"Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages"

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Andsigil

Well, that certainly sounds familiar, even in (ostensibly) what's supposed to be a democratic republic.

Exactly; "the Democratic People's Republic of Mordor" comes to mind, although I doubt Sauron bothered with such pretence. I suppose Professor Tolkien might be arguing that strong political ideologies were essentially indistinguishable from false religions, especially with the implication of Sauron being equivalent to a "Marshal This-or-That" of one of the totalitarian "political religions" of the Twentieth Century.

In another thread I mentioned Brian Rosebury's statement in Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon that "The modernity of Tolkien’s work, from the point of view of its content, lies not in coded reference to specific contemporary events or phenomena, but in the absorption into the invented world – no doubt a partly unconscious absorption – of experiences and attitudes which Tolkien would scarcely have acquired had he not been a man of the twentieth century."

Dr. Rosebury goes on to say "Some are obvious enough. The Lord of the Rings describes a continental war, in which the survival of whole peoples and cultures is at stake. The undertow of apocalyptic dread is familiar to anyone who has lived in the nuclear age, but its primary biographical source must greatly pre-date Hiroshima: almost certainly it lies around 1914–15 when Tolkien, in common with millions of young men, discovered that he would have to go to war.The successive international crises of the Thirties and Forties can only have reinforced this impression of secular imperilment. Naturally Tolkien would have been more aware than most people of pre-modern analogies: the fall of the Roman Empire, the bare survival of Christian civilisation in the age which produced Beowulf, the lively expectation of world’s end that obsessed some medieval and Reformation believers. But that historical awareness is itself a modern, even a modernist, attribute."

I find this an interesting argument, because it depends on how we understand "modern". There were certainly continental wars before the First and Second World Wars, such as the Napoleonic Wars and, perhaps, the Thirty Years' War, both of which are "modern" according to some definitions. I believe such wars were also, to some, seen as "apocalyptic" in their time. Thus I suppose the question arises of whether we define "modern" in terms of "modernity" or "the modern period", of the early 16th century until the present day, or as specifically "modernist", that is, of the first half of the 20th century in particular.

One thing I note, which has surely been observed elsewhere, is that Professor Tolkien's love of a good pipe (and many of his characters' subsequent enjoyment of it as well) is a fairly "modern" thing and rather out of place in the medieval world. I wonder if Aragorn still enjoyed a pipe after he had become King? It's unsurprising that the more "modern" Hobbits smoked, but curious to observe that High Men, Dwarves and Wizards did too. There is another bit of "modern" culture working its way backwards into the "medieval" - or is it drawing the medieval forward, into the modern?

(Incidentally, I've been thinking about why Legolas found smoking strange. Even though the Elves made some pipes for Bilbo, is it possible that for Professor Tolkien a pipe meant relaxation and an aid to thinking, which was something Men, Wizards incarnate as Men, Dwarves and Hobbits might need, but Elves did not?)

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

Exactly; "the Democratic People's Republic of Mordor" comes to mind, although I doubt Sauron bothered with such pretence. I suppose Professor Tolkien might be arguing that strong political ideologies were essentially indistinguishable from false religions, especially with the implication of Sauron being equivalent to a "Marshal This-or-That" of one of the totalitarian "political religions" of the Twentieth Century.

Mordor seems to be an outright dictatorship, with fear keeping its denizens in line. I could draw RL parallels, but discretion advises against it...

Gondor had a 'strong political ideology', didn't it? No religious bent there. In fact Gondor seems much more secular at the time of the War of the Ring than at earlier times.

Originally Posted by Zigûr

(Incidentally, I've been thinking about why Legolas found smoking strange. Even though the Elves made some pipes for Bilbo, is it possible that for Professor Tolkien a pipe meant relaxation and an aid to thinking, which was something Men, Wizards incarnate as Men, Dwarves and Hobbits might need, but Elves did not?)

