Untitled

okay since people seemed to like my maglor design from the WIP crop of the enormous mereth aderthad painting, here is maedhros from the same! currently in way way more of a WIP stage than his brother as you can tell and i’m still deciding between giving him a pipe or a hookah, but do note the ear-tip prosthetic he’s wearing 🥰

So! With the left hand thou wouldst use me for a little while as a shield against Mordor, and with the right bring up this Ranger of the North to supplant me?

I mean, this is deliberately contemptuous ("thy" indeed!) but if you pull back from the glamour around Aragorn, it's hard to say this is not exactly what is happening.

This seems to imply that Denethor shares the same respect for the King that Faramir does. We also know that Aragorn at one point served with the gondorians and was well-regarded (source required, iirc he was using the name thorongil?). This seems to further imply that Aragorn was at least plausibly accepted by the gondorian higher ups. This, to me, implies that Denethor would have been more amenable to Aragorn’s claim in the past.

In addition, Denethor personally loathed "Thorongil" despite agreeing with him about almost everything, policy-wise, and later on people realized that his Númenórean powers likely allowed him to detect Aragorn's true identity, which super didn't help his pre-existing distrust of Aragorn and Gandalf. Aragorn-as-Thorongil left Gondor when he did (while Denethor's father was still alive) specifically to avoid open conflict with Denethor once he became Steward.

Denethor was also never corrupted by Sauron, simply broken by despair. That might seem like a nitpick, but it's one Tolkien felt was important, and discussed at some length in his essay on the palantíri in Unfinished Tales:

It may be noted that the effects [of using the palantíri] were different. Saruman fell under the domination of Sauron and desired his victory, or no longer opposed it. Denethor remained steadfast in his rejection of Sauron, but was made to believe that his victory was inevitable, and so fell into despair. The reasons for this difference were no doubt that in the first place Denethor was a man of great strength of will, and maintained the integrity of his personality until the final blow of the (apparently) mortal wound of his only surviving son. He was proud, but this was by no means merely personal: he loved Gondor and its people, and deemed himself appointed by destiny to lead them in this desperate time. And in the second place the Anor-stone was his by right, and nothing but expedience was against his use of it in his grave anxieties. He must have guessed that the Ithil-stone was in evil hands, and risked contact with it, trusting his strength. His trust was not entirely unjustified. Sauron failed to dominate him and could only influence him by deceits ... Whether he ever thus made contact with the Orthanc-stone and Saruman is not told; probable he did, and did so with profit to himself.

English is not my first language and I realise now that I should have asked me to explain all the lines. But: regret, by definition, comes to late.

Me, crying: O King to whom all birds are dear, speed now this feathered shaft, and recall some pity for the Noldor in their need!

Therapist: Uh...

Me, shaking: Then Fingolfin beheld the utter ruin of the Noldor, and the defeat beyond redress of all their houses; and filled with wrath and despair he mounted upon Rochallor his great horse and rode forth alone, and none might restrain him.

Therapist: Maybe you should try something more-

well, to be fair left criticism v. conservative apologia was fairly central to the tolkien debate c. the 70s, so I would not say the appeal to fascists & conservatives is new, so much as that its mythos is being integrated into their mythos more broadly now because the generation of fascists that exist now grew up reading Tolkien.

As for why it has the appeal it does... Well firstly, I mean, I don't think its the "everything I love is secretly leftist" of it all. If at all, I think the "everything I love is secretly leftist" follows from people connecting to the story and therefore wanting to read their own politics into it, in order to justify their love: its a reversal of cause and effect. People say that because they want to justify loving the thing, because to love the thing is to say something about themselves.

Secondly, I think its perfectly possible for people who espouse left politics to enjoy conservative art. Engels famously enjoyed Balzac. Good art made by conservatives will often embody a tension between the writer's ideological beliefs and their desire for realism, captured through observation. Tolkien's works are basically rife with this. A desire to hew to realism, to say something true about who people are and what people do and how they move in the world, will puncture ideological considerations & is ultimately more integral to creating a really good work of fiction than anything else.

And in that regard, Tolkien is a good writer! There's some criticism of Tolkien's characters being "flat", but I do feel that some of those criticisms also emerge from his refusal to work with the stream of consciousness style that became integral to writing c. the 1940s onwards. Within the mythic mode they occupy, his characters are rendered with a lot of sympathy and three-dimensionality, with I think significant attunement to the very real ways in which people work that is quite humanist in philosophy, despite Tolkien's catholicism. Their heroism is not decoupled from fear or despair, but occurs despite it. They have petty feelings, they suffer from irresolution, they struggle with the meaning of the world and their place in it, they ask themselves about nature v. nurture, they wrestle with fate, they wonder what they can make of their world, they seek home and belonging, they have ambitions, they struggle against those ambitions being thwarted, they struggle against the shape of their social world, they long for a better world.

