Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6202040" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree that Tolkien's fiction evinces very strong (and negative) views about non-Europeans and even non-Christian Europeans; although it's muted enough that you can read the works without noticing it. (I once had a poster tell me that I was wrong in suggesting that Tokien's conception of orcs reflects a certain European conception of the Turkic multitudes, because Tolkien once said of WWI soldiers "That we were all orcs" and the poster thought that substituting "Turks" for "orcs" made a nonsense of that statement - whereas it seems to me that that's Tolkien's whole point, and consistent with a recurrent difficulty among some European intellectuals in understanding how the European civilisation of which they were/are part should have given rise to the World Wars.)It's not so much that I want them to give a particular mythic history - although I happen to like the one they gave us for 4e - but rather that by emphasising supernatural origins in some way they create an approach which makes it less likely that these issues will come through strongly. Whereas I think an approach grounded in real-world biology or anthropology or psychology will make it very hard to avoid this.</blockquote>