"For all that he has inspired many a mediocre imitator, the power and legacy of Tolkien, and the high fantasy he invented, cannot be understated."
The correct phrase is "cannot be overstated." I cannot overstate how common the erroneous "understated" variant has become, to the point it now seems likely to replace the original. The problem seems to arise from the trifecta of overstated being less familiar than understated, the difficulty of parsing the meaning of the phrase (which is basically "impossible to exaggerate") and—with apologies to Doug Piranha—litotes.
I was actually confused by that for a moment when reading the article.
I think rants such as yours are good and important. Despite not being a native English speaker, I think English speakers should strive to hold to their language rules and not let globalism and less informed people like me take their rich vocabulary and correct grammar away from them.
With English as a true lingua franca, I think us non-native speakers should feel some ownership too. It is the language we are required to speak when communicating with foreigners in a globalized world. I think we should see it as our language as well.
I agree with you, even as a native English speaker.
I reside in Northern Europe where almost everyone speaks truly excellent English with a kind of formidable grammatical correctness. However, it is definitely spoken as a business/technical/lingua franca and not as a beautiful, poetic language in its own right.
I would love the people who speak it non-natively to truly own it by learning and caring about the nuances, idioms and poetry of English. Know and care for instance what it means when you have me in stitches, or he's a square peg in a round hole, or they got her goat or when someone sighs about a path not taken or says Ay, there's the rub.
English is as much about these idioms and aphorisms as it is about making grammatically correct declarative statements like "They write an email. I train an employee. It costs 17 euros. They respect the treaty. She prepares a speech."
I think people care, to the extent they are familiar with the idioms. But what I think matters equally is that new idioms born outside of the natively spoken English should be seen as equally valuable, when they get a meaningful reach. I am thinking for example of "do the needful" which I understand being born in India. I don't hear it used except by Indian English-speakers but I think it should have equal status as your examples.
>I am thinking for example of "do the needful" which I understand being born in India. I don't hear it used except by Indian English-speakers but I think it should have equal status as your examples.
When my U.S. employer opened a technology center in Chennai, with the full intent of making two co-equal teams 12 hours apart, one of the first idioms our American staff learned from India was "do the needful." This is just to let you know that a whole bunch of very American tech people use this delightful and handy phrase all the time.
> But what I think matters equally is that new idioms born outside of the natively spoken English should be seen as equally valuable, when they get a meaningful reach. I am thinking for example of "do the needful" which I understand being born in India.
Yes! Absolutely! I agree 100%. English contains multitudes!
What does it mean? I think I have even heard it. Where did it come from? Like, a poem or ...?
One of the marvelous things about English is that there are no official gatekeepers who determine correct English. It will happily absorb foreign or regional words and concepts. For instance, schadenfreude is probably now a proper English word despite its foreign origin. Often idioms and memes are adopted and propagated through popular entertainment. So if you want people to adopt and use "do the needful", one way is to write a popular and ensuring classic!
I’m guessing that the bastardised “could care less” is an Americanism that is endemic to Internet discourse. Thankfully, I’ve never heard anyone say it out loud on this side of the Atlantic.
Never cared for the many linguistic convolutions of over/understatedness, as I feel I always need to solve an equation in my head to gain a basic piece of information. It’s no wonder even authors get tripped up.
Also “nonplussed”, which is its own antonym at this point, and needs to be sanctioned.
I don’t usually worry about misspellings, my spelling and typing isn’t great, but it seems like here particularly Site instead of Cite as in citing a source is painfully common.
loose for me is “loos” or “lewss” with an emphasis on making the “s” sound like “s”, versus lose sounding like “looze” or “lewz” that have a “z” sound at the end.
which is interesting for sure since “loser” still has the Z sound (mostly), and to make something less tight you make it “looser” with an S sound.
Or teach people what it actually means. But i agree, it is one of those words who's uses in Modern English make me grind my teeth - and i'm not all that fussy.
Decimate is already fixed. It means to destroy a large number. It meant killing one in ten in Latin. But there are lots of words that have different meanings in the original language and have changed over time. This meaning is centuries old and the dominate one.
