h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The experience of the shurch in Ireland was interesting. St Patrick famously adapted existing observances to new references, the outstanding example being the lighting of the Beltane Fire and calling it the Paschal fire, for Easter. He also picked up new references literally from the ground - the shamrock to explain the Trinity. Before him Brigid was a divinity, after him she was called a saint. The practice of tying rags to thorn bushes near holy wells was continued, with Christian names inserted. The Irish church then went on to evangelise England and the continent, bringing with it such innovations as the use of bells.

After a few centuries the Celtic church was seriously out of step with Rome, famously over the calculation of the date of Easter. Even before the Normans came in, in the twelfth century, Dublin's Christ Church Cathedral was changed from a Benedictine order to Augustinians and -- get this -- Irish monks were no longer employed. An Irish name meant no admittance. This is when the church of Rome started flexing its muscles and stopped incorporating local mythology.

Curiously, people still tie rags to thorn bushes near some holy wells. Mythology persists.

Sorry I'm miles behind Recubentman. This is to your post 44.
I can see no reason to believe "hobbits represent the habits/hobbies of an English gentleman" and I can't see any reason for you to imagine hobbits, in the fantasy world of Middle Earth, would be less than human (except in stature). You think they stand for parts of a person? Hmmmm. It's a whacky theory beginning to end. Your foundations are more than a bit flimsy. I do believe you're having a laugh Well done!

Hi Della. You said
>>all the women PJ inserted and all the exciting things they got to do *were in the book anyway*!!! (As you all would already have known.)<<

Arwen does some daring things in the film that she didn't do in the book. In the film she rescued the mortally injured Frodo and charged back to Rivendell with him, pursued by ringwraiths. A male elf called Glorfindel carried Frodo to Rivendell in the book. But most of the rest of the female action is in the book as far as I remember.

>>I don't believe that the Orcs or the Southrons are ever stated to be black or dark skinned (*in the book*)<<

They are. He mentions black orcs and swart orcs and at one point, Gollum refers to Sauron as "the Black One". The Southrons are "swarthy men" with black hair. I don't think this should be thought of as racism though. Tolkien wasn't living in a time of political correctness and it probably wouldn't have occurred to him that anyone might take it as racist. He uses darkness as a sort of metaphor for evil, as is still common. The ringwraiths are "black riders" but that's because they wear black. The troll in Moria was dark green. Shelob and her kin (Ungolient in Silmarillion) somehow weave darkness about themselves. And there's the Dark Tower and the Black Gate of Mordor and the Mountains of Shadow, of course. Peter Jackson's orcs come in a variety of colours though.

>>I have read that the Celtic Christian church, which had so much more influence than Roman Catholicism, for so much longer, assimilated the native mythology quite peacefully. When Roman Catholicism came along, it still lived in relative harmony<<

I'm out of my depth on this one. My timing may well be out. I was thinking about things like witch burnings that became popular in Britain, Europe and America. There were all sorts of nasty things done to women (and men) by the Christian authorities. I get the impression that these woman were mainly what might have been called, by more reasonable folk, "wise women" or even "midwives" who were held in high esteem by the people/communities they tried to help. There was the dopy notion that if you threw a witch into a river, the river would reject her but if the woman was innocent of witchcraft, she would drown. I feel these "inquisitors" may have lacked a sense of irony or humour.

>>I have perceived an attitude of superiority in the last few posts, along with the dislike of *perceived" racism/classism here. Tolkien was a product of his time (as we are of ours) and I see the emphasis on "coloured hordes from the east" and Arab looking human enemies to be purely New Line, Peter Jacjson and the Americans of the 2000s!<<

Afraid you've lost me there

Hi to Blues Shark

"Pratchett's Elves are not a parody or indeed anything else of Tolkiens 'Fair Folk'.....

....In fact, just like comparing Pratchett to DNA is a comedic cul de sac, comparing him to Tolkien strikes me as a fantastic trip too far."

