Letters

David Brin doesn't know a damn thing about "Lord of the Rings." Plus: Say what you want about "Adaptation" but lay off Wes Anderson.

Dec 19, 2002 | [Read David Brin's "J.R.R. Tolkien -- Enemy of Progress."]

Shame on David Brin for failing to note an obvious and delicious irony in his discussion of "LOTR" as an anti-technological treatise: The current film series that's bringing Tolkien's anti-progress back to the front of our cultural consciousness is an incredible example of progress in technology itself.

Exactly how far do Tolkien's anti-scientific sentiments extend? Was the printing press an instrument of Mordor? How about CGI?

-- Nathan Fisher

Hooray for David Brin and his cogent, powerful argument that exposes the darkness in the roots, not only of the history of Middle-earth, but so much of today's myth- and nonsense-loving culture.

Just think of the Shire, that so-English pastoral paradise. At least, however, the land of the Hobbits was essentially egalitarian and non-hierarchical -- unlike, interestingly enough, all the other nations of Middle-earth ruled by kings, queens, nobles, aristocrats and mystics. It's odd that Tolkien's epic celebrated the glories of that medieval world while at the same time saving its true love for an out-of-the-way, virtually classless semi-anarchy. Goodness, all the reverberations that sets off: Even the ideal world of the SDS in the '60s was essentially the same.

Of course, that dream of the golden age of peasants and kings only started when its actual models in Europe were overthrown by such horrors as the American, French and Industrial Revolutions.

-- Peter Goodman

I'm quite certain that, given the numerous factual errors in David Brin's article on J.R.R. Tolkien, you have been inundated by letters from geeks pointing them out. The purpose of this letter is not to play Trivial Pursuit with Tolkien, but to address a central fallacy of Brin's article, which is not, unfortunately, the subtle invitation to complexity that he thinks it is; instead, it is a misleading oversimplification. Leaving aside his laughably cartoonish compression of Western history into a page-long feel-good story of progress and enlightenment, Brin shows an inability, or unwillingness, actually to read what Tolkien wrote. It's not just that he gets obvious plot details wrong -- which he does -- but that he has, perhaps intentionally, missed the whole point.

Brin seems to have a good deal of trouble with Sauron in general, trying several times to turn him into a misunderstood good guy. This is hardly a revolutionary thing to do: It's the same tired gambit that Tolkien's critics have been trying, unsuccessfully, for decades. In addition, it is simply the same intellectual reversal -- sympathy for the devil -- that Blake tried with "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" and that Nietzsche attempted in "Thus Spake Zarathustra," "Beyond Good and Evil" and similar works. Brin's position is, in other words, pure romanticism. It's deeply ironic that he accuses Tolkien, who was not a romanticist but a Catholic humanist, of precisely the intellectual fallacy that he himself has fallen into. The mistake goes something like this: Hierarchies exist in the world. Sauron challenges them. Therefore, Sauron must be egalitarian. That Sauron simply wants to replace all the other hierarchies with a single one, with him at its summit, is conveniently forgotten. What Blake said -- mistakenly -- of Milton turns out to be true of Brin: that he is of the devil's party without knowing it.

The funny thing about all of this is that Brin is trying to get us, as he says, to understand evil. But he himself doesn't seem to understand the most important thing about it: That it is different from good. In fact, Brin doesn't seem really to take evil all that seriously; even when he brings the word up, he implicitly apologizes for it by placing it in ironic quotation marks. He even shies away from assigning the word to Hitler, preferring instead the weaker description "bad."

This is not to say that Brin is completely wrong. Of course, democracy is a fine thing, as was the Enlightenment. There is no doubt that most of us, myself included, would far rather live in a modern egalitarian society than a pre-modern hierarchical one. And the ability to understand rather than condemn points of view different from one's own is a great achievement of civilization. But none of that makes evil simply nonexistent; none of it makes people who take it seriously, as Tolkien did, into fools; none of it makes perpetrators of genuine evil into misunderstood good guys. Nor does it make those who disagree with Brin's one-sided, rah-rah view of the modern West into backward-looking dupes.

