Every time i re-read 'The Lord of the Rings' I'm amazed at how 'racist' it is in the literal sense of the word. Everything is built around races: the good characters are from the north/west, while the bad ones come from the south/east, etc.
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And rather misogynist, and monarchist, and a boatload of other things.
Many of those I'd write off to Tolkien being a product of his times. At least his heroes seemed to have many ideals which are still accounted virtuous.
Tolkien's monarchism, though - even in the days of the Old Testament, it was obvious that hereditary monarchy never, ever worked for long. Because the heirs of great men always regressed to the mean. Pretty damn fast. (After King George III, Britain mostly solved that problem by turning their hereditary monarchs into mostly-symbolic figureheads.) And Tolkien served in the hellish trenches of WWI - a war which dug deep, dark graves for both hereditary monarchy and European superiority.
Hmm...in many ways, I could argue that Tolkien's fantasy writings were mostly escapism for him - to a old-fashioned romantic utopia, where "land of milk and honey, and the kingdom is powerful and prosperous, and the king is always good" was at least possible. And consider the massive decline in the real Britain's fortunes between Tolkien boyhood (~1900), and LOTR's publication (~1955)...
Monarchy never really works for long in Tolkien's works either. The history of the kings of Gondor is all strife and crises, and in Tolkien's abandoned sequel already 100 years later “the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse.” (Letter 256)
> consider the massive decline in the real Britain's fortunes between Tolkien boyhood (~1900), and LOTR's publication (~1955)...
Tolkien called conlang'ing (and by extension, worldbuilding?) "the solitary vice": a phrase which would have had a different denotation in his Edwardian childhood than the rather literal denotation we ascribe to it.
Lagniappe: https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/8f425o/sex_in_you...
Exercise for the reader: how solarpunk would wider europe be now, if the British Empire and the German Empire (and their descendants) hadn't played Sith Master/Apprentice games, not once but twice, last century? (1914-1918 and 1939-1945)
Many of those I'd write off to Tolkien being a product of his times
Well, there are two products-of-their-time: the writer and the reader.
Since we readers are products of a time where we're incessantly propagandised (albeit more for economic than political ends), we ought to habitually be reading for both explicit text and implicit subtext.
Because the whole book is elvish propaganda.
Mordor: "[that] 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"
Yeah, I was thinking about that book[0])
Here are similar works, anyone have potential additions?
Grendel
The Persian Version
Snow, Glass, Apples
Lagniappe: "there can be no peace until they renounce their Rabbit God and accept our Duck God" https://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141201_...
EDIT: also, Bulgakov's hard-boiled detective version of the gospel (his who-dun-it has a pragmatic advantage in that although christians and jews both still exist, no extant groups claim to belong to the Senatus PopulusQue Romanus)
[0] consider how quickly he hooked up with somone who merely dropped papers in front of him?
[1] want someone to kill people in a random pizzeria for conspiracy reasons? Smith's your man.
>short story from the point of view of one of Winston Smith's coworkers
I like the idea. I think the part 3 can co-exist the new interpretation of parts 1 and 2 -- Smith can be a conspiracy nut amid mundane reality but Big Brother's security apparatus nonetheless exists and for some reason eventually gets interested in Smith.
On the issue of how Tolkien thought about race in his works, Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth, by Robert Stuart (2022) is very good. Despite its slightly clickbaity title, the author does a careful analysis and avoids polemic.
The northwest being Britain, the southeast being Germany. Such were the times.