I don't know why decimate gets this pedantry. Maybe because it has interesting source but why not talk about the source. It is especially weird coming from online people who use new definitions all the time. Nobody is like the real definition of computer is person who computes. Or hacker is somebody who chops.
Think about it if asked you to overstate Tolkein's achievements if they were great enough, no matter how hard you'd try, you wouldn't be able to over state them.
I agree that is the usage of "Cannot be overstated". I don't understand why you would apply a separate scenario from what was written.
"Cannot be understated" is a phrase used to emphasize the importance or significance of something. I think that applies. (Google - ludwig.guru summarizer)
That sentence, taken as it is written, would imply the exact opposite to me. There may be dialectal differences, of course, but if there are then people are bound to misunderstand this.
If you cannot understate something, then any statement no matter how bad (for example "it is mediocre") is likely to be an overstatement. That's now how you would think of something important.
Double negations are always tricky. "Can not be understated" can more clearly be written as "easy to overstate".
English slang is full of double negations. A sentence such as "I didn't do no harm", which would absolutely mean harm was inflicted, can mean the opposite. So it may be good to avoid them as to not confuse non native speakers.
I thi k maybe it can be used in both ways, like " I cannot overstate the importance of this" or "you can not understate what I just said" cannot as in "I am not allowing you to understate what I said". Idk, that's my most generous reading of it.
I do not think this is a typo. Tolkien is very old school. Many people today do not share his opinions and world views.
Most old books, movies... were subverted and reinterpreted today, just look at starwars or Witcher. Huge corporation spend billions just for an opportunity to defecate on Tolkien's grave. But his legacy seems to be resistant to this sort of damage!
> The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil”.
Can we please fucking stop pretending that every work of fiction must be about several factions in shades of grey fighting one another in a universe where Objective Good and Evil aren't a thing?
I also isn't accurate. The Elves are generally good but don't help at all costs, they are fairly self-serving (or seem to be). Gollum is a swing b/w pity and anger. Gandalf and Aragorn tend to hide information (for the betterment of the mission it seems). Plenty of other "characters" are self-serving, Eagles, Beorn, Mr. Bombadil. Even Sauron was once good and there's hints that people believe he isn't pure evil or had some good to do.
Ironically, there are very few characters in Tolkien who are consistently and unwaveringly good -- the huge majority, including some of the central figures like Frodo and Sam, had at least some moments of darkness, however fleeting.
> the huge majority, including some of the central figures like Frodo and Sam, had at least some moments of darkness, however fleeting.
Yes, but not due to their own inherrent greyness, but because of the corruptive influence of evil they fought against. That's a huge difference to my eyes.
True, but it's always obvious what the good thing is and what the evil thing is at any point. The characters themselves may falter but what they should be doing is immediately clear.
This is why I tapped out of breaking bad about half way through.
Brilliantly done show, blah blah. But no one in it was sympathetic anymore after a certain point. Everyone was a horrible human being - I find it hard to watch that.
It is valid thing to point out for a critic. Just like unrealistic physics or one dimensional characters are.
Objectively angelic vs evil was extremely common setup in cheap literature. It is easy to write and people used to consume tons of it. Be it detective stories, adventures, westerns, goodly good vs badly bad was common.
> It is valid thing to point out for a critic. Just like unrealistic physics or one dimensional characters are.
That presumes that Objective Good and Evil are somehow just as unrealistic. That's very much debatable, though I'd not be surprised if right here on HN people can't see that.
> Objectively angelic vs evil was extremely common setup in cheap literature. It is easy to write and people used to consume tons of it. Be it detective stories, adventures, westerns, goodly good vs badly bad was common.
Yeah, so is grey and grey morality. Hacks like GRRM make bank with objectively bad people on all sides, and it's tauted as 'realism'.
It's a story about a world where God and deities objectively exist and interact with it in visible ways, it makes sense everything turns around being for or against them.
There isn't much of an economy or progress in general, with magic being a thing. The only sin the good guys are allowed is Pride.
This is relevant for some fantasy worlds, but not for Middle Earth.
Morality in Middle Earth is clearly not derived from divine mandates. Magic is relatively rare and not used to support economic activities all that much. It is in fact on its way out by the end of LoTR.
