madbaker | LOTR - a contrary take

The success of Peter Jackson’s films have spawned a cottage industry of pundits relating the story to current events. (This is not unique to the Ring films. I recall seeing one particularly eye-rolling essay trying to shoehorn Harry Potter into "perfect Christian behavior", for example.)

Most of these are obvious stretches trying to make some political point. By far the worst I’ve read was Rush Limbaugh’s screed. I’ve also seen arguments from the left equating the Council of Elrond to the U.N. (Scendan’s post here is well written, I thought.)

With due deference, I think you all are mistaken.

LOTR survives as a relevant literary work because it’s full of archetypes and grand themes. The fight of good versus evil, even in the face of overwhelming odds. "Little people" achieving what no one else can’t. The ending of one age and the beginning of another.

Tolkien may have meant Sauron to represent industrialization, or WWI evil, or even something else entirely. People read in what they want to because it’s unspecified. Like Nostradamus, staying vague means it stays relevant.

So go ahead and make your comparisons. You’re not wrong. But you’re not right, either.

Now to lighten things up! I stole the following from David Brin’s website. Blame him.

Let's start by remembering that history is written by the victors.
How do we know that Hitler was as bad as we are told?

We know because we live in a democracy that has given Holocaust deniers plenty of opportunities to make their case, and all they ever come up with is blatant drivel, ridiculous scenarios that are laughably easy to disprove. That's how. We see and hear countless witnesses to the Nazi horrors, conveyed via a media that, for all its faults, is relatively free. As implausible as the story of deliberate mass genocide might have seemed, in fiction, the reality was undeniably true and worse than anything previously imagined.

Allied propagandists did not have to make up any of it.

Ah, but things were different in kingdoms of old, where one official party line was promulgated and alternative sources of information got routinely squelched. And that's in every kingdom, mind you. Go ahead, name one where it didn't happen. (Note how the Norman propagandists went to work on poor old King Harold, even as his body was cooling after the Battle of Hastings.)

My point? Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.

So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?

Isn't some of that over-the-top description just the sort of thing that royal families used to promote, casting exaggerated aspersions on their vanquished foes and despoiling their monuments, reinforcing their own divine right to rule?

Yes, I'm having fun with words like "really" -- relating to a made-up story. But come along with me for a minute. Next time you re-read LOTR, count the number of examples... cases where powerful beings are vastly uglier than anybody with that kind of power would allow themselves to be. Why? How does being grotesquely ugly help you govern an empire?

Then unleash your imagination to take the story a bit farther. Have fun!
Ask yourself - "How would Sauron have described the situation?"
And then -- "What might 'really' have happened?"

Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy. This clearcut and undeniable fact. Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.

Hm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil dark lord"?

Or might they instead have thought they were the 'good guys', with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elves and their Numenorean colonialist human lackeys?

Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the Ring War -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and movie-makers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle-Earther! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return... bringing more rings.

Heh. All right, we don't have to go quite that far!

Here's a milder version. Those orcs and low-elves and dwarves and dark-skinned or proletarian men who fought for the Ringlord were fooled by Sauron's propaganda.

Fair enough. Even that slight variation adds flavor to an already-great tale, making you pity Sauron's dupes a little, even though you still cheer as they're slaughtered down to the last private and orcoral.

Come on folks, a little empathy.
Instead of railing against 'evil,' try to understand it. That's always been the best way to defeat it.