Agreed on comparing TP to DNA - the most that can be said is that both write sci-fi which has dysfunctional people doing dysfunctional things in a dysfunctional universe (cf Pratchett's "Strata"), but the style and approach is too different to say anything more than that.

I would say, though, that one of the joys in Pratchett, particularly in the earlier books, is picking up the references to "straight" fantasy fiction and identifying which author, characters, and situations are being done over good and proper.

"The Colour of Magic" and "the Light Fantastic" are a joyous romp through and over other people's novels; Conan the Barbarian gets the Pratchett treatment, in passing in CoM and thoroughly in TLF, as the geriatric warrior Cohen The Barbarian ("wholesale slaughter")

Speaking of Moorcock, the Black Sword makes a guest appearance in CoM, which sucks out souls by boring people to death with long rambling tales.

As for Elves, there's a dialogue in "the Light Fantastic", where a gnome, who smells like somebody who lives in a toadstool, looks doubtful at any mention of Elves as "lordly, wise, noble, and kind", and says "Well, I don't know about that. We just get the other sort of Elves around here" (ie, the sort who appear in "Lords and Ladies", and who are derived from other folk traditions and legends, as you rightly say.

Although Granny Weatherwax, in explaining the nature of Discworld elves to Magrat (who is also romantic enough to want them to be wise and kindly and generally "nice")says

"Elves and humans can interbreed alright, as if THAT's anything to be proud of!"

I wonder what (or who) TP was getting at in that throwaway line.....

Kea, referring to Celtic mythologies that are no longer much in evidence in Britain, you said:
>>Nah, it's all still there. We've just lost the knack of recognising it. It's a bit hard to comment from this side of the world though, as the issues here are quite different. Although I would say it amazes me how much the colonised peoples (Irish, Welsh, Maori...) have been able to take their own culture into the incoming Christianity. <<

I've been thinking about that and in a way, I might as well be on the other side of the world too. I live in the middle of England, which is quite a long way away from the areas where the Celts fled to when the invasions hit. But I do have Scottish and Welsh family, none of whom have ever mentioned any myth to me - not knowing it had anything to do with old myths, at least. I think my Scottish relatives go "first footing" which seems to involve taking lumps of coal to neighbours' houses round about Christmas or new year. I have no idea what the significance of that is but it doesn't sound like a Christian tradition even though my cousins are mainly Catholics. One of my Welsh friends has a friend called Rhiannon, after a character (possibly a goddess) from the Welsh mythology. I have a friend in the South of England who belongs to a group of (not sure how to spell this) Wiccas. She described them to me briefly once as being something like "white witches" and they go in for meetings in the countryside, in woodlands and on hills where, one of the things they do is to respect the Earth. So there you are. A bunch of indications that you're probably right.

Of doomed mortal/immortal love affairs:
>>hmmm...on one level I think it is about the loss of spiritual connection. In the Celtic mythologies, the original inhabitants of the Brittish Isles were the fairy people. Later people's kept histories about them (oral and later written) that ascribed to them magical and fey powers. It's likely that they were simply more connected to the spirit of the land than the later arrivals.<<

Years ago - my memory of it is pretty vague - I remember hearing speculation that the Picts might have been the original fairy people. Good at hiding - a bit like hobbits. There's some doubt about what happened to them: where they came from, whether they died out, were wiped out, were integrated with the people in Scotland. There's probably some DNA search going on for them right now. They've already colour mapped the British Isles for descendents of the invading Vikings. Now we know that Kirsty Wark, a presenter of Newsnight and Newsnight Review on BBC2 at 10.30pm every weeknight, is a Viking descendent. How can you have myths if science can come along and just give you the fairies' addresses and national insurance numbers?

>>My guess is that the mortal/immortal love affair stories arose at the time of the diminishing of the older 'fairy' tribes and the increase of the newer peoples. The love story becomes metaphor for the process of the loss of that earlier connection to spirit/land. Most indigenous peoples that have such a connection to land, have a strong tradition of the 'otherworld'. The Brittish have been in a very long process of losing this.<<

A sad and moving explanation. Also convincing! It's hard to imagine Tolkien's Saruman or Sauron and his orcs, feeling such longing for the beauty and spiritual connection to the land they've destroyed.