Well, there isn't much of invidual every day morality in LOTR basically. It's more of a morality for kings tale.
who is the most moral character? Gandalf. And he is a mouthpiece from the Valar to men.
Who are the most moral people? The elves. They're closest to the Valar and are always good, to the point you can debate whether they have free will or not.
What's the job of a moral ruler? To fight the beasts of Morgoth and men not from the north west, all the people that never got told morality from the Elves in ancient times.
what's the ultimate sin? to challenge God and the Valar, of course. God will sink your continent to the sea and reshape the planet if you dare.
But… no? I don’t think this is what people generally believe at all. The elves are certainly not the most moral faction.
The morally challenged characters in my opinion are Boromir, Sam, and Pippen.
Almost every main character is clear that they desire to do good. Their struggle is not navigating grey space, but trying to figure out how to overcome barriers to do so (personal, hierarchical, self sacrificial, etc.).
> The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil”.
Yeah, I love The Lord of the Rings: read and re-read it as a teen (read it to my daughters when they were young — twice because the younger one was too young the first go-through). But I don't disagree with a lot of the criticism of the book.
I don't know the term that the critics would use, but I tend to say that I like "small" stories in general. A small story is more like the film "The Last Picture Show". A story where the entire world is saved from the embodiment of evil by a handful of determined but powerless good guys is the opposite of what I would call a "small" story.
But I forgive Lord of the Rings because I put it on a different shelf and in another corner. Tolkien wrote perhaps the second best "fable" of all time. It seems strange to me to hold it up to 20th Century literary trends.
By the Duchy of Normandy, which was as Viking as it is French (Norman means literally Men of the North). The Abbaye aux Hommes William the Conqueror founded in Caen, and where he is buried, has a roof shaped like an inverted drakkar.
Not much. Maybe I noticed it because, as a native German speaker, I am a bit more sensitive and also occasionally stumble over a word, I do not know. I just made a test and opened "The Fellowship of the Ring" at a random page. Here (in chap. 8: "Fog on the Barrow-downs") I read:
"The air was growing very warm again. The hobbits ran about for a while on the grass, as he told them. Then they lay basking in the sun with the delight of those that have been wafted suddenly from bitter winter to a friendly clime, or of people that, after being long ill and bedridden, wake one day to find that they are unexpectedly well and the day is again full of promise."
Here my observations:
- It is not that Tolkien avoids words of Italic (Romance) origin altogether. In this passage there are several: "delight" (< lat.: delectare), "clime" (< lat.: clima), "unexpectedly" (< lat.: expectare/exspectare) and "promise" (< lat.: promissum). But he uses such words sparingly. In this way, he still sounds modern and not comically mannered.
- At the same time, is prose has a lyric undertone. He uses discreet metaphors ("The air was growing ver warm agin" [not "getting"], "basking in the sun", "bitter winter", "friendly clime", "full of promise") and unusual, poetic words ("wafted", "clime" [instead of "climate"], "bedridden"). The changed feelings of the hobbits is not simply state (as if to say: "The sun came out and the hobbits' mood improved."), but demonstrated by their behaviour and then explained not with a single, but with a double elaborate comparison that emphasises the contrast between the hobbits previous and their current state.
- His style is plain but not simplistic. The whole passage has a nice rhythm, starting with a short simple sentence, a slightly less simple second and a long third, which is nevertheless not overly complex. He uses simple words to make his point ("very warm", not "boiling hot").
I would suggest you try it out yourself. Just open the Lord of the Rings somewhere, take a short passage or a few lines and write down your observations for at least half an hour. If you feel that you have finished earlier resist that urge and carry on for half an hour. The interesting observations typically happen a while after you have written down the obvious.
Another very instructive experiment is a backwards translation. If you know a language other than English, get a translation of the Lord of the Rings and translate a random page (without looking at the original first, of course) back into English. Then compare it with the original.
Anyone remember the EA Battle for Middle Earth series? There's a small group of people trying to resurrect it, but they might need a hand: https://github.com/Ravo92/Patch-2.22-Launcher
I played that as a kid. It was fun, but even as a dumb kid who did not understand depth it seemed unbalanced. I would be greatly amused to hear from someone more informed what the more mature community has concluded about it as a competitive RTS.
