Lazy Day

2. thees and thous

this still isn’t my strong suit, but crash source based on the cursory internet research i just did: “you” is for social superiors and people you respect; it’s an at-a-distance word. “thou” is for social inferiors, but it’s also for people you care about and are speaking to intimately, but it’s also an insult if you say it like an insult. apparently it was common for upper-class families to all “you” each other? i don’t know. what i know is everybody is “you”-ing lear in this first scene and that makes sense. he’s the king; he gets royal we privileges; nobody is above him in social status; everybody has to respect him (even/especially his own kids, because he’s The King and The Dad, roles which for lear are always synonymous in a way that gets people killed). right, good, okay. and lear calls his daughters “you,” just like gloucester calls edmund “you,” which also seems fair; this is a court setting, it’s highly formal, it—

that is an INSTANT switch. holy shit, that is an instant switch. so! turns out you can win “thou (intimate)” privileges and all you have to do is tell daddy you love him soooooooooo much in front of the entire gathered royal court, the king of france, and god. which, coincidentally, is also how you earn enormous amounts of material wealth in the form of massive land grants! i bet this total overlap of the family structure and the political structure can never go wrong for anyone.

“wait, so does he not thou cordelia?” oh, no, of course he thous cordelia.

you can’t scream at and disown your daughter without thouing her; let’s not be silly. (cordelia we need youth liberation NOW look at your dad dawg you’re going to prison)

(pronouns footnote: lear uses the royal we almost all the time, except when he’s really mad and talking to burgundy and starts slipping into “i.” the king of france uses “i” until he officially takes cordelia’s hand in marriage, and the switch to “we” there happens in a sentence: “Thy dowerless daughter, king, thrown to my chance, / Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France.” which feels, uh, pointed. hey, lear, remember, you’re not the only king on stage, actually! and then lear thous him instantly lmao. extremely messy senior citizen)

3. telling daddy you love him soooooooooo much

okay so first of all the very first lines of the play establish that the map has already been divided. we already know exactly who is getting what and how much, because gloucester tells us that albany and cornwall have gotten land inheritances so close in size that it’s impossible to tell who lear favors. which means this is court-wide information. so the entire love contest is a farce. i know we know this, but yikes! okay, moving on.

the general take on this scene is that goneril and regan are lying to butter their dad up, or at least laying it on really thick. i think that’s a true take. judging by the later acts, it definitely doesn’t seem as if—[pause to acknowledge the complicated feelings people have about parents who suck, etc etc]—they like that guy. but walk with me for a second here and let us assume that, while these speeches are performances, they are at least semi-honest performances in terms of how the sisters talk about love:

what goneril is more or less saying is that her love takes precedence over money, health, freedom of movement and perception, etc etc. which doesn’t necessarily mean love deprives her of those things, but it does “make breath poor, and speech unable,” which is a line about, like, choking up because you love someone so much, but also does very much paint love as something that takes away a person’s power. the vision of love presented here is one that makes you weak: loving someone Thiiiiiiis Much traps you in a blind box, feeble and mute and vulnerable.

and then you have regan, and of course she has to get her dig in at goneril #middlechild, but the way she talks about love is sort of opposite, because goneril is talking about love as the active force: love makes her breath and speech weak, etc etc. but regan is the active force in this speech: love turns her into an enemy warrior against other joys. love is a battlefield, or a competition; she’s actively against other pleasant things.

i don’t have anything super smart to say here, but if we take these speeches as reflecting their real thoughts about how love works, i at least end up at “love = powerlessness” for goneril and “love = combat” for regan. which does feel like it prefigures what’s to come—goneril wanting edmund in a desperate and powerless way, because she already has a husband that doesn’t even like her, a desperation that culminates in the murder of her closest ally; and regan and cornwall acting as one unit against the world in the blinding scene (including in literal combat).

and then, of course, “As much as child e'er loved, or father found;” also jumps out to me, because—well. that’s the question! that’s an animating question of this play! how much do children really love their parents? what will fathers find when they plumb their children’s depths? it’s possible goneril actually does mean this one, you know? i love you as much as any child ever loved their father, because i can’t believe in any daughter loving her father more than she’s forced to.