>>I suppose what I mean is that it works for the large number of white middle class people who are finding themselves in a world where everyone else is returning to their cultural roots but us whities have little place to go. I don't actually believe this - it's just that white English culture seems to think it has no indigenous culture/mythology.<<

Not sure about that. It's certainly not something I've been aware of, but you could be right. We all see the world through our own filter, subject things to our own interpretations have the perspective of our own culture and geographical location in the world, so it's easy to miss altogether what someone else sees clearly. I wonder if the rise of the new-age culture is a sign of search. It would make sense. There seem to be a lot of young people who are willing to believe in anything at all. One of my friend's daughters - currently studying for her A levels and planning to go off to university soon - is so hooked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that she seems unable to grasp the fact that human vampires don't exist in reality. The need to believe in something - anything, is very strong in some people .... in which case, the mythology of LotR could serve a useful purpose.

>>I imagine that the challenge for England now is to find a new mythology that acknowleges it's anglosaxoness as well as integrating the newer peoples. England is nothing if not a succession of newcomers.<<

It's not simple and it's easy to put a foot wrong. Britain, we hear again and again, is a multi-cultural society. What that means is that all the different cultures are maintained and celebrated and not exactly integrated and absolutely certainly not homogenised. There are faith schools and religious festivals and people of different ethnicities and religions living in particular areas and marrying within their own communities. Recently, it was reported on the news, that a father murdered his daughter for falling in love with a boy of a different religion. Some people/groups feel the need for separation of their own culture from the culture(s) around them very strongly indeed. Under the circumstances, it's hard to imagine a mythology that would suit all these cultures. But it would be nice, if it were possible.

"I remember hearing speculation that the Picts might have been the original fairy people."

David Dale in an essay on the Picts at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/DavidDale1/Part_2.htm#17
concludes that "I think it is safe to say that the Picts of Scotland were of the same racial grouping as the Gauls, and should be considered as Celts in the truest sense."

The fairy folk / little people of Ireland were by tradition the pre-Celtic inhabitants, the Tuatha de Danaan (children of Danu) who, when the Celts invaded, went underground. The love story of Diarmuid and Gráinne has an episode where Diarmuid, on the run, is taken in and given hospitality by the Tuatha de Danaan, whom he describes as noble, courteous and hospitable.

In the story they actually live under the ground; the original underground culture. They must have had some charisma and power, since though conquered, one daren't speak ill of them for fear of retribution.

shorncanary:- "Not sure about your racial integration point. You couldn't imagine a society that would want orcs integrated with it."

Just a throwaway suggestion. In Middle Earth, the book (and the film!) have it absolutely clear that Orcs were originally Elves, unimaginably debased and altered by the Dark Lord and thereinafter breeding like, well, Orcs.

A problem with the books is the absolute dichotomy of Good and Evil with no reassuring grey bits in the middle - everything is in stark black and white, morally speaking. Ref.the discussion about Faramir being impossibly upright and principled and clear-cut and the plausibility gap this presents.

You wonder. In the Silmarillion, there are enough examples of Elves behaving in what could be called an "orcish" manner - driven by greed or rage or lust or base motives - to make you suspect the "orc" streak, the dark side of the Elves, was there all along. (Ref. Feanor and his sons) All Morgoth had to do was refine and concentrate this - he didn't need to add anything as such, just breed out the redeeming features.

This makes me think it could work the other way - what if, from time to time, there's a "throwback" in the Orcish race, one who is more Elf than Orc, or one who just dimly remembers or perceives his/her/its origins?

Again, it's the black/white moral system that ignores the grey - the idea there might be some saving graces in some of the Orcs, just as there is a "nasty" darker side to the Elves.

And - when Aule created the Dwarves - Eru, the Creator-God, wasn't best pleased but adopted them as his own, as a part of middle-Earth. (though he said "oft shall strife arise between the children of my choice and the children of my adoption")

So - does anyone have a moral right to destroy a created species, as Aule and Morgoth were "kin" in the beginning - would God have a part for his (indirect) Orcish creation too?

