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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 7727207" data-attributes="member: 40166">The historical context is of an Englishman during a period where the United Kingdom held India and much of Africa as colonies, who writes an epic story of good versus ultimate evil where good is multiple races, all white. He's not medieval, he's from 20th century Oxford.Secondly, Roland Barthes disagrees. His "The Death of the Author" is hardly a new idea, nor is reader-response criticism. For my own play on the latter, I would argue that you cannot judge one of the best selling books of all time solely from the perspective of one person. What the Lord of the Rings meant to Tolkien is but a tiny scratch on what the Lord of the Rings means to humanity.And lastly, you can not simply make a movie of the Lord of the Rings or use his races in a game and then dump all the responsibility on Tolkien. That's a new author, a new historical context.A citizen of a nation that ruled a multi-ethnic empire, who was born in the part of that empire that invented apartheid, will always have their race tangled in the background of their writing. To ignore that is to ignore the historical context of the writing. Tolkien's writings are rooted in the sources he chose, and said mythology was greatly expanded. Because Aladdin is Chinese, first written down by a French translator allegedly from a Syrian Christian. Because Tolkien wasn't writing from an isolated culture, he was writing from the core of a multi-racial empire. I don't expect something different in real European mythology, but Tolkien was not a writer of real European mythology. Tolkien was not medieval. And again, this is not about the Lord of the Rings novel, per se. We rewrite literature all the time. When we turn Doctor Dolittle into a movie, we don't include a white Doctor Dolittle turning an African prince white as a reward.</blockquote>

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