/lit/ - Literature

Language is hard. This was maybe my answer to Martin, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. A Song of Ice and Fire had a very modern philosophy: that if the king was a good man, he would get his dick chopped off. We look at history and it’s not that simple. Martin can say that Bran became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Martin doesn’t ask the question: How was High Valyrian conjugated? Does the pluperfect tense of Bravosi derive from the suffix? How did dragons understand the verb “dracarys”? And what about all those lost Westerosi languages? By the end of the war, the Night King is gone but all of the autists aren’t gone – they’re in the Godswood, watching beautiful sisters be beautifully raped. Did Bran pursue a policy of monolingualism and kill all other languages? Even the little baby dialects in their little dialect regions?

'Despite what some of his fans might suggest, Tolkien understood the horrors of war. While he did not object to the notion of a just defense, he was against any militant notions such as a pre-emptive strike as being justified. He thought that the solution to war was not more war, or plans for more wars, but rather, to go beyond the logic of war itself. War begets war; preparing for war leads to people to accept the unacceptable, to use “the Ring” in order to achieve an easy victory, only to find themselves becoming Dark Lords themselves. As the Orcs were created by corruption, that is, they must not be seen as a race which developed on its own, Tolkien understood that with a new Dark Lord there would be more Orcs, that is, more corrupted people who would follow the ideologies of that new Dark Lord. Racism, nationalism, fearmongering, hatred, selfishness, and the rejection of the common good, all of these are a part of the corruption which creates an Orc, the willing slave of a Dark Lord...

'Tolkien, far from a figure representative of the alt-right, or the ultra-right wing with their ideologies of power, warmongering, and xenophobia, was a writer who wrote against those ideologies, afraid of what their embrace would bring into the world. When he began his sequel to The Lord of the Rings, The New Shadow, he saw, to his dismay, corruption was once again taking place in Middle Earth: kids were forming gangs, pretending to be Orcs, showing that Gondor had not learned its lesson from the fight against Sauron. It was too dire a story and Tolkien did not write much before giving up on his sequel and returning to his earlier tales, perfecting them throughout the rest of his life. But yet, it serves as a fine representation of the warning which he gave to Christopher: the people of the earth need not only to be victorious against the other, but they need to be victorious in a way that overturns the ideology of the other lest they become that which they fight against and doom themselves to repeat the evils of the past. The rise of the alt-right is like the rise of children turning into “Orc gangs” after the defeat of Sauron. We, unlike Tolkien, have to face them and deal with them today. Let us remember what it is we fought for in the past, what we should fight for now, and do so by not embracing the power of the Ring and turning ourselves into Dark Lords: let us, rather, embrace the truths which the alt-right reject and follow them to overturn the alt-right itself. Compassion, mercy, imagination, and the common good: these need to be our tools; Tolkien understood this. Let us heed his wisdom.'

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/henrykarlson/2019/05/tolkien-and-the-alt-right-orcs-tolkiens-forewarning-and-rejection-of-the-new-ultranationalism/?fbclid=IwAR3LgiVvZTzhmpsxkt4aaZO8SmevWR_zCfwQXbARovt4mbO4_4-3mFf_oPM

the first Dungeons & Dragons playing group?
>with J.R.R. was DM, of course