Great ideas and thoughts on dragons, SF and fantasy!
Fordim said:
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There are several examples of quite subversive behaviour and institutions in his works, I think. The Hobbits, for example, live communally without an elaborate state structure and in a state of political anarchy (not chaos, but not ordered by an elaborate state apparatus). He gives nature the power to fight back and destroy technology (the Ents laying waste to Isengard). I even began to see his supposedly conservative models of leadership as being subversive – I mean, what could be more radical than to imagine the Return of the King in the midst of the most democratic century in history? Eru himself could perhaps be seen as subverting a dominant view: in our increasingly materialist society, God is dead. Not in Middle-earth.
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I think this nostalgia for the past and this will for certain elements of the past to return can be better be described with the term 'reactionary' than with 'subversive', although wanting the past to return can be rather subversive, of course, if you understand what I mean.
Also, Hobbit society is rather a reactionary idea than a subversive one: it reminds me strongly of the 'golden age' legends of many a political theorist/philosopher. This golden age was (in the view of those theorists) an age when people lived close to nature, in harmony with it and in harmony with eachother, without any form of government.
the phantom said:
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I always have a tendancy to look down on these simple, robotic individuals who seem to have such a limited imagination
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Actually, my wife is studying at the art academy and has a whole lot more imagination in her than I have, but still, she doesn't like fantasy a bit (not even JRRT
), while I do! Her reaction is 'such things cannot be', while I have this 'suspense of disbelief'.