A Truly Proper Opening Text?

[Kalimac]

Squatter - just wanted to say, nicely put. The bit about "Thou, Melkor" reminds me of Aquinas's dictum that it is one of the greatest miracles that "out of evil cometh good." I don't like expansionism for expansionism's sake, and treasure-hunting isn't perhaps the noblest of callings, but they've had a lot of (doubtless unintended) good consequences. Beagle has every right to talk about how Tolkien was anti-expansionist and didn't like the idea of empires; what I think got to Durelin was the fact that Beagle was picking some rather inflammatory examples that you might be able to argue weren't necessarily ones that Tolkien would have approved of. The "murderers carrying crosses" makes it sound like every religious missionary that we honour is a rogue and that they should never have done what they did. First of all, not all of them were bad; many sincerely believed and sacrificed everything to that cause. Secondly, Tolkien himself was a very strict Catholic and would probably not have considered Christian proseletyzing (sp?) to be a bad thing, although he might have a few words to say about the manner in which it's done. But by lumping those examples, Beagle makes it sound as if these biases are present in Tolkien's own worldview.

And to add a few things just because I'm pedantic: Durelin, Columbus already knew the earth was round; it had been known for thousands of years - when Dante posited the position of purgatory, the idea he came up with presupposed a round earth. They just thought it was a lot smaller than it was.

Finwe, I think you might be going a little too far in the other direction. What people honour when they honour Columbus isn't so much the man himself as the discovery he made, and for good or ill his was the discovery that made an impact on the entire world. The Norse had gotten to Iceland and even parts of eastern Canada many centuries before, but they didn't capitalize on it, and eventually their settlements died out and left no permanent mark or open door to Europe. And as for Columbus himself - the man was just looking for a trade route, it wasn't like he had bad intentions. (I know, the road to hell and all that). And for wiping out the native population; despite what people may say, there was no large-scale planned genocide. Disease was the main killer, and there was no way anyone could have predicted it.

Supposing the shoe had been on the other foot, I doubt that the American natives would have been much gentler with the Europeans. There was a great deal of fear on both sides - why not? They'd never seen anything like this - and they acted as two flawed groups of people tend to act. Sorry about the long write; I just wanted to convey that it's not so much a black-and-white issue.

/Kalimac descends from soapbox.

LATER: Edited to get names right - I got confused and put Doug's name instead of Squatter's. Sorry, Squatter!

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 1:48 AM January 16, 2004: Message edited by: Kalimac ]