and then, of course, we have the Problem Child:

and of course this is the big question mark of this scene, right, the structured opacity of king lear. why does hamlet pretend to go mad, why does iago hate othello, why the fuck does cordelia say that when it’s SOOOOO easy to lie to dementia patients. and i think—well, i think she’s autistic, but more relevantly i think you can read this in a proto-social-theorist way. she has correctly identified the way family structures create ties of obligation and debt, and also the double bind women face as wives and daughters. (AND she’s pointing out, in those last two lines, that remaining an unmarried woman attached to her dad 5ever would not be “normal” age-appropriate development and would seem pretty incestuous after a point.) but it also comes off pretty cold. instead of “i love you thiiiiiis much” it’s “well, actually, factually, i owe love to more than one person ever 🤓 👆”

but i think that in itself is very revealing about cordelia’s worldview, which is one where things… like, seem to make sense? where there’s an order to things? everyone in lear wants to believe that there’s a coherent structure to the world, where parents do THIS and children do THIS and X is owed to Y and reciprocity of care is real and desire is an orderly thing that goes where it’s supposed to (50% to husband, 50% to father, easy, dust your hands). everybody wants this to be true (well, not edmund). but cordelia seems to be the only person in this goddamn play who actually believes it.

4. do you ever suspect some people have kids exclusively so they know someone will be there to take care of them when they’re really old? i’m not having kids so idk what i’m supposed to do

don’t you think it’s kind of crazy that lear refers to the kind of so-called barbarious person who “makes his generation messes / to gorge his appetite” (ie, eats his own children) and then six lines later says that he loved cordelia “most, and thought to set my rest / on her kind nursery”? and then he tells the other two husbands to “digest” cordelia’s dowry amongst themselves? like, what was that we were just saying about using our children as nutrients? what was that we were saying about using our children as raw materials to nourish and care for ourselves? must have been the wind

5. kent definitely leaves the scene early so he can be double-cast as france or burgundy, right?

lmao

6. goneril and regan, they could never ever ever make me hate you

i love cordelia. i think she is rude in a fun and autistic way. she’s really rude, though. this is so bitchy.

“well may you prosper! ☺️” is nuts. then again, to be fair to cordelia, neither of them said a goddamn word in her defence. but to be fair to goneril and regan—well, first of all, your dad, who they both go on to agree has always been like this (“he hath ever but slenderly known himself;” his senility joins “the imperfections of long-engraffed condition”), yelling at your sister and disowning her and threatening violence is SCARY even when he’s not the king. but second of all, he IS the king. this isn’t just a sibling thing. as K’s great post points out, lear is defining this as treason; it is extremely political, maybe more so than familial. to stand up for cordelia would, for the two of them, be raising their hands to go, “hey, can i have some treason and disownment too?”

anyway, the first thing they do after this is regroup and decide they have each other’s backs and recognize that this transfer of power is probably going to go badly. there’s literally nothing objectionable here man they are not being evil i think some of you [scholars] just hate women

6. sight/vision/blindness language tracker

the first time you see figurative language about blindness, you’re like, “haha, just like gloucester.” the fiftieth time you’re like whoa there’s a lot of eyes in this play

goneril saying she loves lear more than eyesight (which, if she meant it, could speak to love swaying one’s judgment—not relevant for her now, but perhaps later!)

kent’s “see better, lear,” which of course lear is not going to do (and which i think he never does—i will think about this harder as i reread the rest of this play, but even when lear comes to see cordelia more clearly, he maintains that he did no harm to goneril and regan, maybe in part because to him the king can do no harm to disobedient subjects)

7. textual trivia

my professor donated to me (starving hyperfixation urchin) an edition of this play (ETA: it's the 2000 pelican edition) that prints both authoritative texts of lear, a quarto and the first folio. these have more dramatic differences than most shakespeare quarto/folio editions, or so i’ve read, so because i’m crazy i’m comparing them. my trivia is:

only the folio has “as we, unburdened, crawl towards death.” where would we be without her.

in the folio, lear calls cordelia his “last and least;” in the quarto, it’s “last, but not least in love”

in the quarto he gives kent one fewer day to scram lol

in the quarto, gloucester introduces the entrance of burgundy and france. in the folio, cordelia apparently gets this line? which certainly gives the line a new tenor, since she’s just been Brutally Screamed At and hadn’t spoken since

8. in sum

I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.

What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?

Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.

No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.

There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.

Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.

The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.

Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.

Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.

I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.

Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.

I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?

This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.

You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.

So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.

But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.

Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.