podcast friday - tolkien the anarchist

[frandroid]

I have a confession to make. I have never read LOTR. Not read any Tolkien. Even F who doesn't read fantasy or SF has read LOTR or maybe The Hobbit. (In school for English lit., but still). I've watched the trilogy so I'm not a total ignoramus. Anyway the radical perspective I've heard about LOTR is that it's fundamentally Monarchist. And here while I was looking up Andrewism (which Aaron Bushnell was boosting) I found this podcast named Everyday Anarchism. It's hosted by a WASP dude who very much speaks in that WASPy voice that many such podcasts have. The first couple episodes was lacklustre, but I've enjoyed this third one on how LOTR and Tolkien were fundamentally anarchist. It would be interesting to hear a debate, though maybe if I had read the books... :P

https://pod.link/1585390166

Comments

[ioplokon]

Ehhhh, idk if I'm persuaded (having not listened to the argument at all lol). I guess I'm pretty influenced by Northrop Frye's whole Green World idea. A lot of LOTR seems anarchist bc the characters are in the Green World, but they come back to civilization at the end. Basically, there is this dynamic in a lot of fiction, where a world of possibility is opened up (so the chaotic plot can happen) & then foreclosed as Order Is Restored. (also probably worth engaging w/ why so many fascists, most famously Italy's Melloni, find so much to love in LOTR; not that it's inherently tainted or that Tolkein was a facho, but I think we can't ignore it...)

Still, I guess this does leave the potential for finding useful things even in texts that ultimately work against your aims...

[sabotabby]

I have heard this argument before but I think he was essentially a pastoralist? With bits that make him appealing to both fascists and anarchists. But he hated fascism and was very open about this.

[ioplokon]

Yeah, I mean, I explicitly said he's not a fascist. I'm speaking purely from a reception studies perspective. Like how does the work of people like Tolkien get appropriated in this way? Other than just like he's dead and also the books are broadly popular.

Bc basically he's working in the same tradition as what went down that path. Like, in a big way, LotR is just like, Ossian: the Next Generation, right? And you can draw a pretty direct line from pre-romanticism to the national Romantic literatures and then on to fascism's conception of folk/volk. And I do think part of his project is to kind of, recuperate classics (ie: the study of ancient languages and cultures) as well as the kind of... Romantic sensibility from fascism. Which I think so, he's doing this first by creating an explicitly fictional story, right? Like the whole national Romantic project was unearthing real (or real-enough) past texts that showcase your Pure Culture. Tolkien is like, "Yeah, that's fake; it's all fake; it's some stories a nice little guy wrote in a book; this is a fantasy of made up things." But also, in his insistence on specificity - giving us so much weird and silly and contradictory detail - and rejection of allegory (even tho... it's kinda still there in the text, idk... writing is hard!), bc like... the fascistic fetishization of ancient cultures doesn't really survive any kind of detailed acquaintance with them... But still, I think there's a tension here.

I also think a big part of the current reception is coming from the films. Where so like, obviously there is the casting. But I think also you lose a lot of Tolkein's specificity, lean more into allegory, and so create a work that's more readily appropriated? Though I also think these were already the elements people were lifting out of the texts...

So anyway, this kind of exercise is more what I mean when I say we should think about what fascists are seeing there. I suppose it's not really related to a potential anarchist reading, but it's something I think a lot about irt LotR so it snuck in there anyway...

[sabotabby]

Yeah, I don't disagree with any of that. I also don't think a lot of fash who like Tolkien have read the books. Because yes, there's absolutely a glorification of ancient cultures but the entire point of it is that this is fading and modernity is inevitable, and we can be sad about it all we want but it's happening. That's something more or less lost in the film adaptations.

[ioplokon]

I mean, Melloni definitely read them. And that inevitably dying culture vibe is also just Ossian, revisited. Eta: also, I kinda think the 'recover past glory' part of fascism is less a real drive or promise and more a means of inculcating a sense of moral injury? So it being irrecoverable is not a barrier...

I don't really have a whole thesis about what is happening here, but if I were still a long 18th century person, I'd probably have more to say (also, unfortunately the 18th C just keeps getting longer...)

[sabotabby]

Hmm. I feel a little daft for not making the connection between "the things the right demands are impossible goals, which is the point because it means that the people are always unsettled, precarious, and aggrieved with someone to blame" with "RETVRN TO TRADITION is impossible and that's the point." But you raise a very good point.

[ioplokon]

Yes, also this is a long path towards me only half-jokingly arguing that Tom Bombadil is antifa.

[sabotabby]

Tom Bombadil is antifa though.

[warriorsavant]

Can't see it as especially fascist or anarchist. Definitely some religiousness.\ Maybe monarchist, as there is the plot of "restoring the TRUE king" (like real peasants actually cared who was taxing them).

[springheel_jack]

I tried to read them a couple times as a kid and never made it. I didn't actually finish them until pretty late in life. And they're fine. Just...fine.