusnotes

There are many libertarian utopias, most of them unreadable. The Probability Broach is I guess one of the more classic, where Shay’s rebellion won, a true libertarian America was formed, and some how this all leads to communicating with Dolphins, the end of slavery, isolationist America with no standing armies always winning wars with militias etc.

Thanks for the quote J-D 102!

The Good Place is great (and like W, the less you know about it, the better).

One possible difference between utopian/dystopian fuction and Tolkien inspired fantasy is that fantasy often treats evil as being the product of a supernatural entity, rather than human agency. That’s a Christian influence on fantasy, of course, though you could debate whether certain fantasy works fall into a Christian heresy by overly reifing Satan.

Hmmm… is utopian literature necessarily pre Christian or post Christian? Plato was a pagan. The idea that utopia might be achievable on this earth, by human agency, without Christ, is not particularly Christian.

Mario, are you aware that there are criticisms of lotr from a black perspective that say, hmm, this world seems to think black people are bad and should be exterminated? Have you noticed the fantasy genre is very white, and wondered why? Do you know why the Syfy channel made ged white? Could it be that what is “great and noble” about the books is only great and noble from a very narrow perspective? Now sure if we’re talking about what a cool character Aragorn is or if we’re arguing about whether Peter Jackson wrecked the character of faramir or improved Sam hanger, this stuff is not relevant, but here we are asking if the writing is a utopia and to do that we necessarily must ask about the social content of the stories. I’m sorry but if you dont like that don’t read a thread about whether a book is a utopia. You don’t get to say “oh it’s great and noe so it’s a utopia” and walk away. You have to explain why an authoritarian feud society where everyone’s morality is racially determined is a utopia. That means engaging with the politics and the fact that the racial model at the heart of Tolkiens worldview (by this I mean the world he created because I refuse to use the wanky word ” legendarium” ) is fascist. If you can’t deal with your favourite writer being criticized don’t propose him as a model for a social novel in a critical forum.

I’m happy to admit my definition of utopia is too narrow, and to add to it. But you can’t just say that Tolkien’s characters don’t care about the breach. Aragorn is a king for fucks same, and Gandalf is a demi god. They created the social order, which means choosing not to give a damn is the same as accepting it. Which brings us back to my point: lotr is a world of authoriarian racists who don’t care about the vast majority of their subjects and aren’t interested in making their world better. That cannot be a utopia!

@107 “Are there any conservative Utopias”

I’ll nominate William Faulkners Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha counties.

While I myself would hardly dub them utopian (using the same reasoning as many above have against LOTR) they would undoubtedly meet JH’s proposed definition (and have similar helpings of racism and classism).

There are no conservative Utopias. As Oscar Wilde said correctly:

‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.’

There are no conservative utopias because they don’t believe a better world – never mind perfect one – is possible. In fact, they believe their perfect world has already failed.

I think the idea that Middle Earth is “Catholic” is too simple, and frankly, odd. It’s my understanding that Tolkien based this on Norse–pagan–mythology. Is it that he imported the “Catholic” (obviously, Judaism, Protestantism, and other religions share this concept) of the Fall into Norse legends? Or was he making a point that other cultures have similar concepts to our own? (Even going full Campbell and claiming that there’s only one culture, really, and we all share it, no matter our local language or myth system?)

The idea that Middle Earth is “conventional feudalism” doesn’t fit, either. There’s no secular Roman imperium shading over time into an international church. There’s no ruling class sanctioned by the church; there are no schools and hospitals instituted by the church; there is no church. Just as there are no prisons and judges and magistrates sanctioned by the state. What passes for a “ruling class” (sanctioned by the church) is instead a bunch of foreign “races” (actually, separate species), vaguely sanctioned by wandering wise men.

From a specifically English point of view, this looks like the world as it might appear to a provincial village–though one that somehow avoided having any churches or magistrates visible to any of its inhabitants. It looks like a preoccupation with distinguishing between Celts, Normans, and Anglo-Saxons, such as in Drabble’s “The Peppered Moth.” The “good” villagers are thus seen as Celts or Anglo-Saxons, and the rulers are Normans, or whatever. But this is pretty obviously racist.

Even before you get to Orcs (who, I admit, I remember little of). But if you’re proposing that a reasonable analogue to our world is one in which different human characteristics and social roles–and cultures–are organically, genetically, physically baked into groups of “humans”? That’s the definition of racism.

Staircase memory! Poul Anderson Brain Wave and, even more, Shield.

