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

Shame that he didn't then.

Any good writing will attract interpretations -- Beckett is currently "the existential moral struggle of isolated modern man in an absurd world" or whatever you're having yourself -- but in fifty years it may be something else altogether.

By refusing to authorise allegory Tolkien wisely put the burden of interpretation on the interpreters. As Oscar of Blessed Memory said, there are no moral or immoral books, only well and badly written ones.

Particular interpretations may be current or fashionable, but "right" doesn't apply. An interpretation can be sustained at best. Lewis's Narnia suffers by being attached to Christianity; it was an artistic mistake to adopt a predetermined reading. Of course for an evangelist the art comes second, or lower.

"Wrong" on the other hand does apply to interpretations. Jackson is not too badly wrong; that's the highest praise he's getting from me. Apart of course from my chldlike wonder at his visual creation -- magnificent.

Any comments on F103872?thread=245889 then?

Now that's an interpretation that can't be faulted

Hi Recumbentman. Thanks for the link to your theory of hobbits thread. Strange indeed! So, hobbits "are in general heartless and self-seeking" individuals but a bit later you say your theory "categorises hobbits as something near to what Steven Pinker calls "demons", which are single-minded (=mindless) goal-seeking programs within the brain, whose co-operative input goes together to make up the workings of the human mind" ... a bit like ants then. An inconsistent and even contradictory view of them.

I agree with you about Smeagol. He murdered his best friend Deagol almost straight away when Deagol found and wouldn't give the ring Smeagol. There's an implication in the film that Smeagol started off like Frodo and all of the badness in him was generate by the ring. He's a little cutie in the film. When he limps off from Osgiliath with his poor hurt hand, I almost wish someone would take him to the vet. Are we supposed to feel affection for the little so and so?

And of course we have to lie from time to time. Even chimps can lie, apparently. What would politicians do all day if .... oh, never mind.

Thank you Shorn. I see the problem with self-seeking and co-operating . . . but I uphold the analogy (the selfish bit was written before reading Pinker) (no excuse). The main point is, hobbits are less than human. This does not make them stand for an "inferior race" (how could they, when they seem so English? . . . until you read their names in their own language). Instead they stand for *parts of a person* -- his hobbies/habits. Tolkien personalised some habits/hobbies, then wrote a story about them. Because he could, and because it was (and still is) fun.

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

Like Moorcock's Melniboneans, they can trace their lineage back to the creatures of Spenser's Fairie Queen and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night Dream - a starnge, ethereal, sometimes spiteful people who don't think at all like humans.

My guess is still that the biggest influence on lords and ladies wasn't Tolkien but Neil Gaiman, who had already been using a Spenserian race of Changelings and Elves in Sandman before he teamed up with Pratchett to write Good Omens.

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.

You could be right about the confrontation with uncomfortable reality in films Blue Shark. Oddly enough, I came away with a slightly different impression of the orcs. Tolkien's black orcs are Jackson's multi-coloured orcs. There are some really seedy looking white orcs and some blotchy grey/purple/pink ones. Not sure about your racial integration point. You couldn't imagine a society that would want orcs integrated with it. Whatever Tolkien's subconscious attitude, I'm sure he couldn't have associated the uncompromisingly evil orcs with any race of human beings. The class divisions are still easy to spot though. Sam's deference to Frodo really jumped out at me.

Still, the people who rant about the liberties taken by the film makers have their own interpretations and understandings, independent of what the author of the book might have intended. Tolkien may have been a racist/sexist/classist/speciesist - consciously or unconsciously. I love the book but I always took a dim view of his treatment of wolves and birds. I was pleased that Peter Jackson's wargs didn't look remotely like wolves. It would have been a shame if the Lord of the Rings films did for wolves what the Jaws films did for sharks. So you could have a point. I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed the films less than I did if I'd seen animals that looked convincingly like wolves attacking people and being slaughtered.

I think this thread is confusing me a lot... I'll have to read the book and watch the films again.

I think the characters are interesting, but I can never quite believe them (apart from Sam and Gimli) so I love to examine them and work out what they represent/are/are on about.

The Easterlings... well, the threat from the east seems fairly obvious to me. The Uruk Hai - aren't they a bit of a master race? I loved Jackson's Uruk Hai, especially (what's his name, Lurtz?) who was fighting Aragorn in FOTR. But they are very different from how I imagined them, and when I recently whipped through that novel, I was happy to see that I wasn't unduly influenced by Jackson's ideas.

