[ SECRET POST #4273 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4273 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 42 secrets from Secret Submission Post #612.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

are you here to start a fight, OP? because I will fight you.

in what ways does it not make political or economic sense? taking into account that this world includes actual magic and actual gods that stick their fingers into everything for a few thousand years before noping out, The Actual Devil Living In Our Midst And Starting Wars, and immortal elves, the actual history in the Third Age is perfectly sensible. Peppered heavily with Old Norse mythology, sure, since that was Tolkien's wheelhouse, but the guy went to the trouble of laying down linguistic rules for several conlangs and had them make sense in terms of what was most important to each society and its development.

like, I'm all for an interesting discussion on the actual social, political, linguistic, and economic development of Gondor, Dale, and the Rohirrim, to say nothing of the Shire, but I'm gonna need to see some citations first.

[(Anonymous)]

I just want to say that I fully agree with this secret, and I don't think it's a bad thing at all. I would even say that I consider it a *positive* statement about Tolkien. And I don't remember the exact context of the original discussion, but I don't get the sense that cbarararary dislikes Tolkien as a writer in general.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Yeah, it's more a criticism of the last few decades of fantasy-as-anthropology stans than Tolkien. I suspect a part of that comes from fantasy's inferiority complex in relationship to "hard" science fiction stans, but rather than point out that "hard" SF is an overly restrictive and untenable position, we all have to piss on Tolkien's grave as a literary critic.

Given that Tolkien was a bit blatant about retconing key facts of his story, and wasn't even coy about it on the page, I suspect he had more in common with Le Guin than the wannabe anthropologists of fantasy fic. Le Guin admitted that the Hain stories are not always consistent because some ideas became kinda creepy the more she thought about them. (And they were written over 40 years.)

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's just a way of engaging with a work that a lot of people (for lack of a better term, 'nerds') find intrinsically satisfying. Which isn't a bad thing, in and of itself, but it's it's not really a literary or aesthetic way of looking at the work, and it's frustrating when it's taken to the extreme and to the exclusion of other ways of engagement.

I think there's also a connection to D&D and other RPGs and wargames - they really encourage the mindset. If you want to adventure in the world of Tolkien, instead of reading Tolkien's books, you need to look at the text entirely differently. And people get used to that mindset

[(Anonymous)]

LeGuin was creeped out by her own ideas? I didn't know that! Deets, pls?

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Some of her early novels had telepathy, later she dropped it because she thought it would be deeply problematic.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I wasn't expecting that! I'll have to chew it over. Thanks!

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Viceroyalties almost always end up dropping the pretense of waiting for the right royal heir to come along for one thing. Then there's the motorcycle horses and ponies, entire armies that apparently exist without any food or drinking water, and the little anachronisms that Tolkien lampshades with a wink and a nod about unreliable narration. And finally, you really have to wrestle with Tolkien's professional position as author of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, restated in the letter to his editor included in The Silmarilion both of which quite explicitly reject the notion that fantasy is in any way anthropology.

[tree_and_leaf]

Viceroyalties almost always end up dropping the pretense of waiting for the right royal heir to come along for one thing.

Tolkien drops a joke about this into the appendix - Boromir asks Denethor how long it would take for a Steward to become a king and gets the reply "Few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty ... In Gondor ten thousand years would not suffice."

The House of Stuart traced their descent back to Walter Stewart the High Steward of Scotland, whose son became Robert II of Scots, and from whom descended the Kings of Britain up until the Glorious Revolution.