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Old 06-07-2022, 10:30 AM   #9
William Cloud Hicklin
Loremaster of Annúminas
 
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William Cloud Hicklin is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.William Cloud Hicklin is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.William Cloud Hicklin is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
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Finally there's the racist/sexist angle, already hard at work getting in a twist over deviations from "the lore". And it's always "the lore" with these people which is fairly convenient as it makes them easier to identify.
That's rather a broad brush, don't you think? It is part and parcel of Amazon's contempt for Tolkien's creation, the "lore," that they run roughshod over everything including his admittedly Euro- and androcentric viewpoint; he very consciously calqued his creation upon, indeed set it in a fictional prehistory of, northwestern Europe. Why should criticism of this "we're going to make generic cliche-ridden fantasy but call it 'Tolkien'" thus be an identifier of "istaphobes?"

Pretty much everything in Tolkien's mental furniture led that way, from his youthful infatuation with the Kalevala to the fact that his tripartite division of the Elves stemmed ultimately from dissatisfaction with Grimm's explanation of Snorri Sturluson's account of the Norse alfr. His motivation, following Lonnrot and Grundvig, was to create a national myth, but out of whole cloth: it was indeed a "mythology for England" (Carpenter's phrase, but a decent precis of Letter 131). In fact, in The Lost Tales, Tol Eressea was England, the future island of Great Britain. At least until the early 1960s, and possibly for the rest of his life, the frame story/transmission vector was the Anglo-Saxon mariner Aelfwine.

Less well-known but just as direct is this, from Letter 180: "Having set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own." Middle-earth is completely ripped up by the roots if its grounding in the soil of England is removed. And this, from Letter 190: "'The Shire' is based on rural England and not any other country in the world... The toponymy of The Shire, to take the first list, is a 'parody' of that of rural England, in much the same sense as are its inhabitants: they go together and are meant to. After all the book is English, and by an Englishman, and presumably even those who wish its narrative and dialogue turned into an idiom that they understand, will not ask of a translator that he should deliberately attempt to destroy the local colour."

It is all of a piece that Amazon's invented Harfoot protohobbits should have names that are linguistically impossible within Tolkien's subcreation, and skin-tones that are equally impossible. What Amazon is giving us is not Tolkien, but a cargo-cult with Tolkien featuring as John Frum; and "Nori Brandyfoot" is no more legitimate than a bamboo mockup was an actual DC-3.

Remember this blast, highly appropriate today:

I wonder why a translator should think himself called on or entitled to do
any such thing. That this is an 'imaginary' world does not give him any right to remodel it according to his fancy, even if he could in a few months create a new coherent structure which it took me years to work out.
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