"Does anyone have a moral right to destroy a created species" is a post-WW2 question, that is to say, post-Tolkien. Christianity is very relevant here: in the bible God gave Adam dominion over the beasts.

Whether God is responsible for the evil in creation is a hard question with a long and bloody history attached. Talk of the devil doesn't really solve it.

Evolutionary morality succeeds better: evolution has equipped us with every kind of base propensity and treacherous skill. If there is any altruism in the world, it is somehow connected with the levelling influence of language (can we imagine a concept such as "fairness" without language?).

Language is like an extra-terrestrial being with a replicating life of its own that has made its home in humans. In return for benefits conferred on its users (great strides in world domination) language imposes its own rules on us, and we are bound by them. Language is the beginning of morality; that is an event so revolutionary as to justify the extraordinary thought "in the beginning was the word" (also pre-echoed in the Buddhist Dhammapada).

To summarise: we were made by a devil and visited by a god.

This is not Tolkien's scenario; he is stuck with the old good-versus-evil model; hence his 2-D character problems.

Thanks for the Picts link Recumbentman. If it turns out that the Picts were Gauls rather than fairies, I won't be surprised. The Irish story sounds like good soil to grow a myth, doesn't it?

Your reply to AgProv's message is very interesting and makes a lot of sense. I wish I had time to think about it and discuss it now but I'm at work. But later ...

Hi all stumbbled on this and thought id add my two sense.

Im a massive fan of the films (ive done five peices of college exam work on them!), but regardless of any opinions of whether its accurate or not, if it encourages people to like Tolkeins world and ideas, if it encourages them to pick up the fellowship and find out what they missed surely it was worth it.

Believe me the films are (from a media students pov) brilliant. The camera work is superb, the effects are brilliant, and the mise-en-scene is breathe taking.

When i first heard of the films being released (way back in 2001) i made an effort to get the books read, but couldn't get into them properly. However, having watched one and two (several hundred times) ive nearly finished reading three. When the film comes out im going to read the trilogy and watch it. Tolkein created a fantastic world for some amazing charecters to explore, the films are a medium through which to explore that world.

What I meant was, that NZ is not as squeaky clean pure as many people think it is. I see a deep growing sexism and general regression to the nastier aspects of the past in the culture of the USA, and many ofd the -ve aspects of the LotR films, are down to Peter Jackson, or New Line cinema in my opinion, NOT Tolkien!
I concede your point about Arwen/Glorfindel, but I was thinking mainly of the passive whiner Jackson turned Eowyn into - whereas in the book, she is 67% more asserive and active - none of this pathetic 'Felicity' or teenage girl sitcom sighing she does in LotR: Two Towers over Aragorn...

Asmodai, that warms the cockles of my heart... to think that the films are bringing people to the book is fab. Because I love the films, very very much.

The book is just so much better

Well i really got into the films. Really really got into them (I once sat and spent two hours writing a post on here because someone critised it). The books pretty good, but doing english literature and language i can see why younger audiences can be put off by it. The lanugage uses archaic lexis purposfully to create the illusion of an old saga or a myth.

As for the sexism, well you have to look at it this way. Men have been dominanat in society for thousands or years (occassionaly queens etc) and in the past hundred years thats changed dramatically. Im not saying that a patriarchal society is right by any means, all i ever say to the sexism debate is give it time.

I don't have a problem with the sexism - the women in LOTR (those that struggle into it) are fine.

My 2nd favourite novel is Ivanhoe. Must be all those guys racing around the countryside with their swords and bows and arrows. There are some very old fashioned attitudes in that, but it doesn't ruin that story either.

AgProv, yes it's true the orcs started their existence as elves. Where are all the female orcs though? The only indication I can remember coming across of orc parenting is in Appendix A III, Durin's Folk. In a footnote it says "Azog was the father of Bolg; see The Hobbit, p 30". In the films we see orcs being manufactured in the mines under Isengard in very squalid and unhygienic conditions.