The exegesis of Tolkien, Plato, More, and Lewis seems to focus on subtext and structure at the expense of narrative and explication via various voices. The subtext values in pretty much all western literature in the first-half of the 20th-century are the anti-thesis of utopian with some notable exceptions, unless we are willing to re-cast romantic re-imaginings of the past, or future, as utopian. I like the Wilde quote above very much, as I do Wilde in general. He’s responding to worlds that are very much in crisis – the treatment of the poor in the west was almost as dismal as the treatment of the poor in Africa and Asia. Eugenics and racialism were accepted as scientific fact in contemporary societies, so we shouldn’t be too surprised to discover similar phenomena described as fixtures, in a sense, to make fantasy worlds recognizable to readers. Hierarchies of culture with their attendant values according to ethnicity and gender were/are fixtures of this world and virtually impossible without conscious effort on the part of the writers. Which is why I think JH’s description is too broad for objective classification, but excellent for discussions.

Lewis is much more interested in Christianity than any other issue. At least part of Lewis and more of Tolkien must also, imho, be seen as explicit opposition to totalitarian utopias (USSR, Germany) states which were/explicitly utopian in nature. In fact, if the question is authorial intent, I believe there’s a great deal more evidence suggestion that both Lewis and Tolkien are much more anti-utopian, than utopian, and intentionally so. I feel we can reasonably cast the efforts of Sauron, or the Witch, as efforts to remake Middle Earth and Narnian as societies of sort foreign and terrifying to contemporary readers, but nonetheless utopian and totalitarian in structure. There’s plenty of talk of removing the ‘foreign’ shadow from the lands so that the various different critters and species can live in diverse harmony under a benign and holy ruler (implicitly the British Empire). However, the elimination, or enslavement of species and of all knowledge and warmth is explicit and springs from the mouths of characters committed to imposing totalitarian utopias upon everyone, as was occurring in the world at that time. Narnia is much more a romantic present and past that involves, preserves, and appeals to a constructed innocence of childhood.

Suggesting there’s something evil in taking pleasure from reading Tolkien, or Lewis, is the utterance I’d expect only from a 17th-century puritan, or an avowed fascist, keen to ban, or burn the offending text and, perhaps, the readers as well. Indeed, there are a number of modern critics who regard Tolkien, in particular, as satanic. Birds of a feather, perhaps?

two libertarian (on Mars, The Stone Canal and in a sort of sequel, The Cassini Division, on Earth liberated from the Commies who end up lurking in exile in outer space,)

As I’ve argued here before, New Mars is Libertarian, but definitely not a utopia. A 17C Frenchman in contemporary North Korea would say ‘wow, awesome technology’, and maybe convert to Juche thought. But they wouldn’t be justified in doing so.

And the Solar Union of Cassini Division is about as far from libertarian as it is possible to be. It’s more or less what you would get if you took a Usenet libertarian FAQ and added a ‘not’ everywhere it was grammatically possible.

soru@130 Presumably soru was posting as Richard M in the link. First, as to New Mars, the libertarian utopia is producing the technology, because it liberates the human spirit to perfection. That is is techno-Faustian rather than pastoral/static is not the kind of distinction that makes the difference you want. New Mars is not an outlier mining inherited or borrowed or stolen tech to put up a facade, to wildly erect an unsustainable, ergo unreal, illusory, mockery of a real society. That is what people thought about economic development in the USSR and other socialist countries, to be sure.

Second, the Solar Union is destroyed by the awesome moral and spiritual and intellectual superiority of New Mars, which is sort of the point of The Cassini Division. The lesson is the Solar Union’s inferiority.

As to the “general point that the interesting part of Ken’s fiction is not merely working out which _meant to be_ dystopia and which utopia, but which is actually _is_…” I must start by reminding you that there are ironies meant to subvert, and ironies meant for plausible deniability. When MacLeod plays The Restoration Game and brings back capitalism, is it really an ironic subversion of the reality?

It’s like The Taming of the Shrew, you can read it at face value to make perfect (if obnoxious) sense. If you try to read New Mars’ explosive dismantling of the Solar Union as some sort of irony about libertarianism, sorry, not seeing it. Also, that would mean we are to see Ellen’s final defiant words as real promises, and a heartfelt and eloquent outpouring of the human spirit. That reading doesn’t make sense, because it all sounds hollow. This is overwhelmingly obvious if you contrast it to the end of Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, which was sincere.