As a dumb kid, unlike many RTS games where I would likely get trounced, I found myself entering random battles where we would get stale mated and bored because both sides felt unending.
I run Gnooks, a self-learning literature recommendation experiment which has been used by a few million people so far. According to their likes, Tolkien is the 3rd most popular author:
It just didn't seem that interesting anymore. They also lacked a grand adventure, and seemed rather pedestrian. I felt I was supposed to like Clarke, but was just bored with it.
Scifi isn't a particularly big seller (biggest genre fiction by a huge factor is romance and thrillers). Frankly the top entries do suggest a disproportionate amount of old S.F fans.
Most users probably come over from https://www.gnod.com after discovering one of the other recommendation projects. The music one is pretty popular. Or they come via googling for "author recommendation engine" or something like that.
Clarke is at position 293:
...
#292 John Flanagan
#293 Arthur Charles Clarke
#294 Augusten Burroughs
...
Very interesting. Do you track any sort of demographic data, such as age, gender and location? Looking at the top authors I would wager millennials are the biggest users?
The users only rate authors and enter no other data. So the only demographic data I have is the list of countries Matomo outputs. For last month, the top 10 countries look like this:
United States 46.4%
United Kingdom 8.1%
Canada 5.2%
Australia 4.3%
Russia 3.9%
Germany 2.9%
Italy 1.9%
France 1.9%
India 1.8%
New Zealand 1.3%
Yes, there are a lot of directions the project could evolve into. I have many ideas in a list. Finding a better business model than ads would be a good first step I think.
If you don't mind unsolicited advice, I think your service could easily facilitate a paid "newsletter" of recommended new authors based on some sort of user profile.
Affiliate links for the authors would be a start... Probably wouldn't be huge money, but links would be actually helpful and I doubt anyone would mind you making money of those links.
Bit of an aside, but this means we are now only 20 years from now the copyright on all his books published in his lifetime expiring, right? I wonder what effects, if any, that will have on the use of his works. Right owners of Sherlock Holmes and Conan for instance have kept fighting to control those works even after (some) copyrights expired. Otherwise will the market be flooded, for better or worse, with new movies and video games and other adaptations of Tolkien's works around January 1 2044? That is less than 21 years from now. The first of the Peter Jackson movies came out 22 years ago.
Yes, 2044 is the year when Tolkien’s best-known works enter the public domain (unless laws are changed in the meantime).
By then, AI can probably generate Jackson-quality movies with these recognizable characters in near real-time. It should be a fertile era for Tolkien fans who will finally get to tell their own visual stories within this universe.
My wife just read a thousand page fan fiction set in the Harry Potter world where the Death Eaters won, Harry Potter is dead, and Draco Malfoy has been assigned to Hermione for “breeding purposes”. The premise sounds like trash, but she was describing the intricacies of how wars are fought and political intrigues and a very personal and relatable story of standing up to power. She literally could not put it down, and said it was one of the most interesting and engaging pieces of literature she’s ever read.
Copyright just lets large corporations keep our shared cultural heritage under lock and key. These worlds are living rent free in our heads. We should be allowed to play around with them at our leisure and tell the stories we want to tell without the threat of financial ruin being brought down upon us.
> a thousand page fan fiction set in the Harry Potter world where the Death Eaters won, Harry Potter is dead, and Draco Malfoy has been assigned to Hermione for “breeding purposes”. The premise sounds like trash, but she was describing the intricacies of how wars are fought and political intrigues and a very personal and relatable story of standing up to power.
Is that what Martin has been doing instead of finishing ASOFAI? Because that sounds exactly like him.
I guess I'll take the bait... why would the scion of a "pure-blood" wizarding family be assigned to breed with someone whose parents are both Muggles? Seems antithetical to the Death Eaters' aims.
My wife’s response, verbatim, she thinks it’s hilarious that I mentioned it here.
“Okay, so it was explained that Lord V didn’t actually care about pure blood, he was a mud blood himself. That was just to get the pure blood families on board with his revolution.
And he didn’t actually care about the babies, it was just that Malfoy was a really good mind reader (I forget the technical term) and he wanted Hermione’s hidden memories to root out all the secret members of the order.