Legolas and Aragorn, however are a different matter! (Shallow? It's my middle name)

I prefer to read the book without trying to work out how RL is represented or involved, but I do like the characters to be at least half-way believable. Which is the problem I have with Faramir. Whoever mentioned it up there in the thread is right: we all lie. Even if it's only to make someone else feel better. Faramir is too perfect at that point. although, as I've mentioned before, I do fall under his charm later on. I don't think the film has done him any favours, so I'm looking forward to the extended version of TTT to see if it is any better, and then to see how he is in ROTK.

Sorry if I've caused your confusion SHO. I don't get online often enough or long enough to keep up with the thread so I'm answering messages on the second page, one at a time as and when I can get to it. If that is the source of the confusion, then just click the "This is a reply to this posting" link at the top of the message. If that's not the source of confusion, you're right: read the book again Also, I've seen the extended Two Towers, and it occurs to me that Gollum limping along with a poorly hand was one of the extra bits.

I heard that he argued with CS Lewis about their respective book series ... Tolkien had a mesasge but he wanted it to be very hidden, so that readers could enjoy the books, even if they weren't in accord with the message.
It's basically all about the clash between good and evil. Peter Jackson has portrayed about 95% of it. (P.S., I'd call my self a 'bookie' rather than a 'filmie', although I am a NZer!

Earlier, I got in on this debate to say that I'd be a 'bookie', but I love the films as well! (Especially the music. We have the soundtracks on CD and the first two films on DVD&gt
Re Boromir and Faramir, Boromir, definitely. I don't see him as a 'baddie' at all!
>>There could also be an argument that he was putting forward an idea about his perfect (I hesitate to use the word 'master') race in the elves - but then, maybe not. And how anti-war is it when the men of Rohan are singing while they slay?<<
I've heard something about that - but I don't buy it. Sure, Tolkien did regards the elves as 'almost' perfect, but master race? No way.
As for anti-war, what struck me was when the Frodo and Sam saw Faramir's men kill a man, an ally of Saruman. They were revolted! I think the attitude of the races of Middle Earth to Orcs, is that they are unnatural - "genetically engineered" from captured elves, and so killing them is different. (Also, self defence in all instances.)

>>Arwen stays in Middle Earth with Aragorn or leaves for the West? <<
I read all the appendixes this year, because I was doing some research for a linguistics assignment - one of the Appendixes is the love story of Arwen and Aragorn. They marry and live (mostly) happily ever after - but being Toliken, it's deeper than that...
But you probably already knew that.

Aaaaahhhhh, Dickens! I find his books loathsome, but that's just me. I definitely prefer science fiction, fantasy, myself.

Congratulations on surviving a Monday kea. I watched some of the RotK parade on the news at lunch time (GMT). So it's causing you considerable irritation then - all this movie hype. Your reason for avoiding the films makes perfect sense. Now I've seen the first 2 theatrical versions and the first 2 extended versions, my head's full of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and I have to keep diving into the book to reassure myself that this or that thing really happened, or didn't. The extended versions come on 4 discs, 2 of which are interviews with the people who worked on the films and explanations of how the special effects and things were achieved. There was an account of how the Rivendell house and scenery was put together on one of those discs. Also Lothlorien and Fangorn, which were manufactured. The first wood we see, in The Shire, was colour enhanced but I think most of the rest of the scenery was unadulterated New Zealand. Don't worry though - I won't be invading you and I can quite sympathize with your wish to keep the country as pristine as possible. Goodness knows we've sent you enough ecologically damaging stuff and you don't need the population of the world to trample all over you. Still, you sent us the New Zealand flat worm and that makes us even .... doesn't it?

It's true the Irish and Welsh still have their myths but I don't know how often they refer to them. I get the impression that Christianity has crushed the life out of most of the more colourful and interesting myths. The Cornish may still have some but I can't remember hearing anything about a Scottish mythology. What do you think is the significance of the doomed mortal/immortal love affairs? Is it about self-sacrifice or some sort of warning about marrying outside your tribe/community or something else entirely?

Most of what you've said is convincing and I agree with you, but I've an area of lingering doubt on one issue. In order for LotR to really work as a mythology for England, the majority (or at least a sizeable minority) of the population of the country would need to subscribe and have some affection for it and, to some extent, believe in it. A lot of people in this country seem to be downright hostile to the book, for some reason. You say "the West has lost its understanding of the value of cultural myths", so what is the value of cultural myths? How can a mythology work for a massive, multi-cultural population when a large proportion of the population either aren't interested or think it's nonsense? Is it really possible to construct a mythology and mesh it into the culture and have it function as a proper working mythology?

By the way, it looks as though Lord of the Rings may be about to win The Big Read - it's still number one, so far.