First of all, an “utopia” is a narrative genre where the author explicitly and clearly describes a perfect world, and by “perfect” I mean perfect from the point of view of the author who is using it as a ideal comparation to his/our real world, and by “author” I don’t mean the really existing guy/gal who wrote the story but the narrative figure that is implicit in the text, known as “model author”, a concept that was proposed AFAIK by Umberto Eco as part of interpretive semiotics (I did have to study some semiotics at univeristy, and in fact for one year Eco was nominally one of my teachers, even tough one of his aides did all the lessons).

Basically the idea is that in the normal process of interpretation of a text, a reader has to make various inference about what the author is pointing to just in order to understand the basic meaning of what he/she is reading. The “model author” is the figure that is inferable by the text through various hints disseminated in the text so that the reader can understand what he is reading, and is a very different thing from the meat and blood author who actually wrote the text.

In other words “utopias” are such only if and to the degree that they are presented as utopias in the text, that clearly disqualify the LOTR and many other stories.
(Plus incidentially the Shire is clearly the best place in Middle Earth, and is also the place that is closer to our own world, so I really can’t see how one can view the rest of ME as an utopia).

Second, about Tolkien, there are two things that from my point of view are totally obvious, but for some reason everybody gets it wrong (IMO):

1) LOTR is set in the PRE ROMAN Great Britain + Ireland (that will be divided later by the sea god in a fit of rage). Tolkien says this explicitly. Why does everybody say that it is a middle ages setting? Were middle ages Britons politeists? Middle ages != pre-roman mythical past.
Howard too set his stories before the fall of Atlantis, and there are tons of references to the classical world in early sword and sorcery stories (even the elephants in the LOTR are totally a citation of Hannibal). What is this fixation with the idea of the middle ages? I blame Arthur (although note that there are no knights in ME).

2) So Tolkien writes a novel in the middle of WW2, while Germans are continuously bombing his head, and in the novel there is a really evil population that is bent to world conquer and in fact more or less bombs Gondor, and this population represents… blacks??? Seriously? I mean isn’t it obvious that the orcs if anything are the nazis? The “evil kingdom” is in the south-east and, while there are really a lot of countries that are south and east from the point of view of the UK, the first one is Germany.
This is not to say that T’s political opinions were necessarily the best, but the idea that orcs=black people has no basis in the novel.

“I think a few people got a bit too riled up about this subject.”

Yep. Mario and Sebastian speak for me, if I were to get into this, but there are so many real issues where we could be screaming at each other it seems a shame to waste all this emotional energy on the ethics of orc slaughter.

137@ Glad you couldn’t resist!

Finally, on fantasy dystopias – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIVTpSYt9wk

I spend my weekends researching, among other things, the construction of a set of ‘ideal’ aesthetic values in the early 19th century, and normally listen to youtube as diversion. My tastes vary, but given the need of some to vent I decided to listen again to the dystopian vision of America and the world articulated by our intellectual and moral superiors on election night when the world effectively came to an end last year.

Where does fantasy writing begin and end? The linked broadcast begins quite literally with an animated discussion anticipating a ‘fully-blue eastern seaboard.’ That would be a vision of Utopia. Unfortunately that sandcastle doesn’t survive the first hour of coverage as waves of results pour in. The narrative quickly morphs into a vision of a dystopian America replete with variations of Aragon’s speech before the gates of Mordor spilling from the lips of millionaire bubbleheads, and predictions that all the good hobbits will be chained together beneath the burning trees of the Shire before being marched off to work in Sarumen’s mines. Scary stuff! Cormack McCarthy here we come.

Fast forward to this afternoon parked before my computers, where the arena of combat is not in the streets, or before one of the many internment camps of Rachel Maddow’s election night imagination, but a comment debate over Trump’s snipe with America at peace, a booming stock market, and record unemployment. On college campuses symbols of oppression are being torn down, not erected, as universities finally find the backbone to protect all speech. Even one or two of the truly sacred cows of the corrupt establishment (HW) are now in the public stocks.

We’re a very long way from paradise, to be sure, but neither are living the dystopian reality of hate and fear defined as an absolute certainty less than a year ago. Clear confirmation of that is the topic of discussion on JH’s other thread. And other nations are noticing America’s imperfect prosperity under the new President and voting why not?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/czech-election-andrej-babis-donald-trump-comparisons-billionaire-populist-second-richest-man-prime-a8013316.html

Thanks for the reading suggestions one and all.

Soru@133 “What do your version of the books have to say on the toys available to the Solar Union?” That the libertarian utopia of a single city on New Mars has cast the communist stasis of the Solar Union into the shade, because “toys” are weapons are life. The Solar Union can’t compete.