I can see the Elves of Rivendell merely being aware of the smoking habit, through their interactions with the Dúnedain and Gandalf. They don't seem to have practiced it themselves, though.
It appears that the smoking phenomenon was centered around Bree and the Shire, and thus limited to those who passed though or lived in those areas. The Men of Gondor knew about pipe-weed, but apparently never tried to use it for smoking.
The habit was certainly important to hobbit society, and Gandalf seems a right addict.
Maybe it did indeed help Gandalf to relax and find the strength to keep on. Who needs a Ring when you've got a pipe?

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Gondor had a 'strong political ideology', didn't it? No religious bent there. In fact Gondor seems much more secular at the time of the War of the Ring than at earlier times.

Yes; it's definitely worth remembering the remarks in Letter 155 that in Gondor "when the 'Kings' came to an end there was no equivalent to a 'priesthood': the two being identical in Númenórean ideas. [...] It is to be presumed that with the reemergence of the lineal priest kings (of whom Lúthien the Blessed Elf-maiden was a foremother) the worship of God would be renewed, and His Name (or title) be again more often heard."
Hence my specification of "false religion"; worshipping Sauron (or Morgoth) was self-evidently false to a well-informed person in Middle-earth. The King, by contrast, was a distant descendant of Lúthien, and thus of Melian, and thus, in a peculiar way, Eru Himself, and therefore seems to have embodied the spiritual Truth with a capital T.

So I suppose Gondor's political-religious system is, within the systems and workings of Middle-earth/Arda/Eä, legitimately derived from that Truth, while an "ideology" in the modern sense might be thought of as a system of political beliefs intended to explain or rationalise the workings of humanity or history according to subjective standards, which are often not necessarily verifiable; I think Professor Tolkien's use of the term "Sarumanism" embodies this concept: a set of unfalsifiable truisms, essentially, about the world and humanity, which tend to serve an interest rather than unambiguously representing reality.

Perhaps there is an "ideology" in Mordor: Sauron's love of order and coordination; it's just one that only motivates Sauron alone (or once did), not something he needs to convince his slaves of to make them follow him (he has more blunt methods of doing that). Again, perhaps that is identifiable with "modernity" by comparison to the works of Orwell in which the ideology only really matters to the elites, who have the "privilege" of interpreting and manipulating it to suit their own interests.

EDIT: Interesting ideas from denethorthefirst as well! I shall give them some thought.

[denethorthefirst]

Well Marxism-Leninism and National-Socialism are political religions insofar as that they are structured and function very much like religions ... you have holy scriptures, a "church", a messias, a paradise that awaits after the worldly struggles, heretics, orthodoxy, etc. In that sense the blending of religion and politics in Mordor makes sense and could also be read as a critique of the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. Mordor is a totalitarian dictatorship: the "state" invades every space of the individual and there is no privacy or individualism left. Sauron is King and God for his subjects.

About the "modernity" of Mordor: its obvious that it has extensive infrastructure and industry. That would be necessary for the war effort and you would need an effective bureaucracy to manage and oversee the whole thing. I guess this class of bureaucrats would consist mostly of black Numenoreans and elite, long-living Orcs (orcs that have retained some elvish-blood or maybe even are descended from Boldogs) - the official language would be the black speech - there would probably be some kind of "privileged housing" and educational institutions to maintain that bureaucracy.
The Problem is that a lot of Mordor is left unexplained by Tolkien. For example: where do the Orcs live? Are there any large Cities? Is Barad-Dur itself a monstrous City-Complex (very like i.m.o.)? How extensive is the Industry? And how "magical" is Mordor?
I guess the decline that the People and Cultures of Arda experienced from the second to the third Age also affected Mordor (and Sauron), so there is probably a substantial difference between the Mordor of the Second and the Mordor of the Third Age. I always imagined the Mordor of the Second Age to be like a Dark Numenor, an almost futuristic Place, considering that Sauron was a pupil of Aule and probably very knowledgeable and interested in Technology (of course i am talking about the infrastructure and technology here, the life of the majority of orcs and men in Mordor was probably still of very low quality) - but during the Third Age, after the loss of a lot of his power, after giving up every pretense, i guess that the Mordor of the Third Age was a lot more "medieval", primitive and run down. Maybe because Sauron lacked the power to re-build the lost technology or maybe because he no longer deemed it necessary against his reduced enemies.

