"Do You Hate Women?"

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

I find that very interesting because I don't remember seeing that anywhere before.

Is there a source you could point to? I'm curious to see this.

https://www.yahoo.com/movies/bp/the-...211339686.html
To her credit, she did the best she could with the material she was given. But it's sad she was treated so badly.

[Faramir Jones]

Originally Posted by Aaron

https://www.yahoo.com/movies/bp/the-...211339686.html
To her credit, she did the best she could with the material she was given. But it's sad she was treated so badly.

Thanks for the link, Aaron. What I read is, very sadly, not surprising...

[Lalaith]

But it's sad she was treated so badly

Indeed - I felt very sorry for her having to act it. I also felt very sorry for myself having to watch it. Excruciating.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Lalaith

Indeed - I felt very sorry for her having to act it. I also felt very sorry for myself having to watch it. Excruciating.

She at least received compensation for her work.

I had to pay for the privilege...or rather some other people did.

[Marwhini]

Interesting that someone mentioned the Stan/Loretta character of Eric Idle from The Life of Brian.

I cannot think of a more appropriate reference with which to Mock the actor who played Tauriel, and her weird observations about Tolkien, nor mocking PJ's inclusion of this character into The Hobbit.

The Stan/Loretta character in The Life of Brian was/is mocking the Post-Modernist and Identity Politics that had arisen during the 60s/70s/80s.

And Lilly's critique of "Does Tolkien hate Women?" is itself such a manifestation of Identity Politics, and Post-Modernist revisionism.


As is the character's inclusion into The Hobbit by Peter Jackson.

It is an egregious addition whose sole purpose is to pander to a female Post-Modernist Identity.

Tolkien's works are not "Modern" even.

Anyway.... The interview in the OP just shows the contempt of Tolkien's work held by most people. Very sad.

MB

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Marwhini

Tolkien's works are not "Modern" even.

I disagree with this. Tolkien may have been heavily inspired by medieval sources, but he lived for almost his entire life in the twentieth century and was influenced by his context. Tolkien was not a "Modernist" but I believe he was "Modern".

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

I disagree with this. Tolkien may have been heavily inspired by medieval sources, but he lived for almost his entire life in the twentieth century and was influenced by his context. Tolkien was not a "Modernist" but I believe he was "Modern".

Depends on what you define as "modern", Zig. For a writer in the 1930s, Tolkien's style certainly wasn't modern in the sense of contemporaries like Steinbeck, Hammett, Huxley and Orwell, and is on a different planet entirely, comparatively-speaking, from Wm. Faulkner, F.S. Fitzgerald, Viriginia Woolf, James Joyce, etc.

Tolkien's wording and even his grammar is old-fashioned, more Edwardian than modern from a comparative standpoint to his peers, but I suppose Robert Graves, writing-wise, would be more his peer than someone like Faulkner or Joyce. And this decided conservative, dare I say, archaic, style is evident in Lord of the Rings (and even more so in The Silmarillion).

Follow along with T.H. White, who wrote sections of The Once and Future King nearly contemporaneously with Tolkien from 1938 (The Sword in the Stone) through 1958 (A Candle in the Wind), and the difference in tone and phraseology is dramatically different, even though both were writing stories of distant events.

Tolkien was conservative in the old-fashioned sense (and not at all what we view absurd conservatives today in the U.S.). He dressed conservatively, despised motors and engines, was an arch-Catholic (pre-Vatican II), and his prose fits his Oxonic (Oxfordian?) linguistic predilections. From strictly a prose-style he is not 20th century.

[Faramir Jones]

My own view is that you can call J. R. R. Tolkien 'Modern' in terms of dealing with, not just the issues of industrialisation and urbanisation, which he was familiar with, having grown up close to and in the city of Birmingham, but also the impact of the two World Wars of the twentieth century, in particular the First. He did so, however, in a different way from those who have been called 'Modernists'.

I think of him as 'modern' in his treatment of at least the following three things:

1. Bilbo and Frodo looking after themselves: It appears that Bilbo, and later Frodo Baggins, do their own cooking, baking, cleaning and washing up. The only people shown as employees are the gardeners, including the Gamgees. While it was presumably intended not to show them as heartless employers, who went off leaving the status of their employees so uncertain, the effect is to show them as quite 'modern', not needing the help of even a single manservant. (Sam does look after Frodo in terms of the Fellowship, but this is in the context of the War of the Ring, and like an officer's batman.)
2. Aragorn II and Faramir: Both are looking to save their own people, even at the cost of their own lives, not looking for personal glory, and are fully aware of the devastation of war, even when fought in a just cause.
3. How Sam and Rose are treated: After Sam returns with Frodo, not only are he and his wife Rose allowed to live in Bag-end with their increasing family; Frodo makes Sam his heir. Sam and Rose also appear to inherit his social position, he being Master Samwise, and his wife Mistress Rose. There appears to be not the slightest criticism of their new status by other hobbits, including perhaps how 'vulgar' and 'jumped up' they are. Indeed, one of their daughters, Goldilocks, marries into the Took family, Pippin's son Faramir.

[Marwhini]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

I disagree with this. Tolkien may have been heavily inspired by medieval sources, but he lived for almost his entire life in the twentieth century and was influenced by his context. Tolkien was not a "Modernist" but I believe he was "Modern".

The term "Modern" isn't referring to the time-and-place in which they were written.

It is referring to the philosophical themes and Beliefs held by Tolkien, and depicted within the works.

The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are "modern" only in that they are novels, a Post-Enlightenment product.

Tolkien, though, was not a fan of much of the products of Modernity, and the novels both tend to be Romantic Epics ("Romantic" in the sense of a "Chivalric Romance" and not in the terms of a Modern "Romance" Novel, where the theme is involving women and men seeking personal love, and/or lust) which highlight his distaste for Modernity.

Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle-earth covers this relationship to "Modernity."

And he isn't the only one to point out the decidedly non-Modern aspects of the world and works.

Only the Hobbits, within Middle-earth are a narrative link to Modernity, as the Hobbits represent a narrative connection between an archaic world, and that of a Pastoral Victorian England of the Shire (This is Tom Shippey's Thesis, I just happen to agree with it, as it is well-supported - others seem to share that Thesis).

MB