>>Tolkein's world-view does come out loud and strong in LOTR. The Roman Catholicism that makes all his female characters into aspects of the Blessed Virgin Mary, for instance. (Galadriel as an aspect of the BVM - the parellel is striking.)This prevents them from being "humanly" female or developing particularly strong characters - at best, the female characters in Middle-Earth are unevolved, two dimensional, cardboard cut-outs.
This might have worked in the 1930's and 40's, but Peter Jackson was right to flesh them out a bit more for the film and take them in directions Tolkein would never have envisaged for them. Otherwise, their portrayal would have been wrong in the film - dated, antiquated, stuck in a time-warp. 1930's women, in their various aspects. (Rosie - faithful wife, waiting for Sam to come home from the wars, for instance)<<

Interesting. I don't know much about the Catholic influences but it makes sense. It could have been a product of his class, or his university life as well. I do agree that most of his female characters are pretty limited, but I would argue that this was because of the view of how women at the time were _meant_ to be, rather than how they actually were.

Women in the 30s had a remarkable degree of freedom contrary to what history, the media, and popular culture would have us believe. If you look at Tolkein's female contemporaries, alot of women were writing some pretty interesting work, as well as living bloody interesting lives. Tolkein certainly wasn't the only man to ignore this at the time (or subsequently).

Even though I haven't seen the films, I agree that if Jackson was going to make any changes then he was right to make changes to the female characters (and other aspects, to 'modernise').


>>Why is it hard to believe that Tolkien didn't mean anything other than to write good, entertaining, novels?>>

I don't believe that Tolkein did write LotRs as entertainment only. The man spent his whole adult life on this project and produced a book steeped in themes of good and evil, and morality - you think this wasn't intentional?

Tolkein is on record as saying LotR is not allegory. This is not the same as saying that it has no meaning, and if someone can produce evidence that Tolkein did think the book was entertainment only with no further meaning, then I would be very interested.

To paraphrase Recumbentman, Tolkein may have written with meaning, but I don't think he was intending to write the book as _a_ message. Like all good art, the reader is as much a part of the creating meaning process as the writer.

>> Tolkien may have been a racist/sexist/classist/speciesist - consciously or unconsciously. I love the book but I always took a dim view of his treatment of wolves and birds.<<

Good point. Maybe Tolkein gets to epitomise the unconsciousness of the white, male, middleclass, human as separate from nature mentality of the 20th Century!


>>Still, you sent us the New Zealand flat worm and that makes us even .... doesn't it?<<

oh, I didn't know about this - our sincerest apologies .


>>It's true the Irish and Welsh still have their myths but I don't know how often they refer to them. I get the impression that Christianity has crushed the life out of most of the more colourful and interesting myths. The Cornish may still have some but I can't remember hearing anything about a Scottish mythology.<<

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.


>>What do you think is the significance of the doomed mortal/immortal love affairs? Is it about self-sacrifice or some sort of warning about marrying outside your tribe/community or something else entirely?<<

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.

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.

In fact Tolkein explores this as well - hence the time of the elves is over, and the time of men (sic) has come. For all there is sadness in this.



>> In order for LotR to really work as a mythology for England, the majority (or at least a sizeable minority) of the population of the country would need to subscribe and have some affection for it and, to some extent, believe in it. A lot of people in this country seem to be downright hostile to the book, for some reason. You say "the West has lost its understanding of the value of cultural myths", so what is the value of cultural myths? How can a mythology work for a massive, multi-cultural population when a large proportion of the population either aren't interested or think it's nonsense? Is it really possible to construct a mythology and mesh it into the culture and have it function as a proper working mythology?<<

Very good points. It's probably easy for me as white and middle class to asert that Tolkein's mythology works. 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. (I guess I on reflection I would say that Tolkein didn't create a mythology for anglosaxons - he re-invented it. And the fact that _he_ did it, as a white, middle class oxford don, is part of the anglosaxon cultural mythology in itself!)

When I say English, in the context of this thread, I mean white Anglo-saxon. I understand that the England of today is very different from the England Tolkein's time. Although, in New Zealand English still largely means white Anglo-saxon.

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.

Now you come to mention it AgPov, it seems odd - Tolkien being a devout Catholic and yet wanting to give Britain back its mythology, when you consider the trouble the early church went to to obliterate all rival belief systems. I wonder whether he thought the church had made a mistake in ruthlessly crushing all opposition or, perhaps, that now Christianity was well and truly dug in here, it was safe to let us have a bit of that old richness back. Back in the 30's Christianity must have seemed safe and unassailable, with fewer mosques and synagogues and no new-age mumbo-jumbo. Maybe that never occurred to him, but it makes me wonder ....