As I said before, a conservative utopia is one that pictures a social order conforming to Human Nature. As described by conservative ideology (pejorative sense meant,) to be sure. It may still simultaneously see the now as the Best Possible World, and the Golden Age somewhere in the past too. This is inconsistent but conservatism proper has no use for consistency, a hobgoblin of little minds shrunk to fit reason.

As to why MacLeod insists on two genocides of the Fast Folk for his happy endings… I tend to think MacLeod is not really in control of his material, which is undermined by a powerful covert commitment to reaction. This is probably unknown to himself, but the dude has spent years putting the “-ite” in Trotskyite. That takes a toll. I don’t think this is coherently handled. You do, no doubt because you can explicate it all.

MisterMr@134 To the best of my knowledge, Numinor was taken from the poetry of Charles Williams, and respelled. It is Atlantis. I’ve only read Williams’ occult horror novels, so this is second-hand knowledge, to be sure. Also, The Lord of the Rings was begun before WWII. As I recall, The Hobbit was something of an excerpt from his longstanding hobby. And that was published in 1937. Lastly, sorry, but I’m convinced Mordor is the western front from WWI. By the way, if you or anyone else wants to examine fantasy for unwholesome ideas, you really must read Charles Williams. His version of T.S. Eliot in his ghost story is an unintentional hoot.

Mario@135 Yes, I think you are correct. All the really bad stuff is done by the Savage. The thing is, though, that without human suffering, there is no true Art. And therefore Brave New World is a dystopia, not a utopia. You may object that validating a cruel world for the sake of Art is kind of reactionary. I can only reply there is a reason by the novel has been paired with 1984 as reactionary propaganda for teens for decades. How any of this fits with Ape and Essence, Island and The Doors of Perception is beyond me, as I haven’t read them.

Donald Johnson@137 Or the Minds are the administration of things, rather than the State, which has indeed withered away. I don’t hold with a Corey Robinesque reduction of everything to psychological/aesthetic moralizing, but the Minds show no sign of fascist chic, or even David Bowie’s Thin White Duke. On a more mundane level, fascism without imperial conquest seems an absurdity.

kidneystones@140 “America at peace, a booming stock market, and record unemployment…” I think record unemployment would be marked by a rapid increase in real wages. Nor do I think a booming stock market is really a sign of a strong economy, rather than a strong finance sector. Were John Quiggin to condescend, he would probably scorn me, but I’m not even sure Adam Smith would have agreed with you. And lastly, the idea that the US is at peace borders on contemptible. The wars never stop.Also, we are years away from having escaped from Trump without a general war. At this point, the strongest safeguard we have is probably that sinking feeling in a general’s stomach when expected to actually win real victories with a quasi-mercenary army stiffened with a cultivated caste sensibility.

Donald Johnson, I agree regarding the culture, and it’s one of the reasons I like that series so much. The ambiguous nature of the society’s perfection is a lot of fun.

MisterMr, yes you could read the orcs as a placeholder for Nazis if you want to draw Tolkiens experience and personal history into the text in order to draw a certain conclusion, but it’s not the list obvious conclusion , and the most obvious interpretation is not that orcs =blacks. It’s that the world is divided into races whose morality is entirely racially determined, they can’t live together and interbreeding is bad where it is possible. Furthermore most of the evil/bad races are black or brown, the map vaguely resembles Europe/Africa and the southern part full of evil black people is obviously geographically like Africa. Black people coming from the south to attack white people, black people being evil – all in the text. There are no bombs, no Nazis, and if you want to draw geographical analogues it looks much more like Germany is the old arthedain (everything east of the branduin is probably Russia) .

There are no perfect geographic similarities but the Aryan racial theory and scientific racism are fundamental to the history and the story. I’m sorry but you can’t escape this by dubious European interwar historical analogies.

I can’t agree with faustus on Tolien’s views on race. They seem to me to reflect only the notions of race accepted as common sense at the time, and too undeveloped to carry much intellectual weight.

As for LoTR and utopias, it seems to me to reflect a rather medieval view of what utopia might look like – the ordinary person snug in their cottage, ruled over justly by the rightful king, well-advised. I’m reminded of the middle period Egyptian view of heaven – they were embalmed and buried with dolls called shabtis – “and when in the afterlife I am called to work in the fields, my shabti will arise and work for me”. So utopia was no field-work, and all the barley, beer and onions one could want.