I think the good/evil dichotomy you see as a problem is one of the book's strengths and it may well be the reason some book fans were so very upset. We humans are mostly simple souls and when things are complicated we simplify them. That's one of the reasons we're able to massacre each other in wars. We perceive the enemy as evil or not human, and they have to be stopped/punished/conquered. As soon as soldiers start thinking the enemy is probably just like me and really only wants to go home and see his family or have a game of football, all desire to kill drains away. How could you (if you were at war) drop bombs on cities full of civilians or shoot children or even other soldiers who are only there because they have no choice, if you viewed them as just ordinary people - the same as you and your family? We need friends to be good and enemies to be bad. It makes life simpler. The book Faramir was *very* good, not just an ordinary person, easily influenced by personal ambition. And the book Arwen was a good and faithful elf, not just an ordinary woman who could be swayed to do the sensible (but less noble thing) and leave her man just when things were getting tough.

Yes the Silmarillion elves were far more 'human' in their capacity to be ars*s. I'm not sure that the "throwback" argument would work though. For one thing Morgoth did a pretty thorough job of perverting the ones he originally got hold of, right back in the early days. Even if genetics in Middle Earth were the same as here (which is in doubt when you consider that elves can breed with humans even though they were created completely separately), just think about what selective breeding of wolves has produced. Can you imagine a Chihuahua ever producing a wolf? If it had ever happened I'm sure we would have heard about it.

The world of Lord of the Rings (in contrast with The Silmarillion) is pretty well black and white - not much grey. I don't believe the author intended us to see any "saving graces" in the orcs, and it's his story so I guess he had the right to decide that. In the situation of LotR it might even be immoral for the free people of Middle Earth not to try to destroy the orcs. If you had anything you valued and didn't want destroyed, how could you allow the murderous, destructive orcs to live? Tolkien's orcs are wholly evil. The fact that they were created by the fallen Morgoth underlines rather than ameliorates that evil. The Middle Earthers are fortunate in a way, because they don't need faith to believe in 'supernatural' forces. They're in evidence all around them. That might put them in the position of not having to scratch their heads and work out what God would want them to do. In the Silmarillion, the Valar had ways of communicating directly with the elves, so you'd think they had some idea of the best and 'right' way to deal with the orcs. Orcs are *proper* enemies that you can kill without mercy or conscience - as we humans do each other in times of war - but with orcs there's no need to feel guilty about it afterward.

Recumbentman, what at interesting argument. "In the beginning was the word" (so opposable thumbs appeared before the beginning). You're absolutely right. How could we have any notion of fairness, without language? It's unimaginable. But what are the rules language imposes on us?

Della, I don't know what "ofd the -ve aspects" means. If you mean that Peter Jackson or New Line have inserted sexism and racism into the LotR films that was never in the book, then I have to say I've seen no evidence of it. PJ's orcs are not all black - there are even some white ones. Some of his Southrons are so pale as to be no more than gently tanned. Eowyn isn't a complete wimp. She wants to fight and looks pretty convincing when exercising with her sword. So what's the problem?

"But what are the rules language imposes on us?" Yes, that's a hard one, or rather it's awfully easy to get caught in a trap answering such a question. I'm wary of starting, because the image of "language" imposing rules on "us" is a picturesque metaphor for a complicated process. I don't see language as a moral being; we are the moral beings. It's just that morality seems to have its roots in language; and we are speaking of the moral world we inhabit when we say "in the beginning was the word".

We are such stuff as dreams are made on; our existence borders on the fictional.

Hi Asmodia. You lucky students today don't know you're born. Five pieces of college exam work on films you love. Good grief! When I was a student, the material (not films - we didn't have media studies back then) was chosen for us by experts who could spot the most boring stuff and insist we study it till our brains shrivelled to the size of a walnut. I believe you about the films. They may not be perfect in every way but they're the best films I've ever seen, if enjoyment is the criteria. Just tell me though, why couldn't you get into the books to start with? Was it just the language?