I agree with you about the need to modernise those gals. Mind you, Eowyn was pretty feisty even in the book. Most of the complaints I've read haven't referred to the stiffening up the female personalities though. The two biggest irritations seem to have been with 1) Arwen (almost 3,000 years old remember) being packed off to the West by her dad - being manipulated in a very old fashioned way in fact and 2) Faramir taking Frodo prisoner and trying to part him from the ring and cause the mission to fail. These were temporary blips. Arwen is bound to dig her heels in and come back to Aragorn in the next film and Faramir relented and let Frodo go.

You have to wonder why the fans currently in the grip of apoplexy even watched the films. They must have known there would be a few changes. With the best will in the world, time and money would impose inevitable constraints. Kea seems to have done the sensible thing, for someone who really cares about maintaining the "purity" of the book's meaning, and avoided watching the films altogether. I think kea's right about a lot of things and it seems to me that those people who wanted a sort of direct translation of the book from text to film, hadn't understood just how important the meaning of the book (the meaning they read into the book, irrespective of any meaning the author may have intended to convey) was to them and how unlikely it was that Peter Jackson would be able to make a faithful film of the book.

The 'racism and sexism' thing gets me - really. I read re PJ and the films that he had 'put women in', and 'let them do things, all credit to New Zild, New Line and Peter Jackson'! I accepted that because I had not read the book since I was 16, and I am now a wee bit older.
Then, I read the book again, and was amused and annoyed to discover that all the women PJ had 'put in' (to, according to the media, the annoyance of crusty old sexist Brits' (a stonking lie, but the NZ media have had a ball with this...) 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.)
I may be wrong, but I don't believe that the Orcs or the Southrons are ever stated to be black or dark skinned (*in the book*).
Remember folks, made in NZ or not, this is an *American* film. Culturally, NZ and America are moving closer every day and PJ's earlier films were all made for the USA. I am not saying all Americans are racist, that would be absurd. But I don't think Tolkien was as 'racist, sexist and classist' as people are calling him.
Society has regressed badly, from the 1980s, when in an American family sitcom Dad can watch a girl-child playing T-Ball and say admiringly to Grand Dad "oh, she's as good as a boy". Imagine that line in the 1980s!

>>Tolkien being a devout Catholic and yet wanting to give Britain back its mythology, when you consider the trouble the early church went to to obliterate all rival belief systems.<<
But did it though? I am across the other side of the world, but 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 wonder whether he thought the church had made a mistake in ruthlessly crushing all opposition<<
Is this not begging the question a bit?
>>or, perhaps, that now Christianity was well and truly dug in here, it was safe to let us have a bit of that old richness back. Back in the 30's Christianity must have seemed safe and unassailable, with fewer mosques and synagogues and no new-age mumbo-jumbo. Maybe that never occurred to him, but it makes me wonder ....<<
I am sorry, but 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!

No time to catch up on this thread properly, and yet again it's past my bedtime, but I'll ramble on anyway, in no particular order.

I love the films and the book, and I see them as two different things, which is how I cope with the wishy-washy Arwen, the lack of Glorfindel (and his jingly harness, one of my favourite scenes in the book) and so on.

I hate all this PC-ifying of books which were written when we weren't as "enlightened" and "equal" as we are now. So what if crusty ol' ProfT put very few women in his book? It's his book, and it's how he sees things. If someone wants to update it, that's fine, but sheesh, call it something else and/or label it as such.

And as one of the previous posters said: the women in LOTR are pretty strong characters anyway. Even Rosie Cotton is a bit forward, for a shy hobbity lass. And if anything, Galadriel has calmed down a lot since her activities in the Silmarillion.

I know I keep banging on about it, but I do get into lots of "fights" with people who have only seen the film, when I mention how much I like the character Boromir. He really is a man torn between doing the right thing for his folk and doing the right thing for his folk as he sees it. That is one thing I hope might be redressed in the next film, that people might come out saying "oh, he wasn't a bad guy at all, silly me for thinking that"

I find it difficult to criticise Jackson's Gollum though, because it is done so well, it seems churlish to say "oh, but he was an evil little sod, really, not this cute and cuddly Gollum we have here" so I tend to ignore that too and just enjoy the film.

But reading everyone's comments here about Tolkien's life etc, and writings and letters about his novel brings up another question for me.

Is it better or worse when you read a work like this to know what the author was thinking/meaning/intending to show? Or is it better to read (as I do) in blissful ignorance and maybe work it out for yourself?

Read in blissful ignorance, I think. (It can be quite a shock, sometimes, to discover the views some favourite writers have - that they managed by main force to keep out of their fiction...)
I get annoyed at book revisionism, trashing authors because they were racist, classist etc, (nobody cares about sexism, if the awful sequence I quoted from last night's TV, from a new Emmy winning show is any indication..)