But the wizard pop culture was really into the babies so it was more of a PR thing.“
She said she highly appreciated the realistic political stuff in the book. Anyway this is as much thought as I’m willing to put into this topic, you’re welcome to search “Manacled Harry Potter” if you really want to learn more.
Thanks for elaborating. Having read (and then listened to Stephen Fry read) the Harry Potter series during lock-down, that sounds like it would be worth checking out.
One person’s genre-bending fan fiction is another person’s worthless porn…
But there are some interesting works diegetically aligned with the Tolkien universe that currently can’t be published or developed in the West for copyright reasons.
I’m thinking of the Russian pro-Mordor “The Last Ringbearer,” for example:
> The Court of Appeals recognized copyright in several characters from Gone with the Wind and found that The Wind Done Gone had "appropriate[d] numerous characters, settings, and plot twists". However, the court decided that this appropriation was protected under the doctrine of fair use.
> ... Mitchell's estate chose to drop the suit after publisher Houghton agreed to make a donation to Morehouse College.
> Where many modernists greeted the Great War as a moment of disenchantment and disillusionment, a young Tolkien, who fought in it, took it as a spur to a mission of re-enchantment for a world desperately in need of myth.
The anti-war sentiment of Tolkien’s work isn’t even highlighted explicitly enough I find.
Dead Marshes echo WWI trenches and WWII fascism casts shadows over Sauron's dominion.
Frodo's scars mirror war's enduring trauma.
Myth making for himself, his children and general world (re-)building.
This is the second time I've seen "understated" (mis)used that way recently. I am afraid this may be a trend, like the appearance in the world of "irregardless," which is becoming an accepted word, or the use of "literally," which used to mean, er, "literally," and now can be acceptably used in situations where it is figurative. Or the use of "there's" when there are more than one entity being referred to and "there're" would have been used in the good old days (which I remember because I'm 67).
For things like "there's" vs. "there're", not too much harm besides a loss of precision, Grammer can be sloppy and meaning is still understood. But for "could care less" or "cannot be understated" or "irregardless" they're _literal_ negations of intended meaning used unsarcastically and unironically. How does that not irk you at a visceral level? Learning English is already hard enough, and we want to sprinkle in "sometimes what is meant is the exact opposite of what is said, good luck figuring out when, rely on context I guess?"
> It was published in 1954, at a time when literary modernism was dominant and pervading the academy. Modernist writers were obsessed with interiority, broke with prior literary convention, and traded in irony, ambiguity and convoluted psychology.
I don't understand what is being said here. I assume I'm supposed to already be familiar with those literary criticism concepts.
"Interiority" means directly showing the interior thoughts and emotions of characters, for example through first-person narrative or stream-of-consciousness. Tolkien follow a more classic style where we see the characters from the outside.
Not sure if this helps or is even especially correct but: some decades ago there was a movement towards 'inner space', meaning rather than looking outwards at actions and effects on the world, it was about introspection and what was going on inside characters. This may be what they're talking about with interiority, and probably about the convoluted psychology.
Those few books I read of this ilk tended to be very dull.
Also bear in mind that literary criticism may be prone to being done for show and self-exhibition, much less about the book itself.
This http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html (starts with a quote from Donald Norman "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right") is a painful example of somebody discovering this. It's not funny, it shows somebody's time being wasted as they try to genuinely understand WTF it's all about, and finally 'getting it'. It's well worth a read.
I dislike how much for Tolkien being good means the same thing as obeying the right authority. However, I think that his work does not really suffer much from this because he does not try to rub his moral attitude into the reader in the way that a cheap propagandist would. Unlike so many modern political writers of various ideological persuasions, he does not write paragraphs upon paragraphs trying to convince you, with all the nuance of a sledgehammer, that the bad guys are bad and that you yourself are bad if you disagree. He is more subtle than that. I would probably find his morality insufferable if he was not, given that so much of his worldview boils down to the idea that what is truly good is to serve and obey a god no matter how much suffering that god puts one through.
I also suspect that many of the people who accuse Tolkien of having too much of a black and white sort of morality would be offended if they read, for example, a history of World War 2 that humanized the Nazis. I understand the common criticism that he basically depicted entire races/species as being evil but after all, this is fantasy. Having read some of his letters, I doubt that he actually believed that there were any human ethnic groups that were essentially evil.
