Moorcock blasts Tolkien

[dcas]

out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues

Does this describe any existing racial group?

 

[dcas]

......Or, perhaps, they were just swarthy.

I do believe that many hobbits have a somewhat swarthy complexion as they are described as having "long clever brown fingers" (either in The Hobbit or in the preface or foreword to LOTR).

White people generally don't have brown fingers. Also, golden hair is said to be rare among them.

 

[sckeener]

So, basically, you think the argument is that Tolkien's work wasn't primarily different from what was being offered elsewhere? Which of the "fantasy staples" were staples before Tolkien?

I’m not saying he didn’t push literary boundaries. Goodness knows there are still plenty of English professors at college that refuse to consider SciFi or Fantasy as literature.

I’m saying he wouldn’t have captain Kirk kiss Uhura.

As for what fantasy staples were before Tolkien, he drew from the same sources I use for my games, myths, and for the same reasons, to create an epic story.

You are perhaps conflating "familiar" with "comfortable." When you say of Ptolus that it has "all the fantasy Tolkien staples such as snobish elves, standard dwaves, a 'Sauron' type defeated in a great war" you are at once acknowledging that those ideas would not be "staples" were it not for JRRT, while at the same time suggesting that these shallow and debased versions of what JRRT did are somehow the same as the use of the original themes and characters in LotR.
Not even close. RC

Actually, I was talking about the fact that those settings can be used to create ‘unsafe’ stories for gaming. I do not think many people would consider their games as good as the classics in literature.

 

[dcas]

I’m saying he wouldn’t have captain Kirk kiss Uhura.

Faramir kissed Eowyn.

 

[fusangite]

In such a case, I would argue that, if LotR has racist elements, they are scarcely conscious and certainly not malicious.

You may well be right. But this does not stop the text of the book being what it is: racist.

I love these books and I greatly admire JRR Tolkien but this love and admiration does not blind me to the areas where I feel the books or their author fail. Do I think Tolkien had some sort of racist political project in his writing? Of course not. But let's move beyond hero worship and acknowledge the flaws that come with any great person or thing.

 

[Mark Hope]

Should the question not be something like: Was it racist of Tolkien to make "non-European" lands subservient to Sauron?

Because it seems to me that the predominance of "evil black races" in LotR is largely due to the geographical factors involved, rather than any decision to make dark races evil. Or rather, you could argue that just as well as you could argue the case that Tolkien decided all dark races would be evil, and then gave Sauron the south and the east to suit that decision.

 

[takyris]

Hey Mark,

In response to your note about Elric not being dependent upon Tolkien's stuff:

Not so sure I agree with this. Moorcock was getting himself published by age 17 (and not in the fantasy field), which was only a year or two after LotR had been released - and well before it gained any kind of widespread popularity or recognition. He wrote the Elric stuff more on the back of Howard and Burroughs, afaik - there was a market for the genre before the Prof, strange as it may seem today. And LotR didn't hit the big time until the pirated copies were released in the USA in the early to mid 1960s. Elric was already on the shelves by then.
As I've mentioned in this thread a couple of times before, I am a huge fan of Tolkien and Moorcock and don't necessarily agree with everything that either of them say. But I don't hold with the notions that Moorcock is motivated by professional jealousy or could not have written Elric without Tolkien. Those ideas have no basis in the facts.

Bad writing on my part. I've got no doubt that Elric could have gotten published without Tolkien, but I don't think it would have had the popularity it achieved without the big comfortable authors there to create a nice healthy fantasy section for Moorcock's edgier stuff to live in.

This is a much larger point than Elric and Aragorn, and maybe years from now I'll disagree with this, but I think that the hard edgy subsections of any movement absolutely need the soft comfortable subsections of that movement. If it's a political movement (any political movement), you need the hard-line no-compromise you-won't-be-comfortable activists as well as the we're-normal-folks comfy people. One group pushes the envelope, while the other makes the contents of the envelope more acceptable to people who aren't part of the group.

Does LotR have some comfortable qualities? Yeah. And yeah, it was in the young adult section for awhile. But it also worked to move fantasy from the one-step-from-porn ghetto it was in -- an adult male seen reading a fantasy novel on the bus before the comfy movement might as well have been reading a dirty book. Whether you like or dislike Howard, it's tough to argue that Howard was improving the pulp fantasy movement's acceptance level with people who weren't already fans.

Elric would still have gotten published without Tolkien, but without Tolkien and Brooks and Eddings and everyone else that the edgy-fantasy people grimace at, without the folks who got fantasy onto the bestseller lists and read by little old ladies on airplanes, nobody except the tiny hardcore pulp-fantasy community would know about him.

 

[IcyCool]

The host of Orcs and Easterlings had turned back out of Anorien...

For a strong force of Orcs and Easterlings attempted to take their leading companies in an ambush; and that was in the very plac e where Faramir had waylaid the men of Harad...

This illustrates neither the skin color, nor evilness of anyone in particular. Did you truncate part of your quote?

(I'm interested in this discussion, but as I haven't read the books in years and don't have the time to read them and be an informed participant, I'll have to settle for being part of the peanut gallery).

 

[Raven Crowking]

Okay. Time #4:

Nobody is stating that all the bad guys are non-white. What I am stating is that 100% of the non-whites are bad guys.​

Fine. Here goes.Now, while I'm at it...Satisfied?

Not at all.

What you have demonstrated is:

(1) Gollum thought the men were bad guys. Of course, Gollum also thinks that of the elves. And just about everyone except his Precious self.

(2) Damrod, who has been fighting these people, thinks they are bad guys.

(3) They understood tactics.

(4) The ones who were "deepest and longest in evil servitude" (servitude to evil, i.e., Sauron) really believed that the Captains of the West were themselves evil, and they therefore hated the West even though they themselves "were men proud and bold" who would rather die than surrender to what they thought was a great evil.

Now, let me dig out my books this weekend and I'll reply to those quotes. And, beyond the shadow of a doubt, I can bring up references that say specifically that at least some non-white characters in LotR were not evil.

RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

I’m saying he wouldn’t have captain Kirk kiss Uhura.

On what basis?

(BTW, as ground-breaking as that was, in ST:TOS, Kirk was forced to kiss Uhura.)

Actually, I was talking about the fact that those settings can be used to create ‘unsafe’ stories for gaming.

I don't believe that there is any setting that cannot be used to create "unsafe" stories. Or "safe" stories, for that matter.

RC