Vaguely interesting BBC Culture article

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Absolutely amazing what clueless twits actually get paid to write, on topics they know the square root of bugger-all about. Starting with the meaning of myth, as Tolkien used it.

I've never put much stock in "analysis" pieces which purport to find inner meanings of books, especially when those works are by long-dead authors who were simply the product of their time.
Tolkien to me has always come across as remarkably open and "tolerant", and the popularity of his works across such a diverse pool of racial, political, and philosophical factors in his readers would seem to torpedo ideas like the Guardian rubbish.

[Zigûr]

I was writing a whole post scrutinising that article but it's obviously not serious enough to be worth the time. I do think that there are criticisms of Professor Tolkien's work which are sustainable from a particular political point of view but that article seems to be much more interested in claiming the idea of the Red Book of Westmarch could represent a piece of unreliable propaganda; in which case, given that The Lord of the Rings is fiction, surely it would have to be knowingly unreliable and therefore satirical, and thus Professor Tolkien would actually support the article author's political views - but he doesn't seem to have reached that step in his analysis.

The thing is, any political ideology can make any text support its arguments if it's presented in the right way. It'd be pretty easy to write a similar article arguing for the merits of The Lord of the Rings as "liberal" or "progressive" or "Leftist" or whatever meaningless "us-and-them-ism" term is the opposite of what this person thinks The Lord of the Rings is. Then one might dig up Letter 83 or something and argue in refutation of that but ultimately I think that The Lord of the Rings as a text, and Professor Tolkien as a person, are just not the kinds of things which can be pigeonholed into a single, and current, understanding of a particular ideology.

I might actually add if one considers Letter 83 that at the end of the day for Professor Tolkien one of his main loyalties was his faith (obviously in this case it's rather a complicated issue), which I think ties back to the idea that The Lord of the Rings is much more a spiritual than a political text.