[Marwhini]

Originally Posted by denethorthefirst

Well Marxism-Leninism and National-Socialism are political religions insofar as that they are structured and function very much like religions ... you have holy scriptures, a "church", a messias, a paradise that awaits after the worldly struggles, heretics, orthodoxy, etc. In that sense the blending of religion and politics in Mordor makes sense and could also be read as a critique of the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. Mordor is a totalitarian dictatorship: the "state" invades every space of the individual and there is no privacy or individualism left. Sauron is King and God for his subjects.

Exactly so (National Socialism/Fascism and Stalinist-Leninist Communism).

Hannah Arendt, Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, Joseph Campbell, David ben Gurion, and many others, Academics and Politicians (or both) have made those observations about National Socialism (and Fascism in general), and Stalinism. I would need to ask around to find the names, but there are even Chinese Authors who have been publishing in the last 20 years or so (living now in Taiwan) about how Maoism related to a religious ideology (and how the Chinese are finally beginning to "Secularize" - so to speak).


[QUOTEdenethorthefirst;704876]About the "modernity" of Mordor: its obvious that it has extensive infrastructure and industry. That would be necessary for the war effort and you would need an effective bureaucracy to manage and oversee the whole thing. I guess this class of bureaucrats would consist mostly of black Numenoreans and elite, long-living Orcs (orcs that have retained some elvish-blood or maybe even are descended from Boldogs) - the official language would be the black speech - there would probably be some kind of "privileged housing" and educational institutions to maintain that bureaucracy.
The Problem is that a lot of Mordor is left unexplained by Tolkien. For example: where do the Orcs live? Are there any large Cities? Is Barad-Dur itself a monstrous City-Complex (very like i.m.o.)? How extensive is the Industry? And how "magical" is Mordor?
I guess the decline that the People and Cultures of Arda experienced from the second to the third Age also affected Mordor (and Sauron), so there is probably a substantial difference between the Mordor of the Second and the Mordor of the Third Age. I always imagined the Mordor of the Second Age to be like a Dark Numenor, an almost futuristic Place, considering that Sauron was a pupil of Aule and probably very knowledgeable and interested in Technology (of course i am talking about the infrastructure and technology here, the life of the majority of orcs and men in Mordor was probably still of very low quality) - but during the Third Age, after the loss of a lot of his power, after giving up every pretense, i guess that the Mordor of the Third Age was a lot more "medieval", primitive and run down. Maybe because Sauron lacked the power to re-build the lost technology or maybe because he no longer deemed it necessary against his reduced enemies.[/QUOTE]

I've done a lot of work on this specifically.

Tolkien mentions that the lands in the south of Mordor, around Lake Núrnen, are very fertile, and are kept by vast plantations of slaves to provide food for his armies:

http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/l/lakenurnen.html

His essays on Orcs, which it looks like you have read, suggest that they breed just like anyone else, and he states that the breed to great numbers quickly (this could mean a very fast maturation, similar to lower Primates, who can reach adolescence in only a few years).

That would make breeding armies much easier, logistically, and could explain a great many other things that Tolkien does not touch directly upon.

But ultimately this just gives us a number of typical mouths he would need to feed.

But Mordor does contain more than enough land area around Núrnen to support an Army of a couple of million (Republican Roman Italy supported a population of approximately 5 million before it began to require the importation of Grains from Egypt and Northern Africa - And Italy contains roughly the same land-area as the area around Lake Núrnen).