-- Chester N. Scoville

Two things about David Brin's essay demand comment.

1. The notion that "The Lord of the Rings" is racist is simply ludicrous. What is the evidence for this? That the orcs are "darker people" than the protagonists? They're not people at all. They're goblins, specifically bred for evil. There's nothing racist about that, but more importantly the chief villains are white! Sauron isn't really a person at all, but as a young apprentice to Morgoth. Saruman is known as "Saruman the White!" Wormtongue is white. Smeagol was white (you'd turn greenish-purple if you lived underground for a few centuries, too). The racism theme is a canard.

2. The suggestion that we have no way to be sure that Sauron's "perspective" isn't equally valid is also without merit. His expressed goals are the subjugation of all Middle-earth and the enslavement of millions. There's no moral theory on which this is legitimate.

-- A. J. Skoble

Dr. Brin's critique of the "Lord of the Rings" has once again demonstrated an ability for abstract analysis that doubtless is the envy of every poli-sci grad student on the planet.

What he misses is this: In the end, it was the mutual loyalty and dogged determination of two ordinary people, Frodo and Sam, that confounded Sauron's evil. They weren't princes of Elves; they weren't aristocrats; they had no secret hidden knowledge passed on by romantic cabals. They were common people doing their best in awful times. Perhaps "LOTR's" underlying message is not as elitist as some might perceive.

-- Don Livingston

David Brin makes an interesting point about the one-dimensionality of evil in Tolkien's world. In "Beowulf," a text that powerfully influenced Tolkien, the poet portrays the monster known as Grendel's Mother with interesting touches of sympathy; she's a grotesque creature, but she's also doing what many, many human mothers would do -- seeking justice for her murdered child. It's too bad Tolkien didn't absorb this quality of complexity and ambiguity into his vision of Mordor.

-- Jason Moss

High kudos to letting David Brin deconstruct "Lord of the Rings" and my pity upon everyone at Salon for the hate mail you'll receive. I can already see it: "Brin hates Tolkien and George Lucas, but let's see him do better! 'The Postman' movie sucked, so what's he doing, writing 'The Postman 2'?" I've worked in the business and can anticipate the mail before it comes: Many of these people have a point, and when they wear a hat, you can't see it.

Sadly, analysis such as Brin's is increasingly rare in the science fiction/fantasy/horror community, which is why it's very refreshing to read it in Salon. Finding intelligent and thoughtful science fiction magazines these days is like finding intelligent and thoughtful tractor-pull and wrestling magazines: Even if the editors have loftier motives, the industry has, through laziness and hubris, created an audience that wants nothing more than wish-fulfillment fantasies, so standing up and suggesting better (much less demanding better) only wastes your time and annoys the pig. Don't worry, though: The same hate mailers will end their campaigns to put Brin's head on a spike soon enough and return to much more important matters, such as petitioning the Sci-Fi Channel to bring back "Lexx."

-- Paul T. Riddell

I may have been liberated from the feudal servitude of my ancestors, and have an education and a better life than I would have had as a serf in my small village, but I'm obviously too stupid to know what to do with my Enlightenment-granted freedom. I need the keen understanding and superior insight of David Brin to direct me to appropriate literature and a correct worldview. Left to myself, I might read things that are bad for me! Brin is so good to take me by the hand and tell me what to do. I just can't live without his guidance.

I mean, on my own I thought that women who ruled kingdoms in their own right, had adventures, and lived their lives as they chose were role models to follow. Now that Brin has instructed me properly, I see that the future holds much better things! I can pick Kirk, or Riker, or Sisko, or Chakotay, and be the fuck of the week! How could I ask for more?

Thank goodness for David Brin. Without his stunningly brilliant analysis I might never have realized that Tolkien and Jackson are evil Nazis who want to take away my freedom. I must run out and find an appropriate movie, like Brin's "Postman," at once! Now that the light of Brin's intelligence has illuminated my previously pathetic understanding of the world, I know I'll find that "The Postman" doesn't really suck

-- Genevieve Carnell

Next Page: You don't even get "Adaptation"!

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