Even at its flattest, when you're deep within the noxiously racialised structuring, you still have instances of characters like Faramir look with sympathy on the Haradrim, for example, and wonder about their lives and interiorities; or Orcs having very human complaints about their working conditions & bad (and incompetent) bosses. Tolkien's anti-war strain is, I think, his most humanist characteristic and what keeps him from falling deeply into a "just war" framing that enables eternal war and frames it as unproblematic. Tolkien sees war as an aberration, as an evil, and also therefore, as something that cannot be delighted in but is an absolute last resort. This coupled with his ability to lend each character a little note that makes them feel "real" and like a person you might meet/know, means that there are points at which the narrative even within just LOTR interrogates this structuring of the world and asks if everyone is not suffering because of the acts of a single, enslaving tyrant. At all points, this commitment to a certain realism even within fantasy means that you don't just have a work that's a vehicle for ideology.

Leaving aside the question of saying something true v. ideology. The other aspect of Tolkien that I think appeals, is that he's constantly wrestling with the question of "will to power" and "domination" as a bad thing. He approaches this with a deeply Christian lens, but I think this is also a theme that has appeal across the political spectrum - the understanding of what "domination" is one that shifts across political lines, but its sufficiently ideologically open-ended within the legendarium (i.e. is not framed explicitly in terms of either racial glory/triumph OR class struggle), that it has cross-cutting appeal. Also, despite his deeply Christian lens, what made it into publishing very much does position the Valar as fallible - good, but fallible - and therefore, as beings that are also growing as the world grows; wrangling with the nature of the world they've been bequeathed and their responsibility towards it. So even though the narrative operates on an Un/Marred binary, in actual reality, there is room for mistakes & goodness to coexist & for even the gods to be imperfect (compare against Lewis who follows a strict perfect/good and evil/marred binary where deity/magical figures are concerned)

I do pick at Tolkien's volkisch romanticism around nature, but the truth is that its also written in ways that aren't confined to a singular blood-and-soil ethic, but one that also comes of a very personal love for nature. I think people do respond to that. Like, ofc one wants to resist romanticisation & the loss of nature in terms of "the long defeat" which is a squarely conservative ideology - and yet one wants to also talk about it, and Tolkien does talk about it. To Tolkien, evil goes hand in hand with the ruin of the natural world - and this is again, something that I think people intuitively connect to, especially if you're a nature-enjoyer. All of us have seen, at some point, the destruction of parts of the natural world that we love; all of us have thought of this as terrible, sad, perhaps even evil. How we frame this loss is what differentiates right wing, conservative ideologies from left analysis; but the emotional experience of that loss, and also the description of that beauty, is something that cuts across ideology.

Also, I'm ngl. I read a fair bit of 1930s era lit and Tolkien manages to be more sympathetic to women living in a misogynist world than... a lot of writers by miles. He does love to subsume them back into traditional gender roles, but he also offers them a lot more sympathy before that subsumption in how they're described - Galadriel's rebellion is positioned on par w her brothers & not treated as horrifying; Aredhel's departure from Gondolin is seen as natural, her imprisonment by Eol as straightforwardly awful; Luthien's imprisonment by her own father is treated as unjust and something that everyone knows is unjust (the Leithian in fact explicitly says Thingol builds her a treehouse because if he confined her elsewhere, she would die); Eowyn's desire to fight, is treated as natural; Elwing's suicide is treated as a natural consequence of her experience & as a grievous harm resulting from violence; Miriel's death is treated as a grief but not a condemnation of her (any condemnation is refuted very directly by the Valar themselves); Indis' marriage is treated as a joy & at no point is Indis implicated in it, as so often younger, second wives do get short shrift in even say, the average Agatha Christie novel; Idril's refusal of Maeglin is treated as well within her right; Nerdanel leaving Feanor is treated as something well within her right and justified, as is Indis leaving Finwe. Arguably Tolkien offers these women more empathy in their depictions than most of contemporary so-called feminists & progressives in fandom.

But for Gollum biting it off with his finger, it wouldn't have been destroyed.

So Frodo's journey saved the world nonetheless.

And it broke him.

It was too much for him to bear. He could no longer live in the Shire or live in Middle-Earth. He wasn't of the world anymore. He had to go to the Undying Lands.