@steven t johnson 142
“To the best of my knowledge, Numinor was taken from the poetry of Charles Williams, and respelled. It is Atlantis.”
Cool. Well Numinor really looks like Atlantis, it’s quite obvious that T took the idea from there. It still counts as pre-roman.
“Also, The Lord of the Rings was begun before WWII.”
Wikipedia saiz ” Written in stages between 1937 and 1949″, so it was written before and during WW2.
“Lastly, sorry, but I’m convinced Mordor is the western front from WWI.”
Might be, I don’t think that Mordor really “is” anything, but I think it was influenced by T’s experience, and since he wrote before and during WW2 I think WW2 has a big place in it, although other experiences certainly intermixed.

@Faustusnotes 144
“MisterMr, yes you could read the orcs as a placeholder for Nazis if you want to draw Tolkiens experience and personal history into the text in order to draw a certain conclusion, but it’s not the list obvious conclusion”
well, it’s what looks obvious to me.
“and the most obvious interpretation is not that orcs =blacks. It’s that the world is divided into races whose morality is entirely racially determined, they can’t live together and interbreeding is bad where it is possible.”
well yeah, and in facts no carachter that stars evil at the beginning ends up good in the end (even Gollum whose moral drama is a big part of the story in the end relapses into temptation).
I agree that LOTR has a very conservative ethics, I just don’t think that the “races” are a big part of it, neither that LOTR “races” can be compared to “races” in “scientific racism”.
I think that quite evidently the idea of the various races comes from various “fairy people” of ancient mithology, stuff like the “Fir Bolg/Fomorians” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fir_Bolg follow the link to the Fomorians), or Kobolds, and many other types of fantastic creatures and populations that exist in ancient legends and folklore.
Generally, as fairy people are more like religious beliefs than “peoples”, you don’t worry wether it is possible to intermarry between humand and leprechauns, or humans and japanese foxes for example: it’s just not the point of the story.
But T raionalized these fairy people into bone and meat population, thus creating this ambiguous thingie that often in modern fantasy is called “demihumans” (whereas it doesn’t make sense to call fairy people as demihumans, they are more like ghosts and spirits).
Because I see the “races” in LOTR as this kind of fairy people, I don’t think that the lack of intermarriage is a case of racism. Also the idea that the races cannot live together is false, it’s just the elves that are arseholes and despise all the others (and are often depicted as such). And then there are the orcs, but again the orcs aren’t really a “race” but something warped and corrupted by the evil god – in general I think that the only “race” in the modern sense are the Numenoreans, and they also look as insufferable pricks.
Compare this to those middle ages/early renaissance epic narratives about the crusades, and you can see how middle earth is way less racist that a “modern epic” could be. Or compare it to stories where white explorers meet “savages” or things like it.
Now maybe T was racist, but on the whole his fault was that of writing a story that could be misconstructed as representing racial division and that he didn’t see the problem, not that he wrote a story about racial division.
“Furthermore most of the evil/bad races are black or brown”
From the point of view of a Briton, an Italian could be brown – it just happens that the men from the south are from the south. As I already said, ME is supposed to be Great Britain + Ireland, so the other people necessarily have to come from the south.
“the map vaguely resembles Europe/Africa and the southern part full of evil black people is obviously geographically like Africa.”
Again, T stated explicitly that Middle Earth is Great Britain + Ireland. Where do you see that it looks like Africa?
“Black people coming from the south to attack white people, black people being evil – all in the text.”
IIRC they southerners are never described as blacks.
“There are no perfect geographic similarities but the Aryan racial theory and scientific racism are fundamental to the history and the story.”
Not really. Celts weren’t Aryan, and T is explicit about the setting so nobody in ME is Aryan in any way. The closest thing to the idea of a superior brand of humans is the Numenoreans, and they don’t look very Aryan (they are black haired for example).
“I’m sorry but you can’t escape this by dubious European interwar historical analogies.”
I think I can by matching it to pre-roman Britain instead than to middle ages Britain (which had Saxons who were actually “Aryans”).
Again I don’t understand why everybody reads the middle ages in the LOTR when T explicitly states in various writings that it is a pre-roman setting. I think it’s just a reflexive idea because many people link fantasy to the Arthurian cycle, but in reality the Arthurian cycle had very little influence on modern fantasy stories, most stuff comes from pagan mythology (that 19th and early 20th century romantics loved, including but not limited to the nazis).