Tolkien wrote a world that functions the way a Catholic wants the real world to work, even though it doesn't.
Morality is uncomplicated, there is a clear black and white divide and nobody ever wonders if say, Sauron might be coexisted with in some way.
Morality is deontological. Good actions are good, period. Furthermore, they don't backfire. When Gandalf lets Grima go, or when people take pity on Gollum, that's not naive idealism, that's the objectively right thing to do. Such actions just don't backfire on people in this world.
On the other hand, evil is a path to ruin and misery. Grima is miserable with Saruman, Saruman doesn't like him either. Saruman dies by Grima's hand once Grima has had enough, and Grima dies too. Villains don't get happy endings.
Mercy has a magical power of sorts. Frodo only succeeds because of his mercy on Gollum.
There's also an essentialism to things. Tom Bombadil is this weird thing, and that's that. You can't convince him to take care of the Ring, it's just not in his nature to care about that sort of thing, and it's completely non-negotiable.
Evil never creates, it only spends chunks of itself to corrupt perfection.
If you read it from the standpoint of "what if Catholicism was true, and the world functioned in the way the religion says it does", it's quite interesting.
> Morality is deontological. Good actions are good, period. Furthermore, they don't backfire. When Gandalf lets Grima go, or when people take pity on Gollum, that's not naive idealism, that's the objectively right thing to do. Such actions just don't backfire on people in this world.
I don’t think that’s accurate. Gollum surviving is the cause of a great number of very bad things, including Sauron discovering the location of the Ring. At the end of course it all comes together: if the location wasn’t discovered, the quest to permanently destroy the ring wouldn’t have started, and it’s by Gollum’s hands that it is destroyed. But the moral there isn’t “good actions don’t backfire”, but more like this: good action can backfire, sometimes in terrible ways, but good people must endure the consequences without doubt and without remorse, keeping faith that things will all be set right at the ultimate end.
In the real world, of course, the ultimate end does not arrive before our deaths.
An important distinction, I think, is that good and evil are tangible and unambiguous as forces in the world, but there is still plenty of room for complexity in the struggle of good and evil within an individual. Is Smeagol truly evil? Is Denethor? Especially true if you move beyond beyond LotR proper -- Feanor, Turin, etc. Plenty of complex individual struggles even within a relatively simple and immutable binary of good and evil in the world's epistemology.
Denethor is an interesting character. He’s one of the only (if not the only?) antagonists who is not evil. Denethor’s flaw is that he has given up hope.
All true, I think it’s important to bear in mind he was consciously writing mythology and fairy tales. I’m not a Catholic, but knowing his premise I’m quite happy to judge his work on its merits relative to his objectives.
I’m reminded of the fact some people disliked Battlestar Galactica because it was inspired by Mormonism. That’s another case where I don’t have to share the same beliefs as the authors to appreciate what they created on their own terms.
I think if we only accepted and appreciated work that already aligns with our personal beliefs or ideology, we’d be missing out.
> All true, I think it’s important to bear in mind he was consciously writing mythology and fairy tales. I’m not a Catholic, but knowing his premise I’m quite happy to judge his work on its merits relative to his objectives.
Myths and fairy tales don't necessary have morality like that. Fairly often, they just don't. The reiterations for little children are like that, because we intentionally write them to teach moral values. But the original collected versions fairly often end badly or the right act ends in disaster or million other things happen. Often times they are about smarter one winning foe comedic effect rather then anything else.
In his essay On Fairy Stories, Tolkien argued the point of fantasy was the “good catastrophe” or happy ending. Tolkien viewed fantasy as therapeutic as counter to the ugliness of modern industrial life. It assures that there is a cosmic justice.
True, but being Catholic I can't help thinking that even though I don't think he cited it as an inspiration, the bible was a template on which his mythology is built. It's a monotheistic world with hinted fall from grace back in Human origins, angelic beings, a Satan analog in Morgoth. So you're right though, I should qualify that my saying he was writing a mythology in the Biblical style but culturally North West European.
I don't think Bible follow that pattern all that much either. It is years since I read the actual Bible, but from what I remember it is not an epic nor a myth nor something like that.