As to the "Magic..." Well... One needs to ask a few questions about what the "Magic" is, and is expected to do. But it does not seem that Mordor has anything "Magical" that would help support the population that isn't also available to the rest of Middle-earth. There is one aspect even where Mordor's methods might actually hurt its ability to produce food, depending upon how what we call "Magic" works.

But for all of Middle-earth... It is actually Tolkien's given estimates for the sizes of Armies that allow us to get an idea of what the general population would be, given that we have ample records of what it takes human populations to support armies, or militaries of a given size.

And we have a few tangential references by Tolkien to human cultures that are "comparable" to those within Middle-earth (I would be very hesitant to draw direct parallels to them, but we get a rough idea). And it seems to be overall a roughly 7th - 11th Century world (save for the Shire), that has one or two Anachronisms floating through it.

For basic Infrastructure.... That is pretty much where you would need to start.

But most of these questions can be answered by looking at what has been said about Middle-earth, and then looking for the things that would need to be True for those existing references to be True.

You can get a pretty long way toward figuring out things like Infrastructure, and population that way.

MB

[Marwhini]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

Exactly; "the Democratic People's Republic of Mordor" comes to mind, although I doubt Sauron bothered with such pretence. I suppose Professor Tolkien might be arguing that strong political ideologies were essentially indistinguishable from false religions, especially with the implication of Sauron being equivalent to a "Marshal This-or-That" of one of the totalitarian "political religions" of the Twentieth Century.

I seem to recall reading this exact sentiment, but I think it was from Christopher.

And this does seem to be rather the implications surrounding his descriptions of the Worship of Morgoth that Sauron instituted among the Númenóreans.

Originally Posted by Zigûr

In another thread I mentioned Brian Rosebury's statement in Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon that "The modernity of Tolkien’s work, from the point of view of its content, lies not in coded reference to specific contemporary events or phenomena, but in the absorption into the invented world – no doubt a partly unconscious absorption – of experiences and attitudes which Tolkien would scarcely have acquired had he not been a man of the twentieth century."

I have often thought something similar, but in a context of how he relates the events of Middle-earth to a parallel history of Christendom that comes almost directly from Gibbon, which saw a Victorian resurgence in the parallels of the British Empire of which Tolkien was a member of the last remnants of that Empire.

But his personal experiences too, are keenly felt in his work.

Originally Posted by Zigûr

Dr. Rosebury goes on to say "Some are obvious enough. The Lord of the Rings describes a continental war, in which the survival of whole peoples and cultures is at stake. The undertow of apocalyptic dread is familiar to anyone who has lived in the nuclear age, but its primary biographical source must greatly pre-date Hiroshima: almost certainly it lies around 1914–15 when Tolkien, in common with millions of young men, discovered that he would have to go to war.The successive international crises of the Thirties and Forties can only have reinforced this impression of secular imperilment. Naturally Tolkien would have been more aware than most people of pre-modern analogies: the fall of the Roman Empire, the bare survival of Christian civilisation in the age which produced Beowulf, the lively expectation of world’s end that obsessed some medieval and Reformation believers. But that historical awareness is itself a modern, even a modernist, attribute."

I find this an interesting argument, because it depends on how we understand "modern". There were certainly continental wars before the First and Second World Wars, such as the Napoleonic Wars and, perhaps, the Thirty Years' War, both of which are "modern" according to some definitions. I believe such wars were also, to some, seen as "apocalyptic" in their time. Thus I suppose the question arises of whether we define "modern" in terms of "modernity" or "the modern period", of the early 16th century until the present day, or as specifically "modernist", that is, of the first half of the 20th century in particular.

The bane of the Historian: defining "Modernity."

Originally Posted by Zigûr

One thing I note, which has surely been observed elsewhere, is that Professor Tolkien's love of a good pipe (and many of his characters' subsequent enjoyment of it as well) is a fairly "modern" thing and rather out of place in the medieval world. I wonder if Aragorn still enjoyed a pipe after he had become King? It's unsurprising that the more "modern" Hobbits smoked, but curious to observe that High Men, Dwarves and Wizards did too. There is another bit of "modern" culture working its way backwards into the "medieval" - or is it drawing the medieval forward, into the modern?