TM @ 45

Of course. But not “conventional” ones from the perspective of a conservative Catholic in a time and place preoccupied with a “fall” specifically from the Middle Ages to Modernity, where all the religious buildings and many of the secular ones dated from that European feudal period. Why do you even suggest Tolkien might have had Japan or China in mind when he wrote that?

TM: Then why did you bring it up? If you want to speculate randomly on topics someone might take offense to, don’t attach your speculations to my comment, please.

Also what TM said about the moderation.

TM: No, I said LotR doesn’t work as medieval nostalgia because it presents a white working class utopia with no significant interactions with the visible elite, in a hierarchical society, so beloved of medieval nostalgists.

@153

I’m not sure it makes sense to say that the Haradrim in Lord of the Rings are evil. For one thing, unlike orcs, who do get speaking roles and come across as bad eggs, there are no Southron characters at all. (The Mouth of Sauron is a Númenorean, and any Southron Nazgul are no longer human.) Their only appearance in the story is as spear carriers, and there’s no reason to believe that they’re any more evil than any human soldiers. In fact, Tolkien goes to the trouble of having Sam remind us of this.

There aren’t many Easterling characters in Tolkien either, and none in the Silmarillion.

Katsue, there is a whole history behind the lord of the rings, it’s not just three books. And in the rest of the history he makes clear that the “men of darkness” are bound to Sauron, because they weren’t enlightened by the Light of Ardor or whatever it’s called, and as a result they’re evil, and all their ancestors are evil. This includes the easterlings (the “wainriders” of The Return of the King, whose physical characteristics are only given to the extent required to establish that they’re mongoloid or somesuch, but whose depraved moral characteristics are described in detail) and the Haradrim, who are confirmed as dark skinned in the same book, and whose moral characteristics are outlined in great detail in many of Tolkien’s works.

Also, if you want an insight into how Tolkien presents non-white characters, consider two races that are crucial to the action of the main novels: the Dunlendings and the Woses. The Dunlendings are universally nasty, they’re brown skinned (“dun”, even) and they are servants of Saruman down to the last man. The Woses, the original people of the land the Rohirrim inhabit, are in decline because they’re weak and woeful and don’t have the vigor of whites (they’re indigenous), and their land was given away to the Rohirrim by some old Dunedain King. They’re classic noble savages.

Really, this shit is plain as day. I don’t understand why people insist on denying it.

Yes, well, in Tolkien, elves are angels and orcs are demons. Wizards are something like archangels, like Morgoth and Sauron were. Ents are trees. Of the other species, the dwarves have so few women it’s not clear in what sense they can be said to be a race, which is something that involves begetting. And the hobbits, well, the racial exaltation of hobbitry is where? Whatever are the fascist implication in the images of Harfoots, Fallohides and Stoors, and why are they relegated to those deranged appendices? The actual races are the Dunedain, the Rohirrim, the Beornings, the Easterlings, the Haradrim, the Khands, the Variags, etc.

The Return of the King is the Millennium. If there is a racial utopia in Tolkien, it’s there…but it’s not there, it’s just announced. Real utopias are on the page.

The Lord of the Rings is about Sam and Gollum helping Frodo and God via his agent, despite his last minute personal failure, to be brave and destroy the Ring, in a trial arranged by God through the providential discovery of the Ring, with vicissitudes managed by his agent Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel. Contra the OP, I’m still not seeing how this is utopian. All the silliness about blood is in there, but that’s not what the story is about. If you can’t ignore that, then the experience of the book is ruined. But it is I think a strange reader that focuses on Aragorn’s skin.

@Faustusnotes 153

I’m ignoring the racial determinism applied to human races because I don’t see it.
Tolkien says in the Silmarillion that humans are the only ones with free will (the elves are predestined, whereas the dwarves and the hobbits are purposedly left in mistery, and the orcs don’t know).

I don’t see any race to be more good (ethically) than the others, with the exception of the orcs who are worse than the others, and for the humans I really don’t see this racial determinism (other than the really strong moral determinism that pervades the whole story: if someone looks an arsehole at the beginning, he is certain to be a source of evil in the end, regardless of his race).

PS: about the Aryan theory, this theory was about a well specified racial group, and, Tolkien being a folklorist, he certainly knew who the Aryan were supposed to be.
Now again everything in the Silmarillion and in the LOTR hints to a pre-roman celtic setting, and T confirmed it explicitly.
Now Celts were not Aryans as far as I know, so even if T was writing about a nazi-like race theory, this would have been a different theory from that of Aryanism, or at least a version of the theory that I don’t know.