The good vs evil simplification is solidly something rooted in Christianity and Catholic tradition I am agree with that. Just not that straigfordly from Bible.
The mythological background of Tolkien is that we’re looking at the Catholic world as we know it, interpreted through the lens of myth and Elves. Catholicism is literally true in LotR. Tolkien even has an essay where Finrod says that the only way for the world to be redeemed is for God to enter himself incarnate into it.
> nobody ever wonders if say, Sauron might be coexisted with in some way
Well, Gondor tried to coexist with him but their watch grew slack and he took over the city built to watch him. Numenor embraced him and was ruined. Even the elves originally considered him a friend, before he betrayed them with the Ring. Saruman seems to have tried to use him. So if they don't think coexistence is possible, it is from bitter experience.
Saruman and Wormtongue drastically accelerated their destruction of the Shire because the protagonists let them go free. Much less damage would have been done and the final effect would have been the same if they’d just killed them.
Note that in the Jackson movies, Saruman and Wormtongue died at Isengard, and there was no need to scour the Shire.
Though I enjoy Jackson's movies as a whole, I have quibbles with some of his choices. But this one actually makes sense, from a cinematic point of view, and the screenwriting team did a good job of changing the story in such a way that changing one element removed the need for the other.
> I dislike how much for Tolkien being good means the same thing as obeying the right authority.
Yes and no. At least in LoTR, Tolkien's various Team Evil groups are pretty authoritarian. Often with the under-baddies ready to disobey or rebel the moment they think that they can get away with it. Under threat of war or violence, the various Team Good groups also tend to military-flavored authoritarianism.
But consider the start-of-story societies of the hobbits and the ents. Both have enjoyed centuries of fairly idyllic peace. The hobbits' authority figures - King, Thain, and Mayor - have faded to mythical and ceremonial offices. And their law enforcement officers seem to have been nothing but the Sherriffs - a dozen hobbits, armed only with walking sticks, with a feather in their caps as their "uniform". When the ent leader (Fangorn) is finally roused to action, he has to think long and hard to recall what other able-bodied ents there even are.
Having two such societies prominent of LoTR suggest to me that Tolkien had some quite un-authoritarian ideals.
(Yes, I'm omitting the Bounders, and Buckland's High Hay hedge, and ...)
> Tolkien's various Team Evil groups are pretty authoritarian. Often with the under-baddies ready to disobey or rebel the moment they think that they can get away with it.
It is always framed as a result of their badness. They do not rebel because they would plan to do something good - they rebel because they are selfish.
I've not read it myself, but your post leads me to think that you may enjoy The Last Ringbearer. The premise, according to Wikipedia:
Eskov bases his novel on the premise that the Tolkien account is a "history written by the victors". Mordor is home to an "amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic", posing a threat to the war-mongering faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude is described by Saruman as "crafting the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem") and the Elves.
> I also suspect that many of the people who accuse Tolkien of having too much of a black and white sort of morality would be offended if they read, for example, a history of World War 2 that humanized the Nazis.
History that humanizes Nazi still ends up with them as bad guys who knowingly and intentionally committed genocide.
Humanizing the nazis make them even more horrifying. It tells us we're not protected from doing the same things just because we imagine ourselves to be good people. The abyss is at our feet.
The article doesn't even mention his religion/beliefs which is odd despite saying
> They are shamelessly moralistic, written on the basis of exhaustive literary theory, linguistics, geography and world-building, and quite devoid of social commentary or Empsonian irony
yes, because it was a heavily catholic work.
> This mythology, he felt, must “reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth” but must lack all explicit reference to the Christian religion or the “real” world as we know it
This is especially true though and undersold. Tolkien's catholicism had an immeasurable impact on his writing and LOTR. he wrote: "[LOTR was a] fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism."
The correct phrase is "cannot be overstated." I cannot overstate how common the erroneous "understated" variant has become, to the point it now seems likely to replace the original. The problem seems to arise from the trifecta of overstated being less familiar than understated, the difficulty of parsing the meaning of the phrase (which is basically "impossible to exaggerate") and—with apologies to Doug Piranha—litotes.
<End rant>