I got the feeling that Aragorn and Gandalf were rather atypical in that regard. Saruman, for instance, only began smoking after he had observed Gandalf's affection for it.

But it does remain a mark of modernity, as "smoking tobacco" (which is what Pipe Leaf is - he does spell that out quite clearly that it is Tobacco - a form of Nicotiana Nightshade (Solanaceae) is a product of the "New World," and not available in Europe until the 16th Century (The 1550s was when it was first introduced, and not until the 17th Century did its use become more widespread). History aside though....

It seems that Tolkien is marking certain people as being "Closer to Modernity" in one fashion or another.

The Hobbits are a sort of Idealized Englishman.

Aragorn is an Idealized King.

Gandalf and Saruman represent Idealized forms of Reason (the word "Idealized" here does not mean, necessarily "Best," but merely a purified, or rarified form).

That is a very deep Rabbit Hole, though...

Originally Posted by Zigûr

(Incidentally, I've been thinking about why Legolas found smoking strange. Even though the Elves made some pipes for Bilbo, is it possible that for Professor Tolkien a pipe meant relaxation and an aid to thinking, which was something Men, Wizards incarnate as Men, Dwarves and Hobbits might need, but Elves did not?)

Did the Noldor not "Think?"

I am not saying that the speculation is out of place, or misguided, as he clearly had this prejudice (The interview of Tolkien I posted in another thread even has Tolkien saying exactly that: Smoking helps him to think).

I get the inference, though, that the Elves tended more to "Remember" or "Dream" than they "thought" about things.

But the Noldor of the First and Second Ages (and during the Ages of the Trees) seem to have done more than a little "thinking" in their time.

Perhaps they did not smoke because Smoking was a New Thing in Middle-earth (being only a few generations old in Bilbo's day), and the days of Glory of the Noldor (when they needed to think were long-gone).

So... You are probably correct here, given that relationship.

And that Smoking was "Modern" even within Middle-earth.

MB

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Marwhini

Did the Noldor not "Think?"

I said "a pipe meant an aid to thinking", not "a pipe meant thinking."
All I meant was that Elves probably did not need an "aid to thinking" because perhaps they had clearer thoughts and greater powers of concentration than other peoples, tied to their artistic capacity for "product, and vision in unflawed correspondence".

[Marwhini]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

I said "a pipe meant an aid to thinking", not "a pipe meant thinking."
All I meant was that Elves probably did not need an "aid to thinking" because perhaps they had clearer thoughts and greater powers of concentration than other peoples, tied to their artistic capacity for "product, and vision in unflawed correspondence".

I got that (see the latter part of that post).

But if Smoking produced an aid to thinking, then it should produce an aid to people who can already think clearly as well, too, would it not?

Sort of like a person who has a high tolerance to pain is likely to benefit just as much from a pain-killer as a person with a low tolerance to pain.

MB

[Zigûr]

I think it's more like a painkiller being taken by a person who isn't in pain, imagining an Elf doesn't experience the same kind of confusion, inattention, poor concentration, or need to "cudgel their brains" that a Man, Dwarf or Hobbit might "in vacant or in pensive mood".

But that's just a guess.

[Marwhini]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

I think it's more like a painkiller being taken by a person who isn't in pain, imagining an Elf doesn't experience the same kind of confusion, inattention, poor concentration, or need to "cudgel their brains" that a Man, Dwarf or Hobbit might "in vacant or in pensive mood".

But that's just a guess.

I can see that.

We know that Elves and Humans are basically the same species, but that something exists that makes Elves qualitatively different from Humans in more respects than just the longevity of the Elves (I think it is Letter 153 when Tolkien makes that very observation).

So that profound cognitive differences should exist would not be a surprise.


MB