He took on the task that no one else would. He saved the world. Everyone got a happy ending. Aragorn became King, Sam rebuilt the Shire, Merry and Pippin became heroes. They all lived in renown.

But Frodo had the hardest task of all. No one else would do it. A simple hobbit who came by the Ring by chance. Not a King, not an immortal. Not a wizard. No power save his will and his friends. And he did it and saved everyone.

And he never got to rest. He never got to remain in peace. The task destroyed him. It was too much.

But there was no other way. Nobody but a simple hobbit could bear the ring all the way to Mount Doom and resist its power so long. Not a man, not an elf, not a wizard; they would have succumbed. Gandalf knew this, which was why he chose the hobbits in all his designs.

It's amazing that one of the precedent setting works in the fantasy genre holds up so well because it subverts what ultimately became the genre's core tropes. The hero was not the King, or a chosen one. In fact, the hero not being the King was a key point that allowed Aragorn to distract Sauron and allow the task in the first place. The hero was someone unassuming but courageous, who did the thing because no one else would, even though it was just by chance he came upon it.

But Frodo couldn't resist the Ring completely. He wasn't superior to anyone else in that way. And in the end it left him broken. The burden crushed him. No one else could do it, and in the end, he couldn't either. He wasn't so special that he was invulnerable.

Something that I've been thinking about, as I struggle with depression and anxiety and *another vague gesture at everything* is that LOTR does not criticize Frodo for being broken. It does not shame him or deny him what he needs.

The task was too much and it broke him and that's okay. His friends nonetheless take care of him and let him go with understanding. The book doesn't treat it as a bad thing.

This seems to be a theme throughout the books. The characters rest and heal. They spend time recovering in Rivendell, Fangorn, Lorien, Ithilien. It's treated as good and necessary. They don't heroically endure endless torment from the second they set out until they're done.

And in Gondor's march from Minas Tirith to Mordor, Aragorn recognizes that some of the very few men he's taking with him don't have the heart to go to battle against the Enemy. And he says that's okay. He gives them other tasks the they can do. They hold other strategic points. They aren't shamed for not going all the way, or kicked out, or told that they aren't manly or whatever. Their limitations are recognized and respected. The task was too big and it was okay that they couldn't do it.

I don't know man. I've held on through some absolutely crazy shit. White knuckled through mental health crises when my doctors were begging me to take a break, to go to the hospital before I hurt myself. My therapist has tried to slow me down and tell me that I've been going through it and it's understandable that I am feeling some kind of way. Even one of my colleagues remarked that I've had an absolutely fucking wild career and that I've seen more as a lawyer of seven years than she has as a lawyer of forty. But I've gotten it into my head that I have to be strong, I have to be independent.

Fuck me, man, I'm currently white knuckling through life and hanging on by a fucking thread. A few weeks ago I was about an hour away from checking myself in to a mental health facility until my best friends swooped in to help me. And then I went right back to work.

And then I read this book. This fucking brilliant and beautiful book written by a man who had seen the horrors of war and spilled it all over the page. And I read it for the first time as an adult with full understanding and experience of what it all means. And it hits me like a fucking truck.

And it says that you can't endure everything. That at some point you need to rest and heal. That if you take on too much you will break. And that all of that is okay.

"I had not touched a cat in 15 years when an orange kitten wandered over to sit with me in the grass one day. I was left without adequate words to describe that experience. It reminded me that I am alive. It instilled in me a raw, unbridled happiness that I had never felt before, not even as a child. 

I have spent many hours with those cats, and still I am amazed at how perfectly they reject everything it means to be in prison. They are playful and unselfconscious, curious and silly, soft and cuddly.

Sometimes it is even more interesting to watch my fellow prisoners interact with our cats. All those hard cases doing hard time melt like butter on a summer sidewalk when they visit the felines, feed them, watch them chase the birds and bees, and when they make toys to entice the cats to play with them. 

I don’t think about the past when a cat hops in my lap. I don’t think of what I should or could have done. I don’t think about courts or life sentences or parole boards. What comes to mind is peace, and a sense that everything is going to be OK. What’s in the past needs to stay there if I want to have a future, if I want to be grateful for today and for the fact that I am no longer the person I once was.

She is far more like Elon Musk. She is a radicalized person with an extreme amount of social and financial power, and for YEARS she has been using that power to try to influence her government into hurting vulnerable people, on purpose. And she has succeeded. THAT is the problem with her, and THAT is why spending money on her books is so dangerous, not because her books aged badly.