A Potpourri of Kinda More-Or-Less Related Links
XKCD (yay!), and more on Rings of Power (Not so yay)
Hello all! Welcome to the new subscribers who, thanks to Erik Jampa’s kind recommendation signed up (I think I’ve recommended Erik’s The Storied and Spirited Earth Substack, and if I haven’t, I do now!).
Sorry it’s been so quiet around here, but on Sunday, October 20, 2024, I turned in the “peer-review” manuscript1 for an anthology that has been in the works for maybe seven years (see, there was this global pandemic . . .): “There are many paths to tread”: Queer Approaches to Tolkien's Middle-earth. I’ll be updating on its progress as time goes by.
My next deadline, and these are the “real” [publisher] deadlines!, is on December 20, 2024. It’s for the peer-review manuscript for another anthology ditto more or less seven years in the making: Race, Racisms, and Racists: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium, Adaptations, and Readers. I hope to post about some of my other ongoing projects in November, probably about my two conference presentations and the Tolkien Society events, but no promises about December!
First: this brilliant xkcd: Númenor Margaritaville
I’ve been a fan of xkcd since I ran across the Map of Online Communities. For years, I had a copy posted on my office door in the Hall of Languages (back in the day when we stuck stuff on with tape! and were in our offices quite a bit).
Second, More on Rings of Power
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry’s: Posts on Why Rings of Power Feels Flat
I found Bret Bret Devereaux’s great blog when I was mousing around the internet some years ago looking for posts on Jackson’s films, and then ended up reading a lot more of Bret’s posts. He is an ancient and military historian who focuses primarily on ancient Rome but also is a “life-long fan of sf and fantasy.”
A sample excerpt:
Here I am going to suggest one reason [why some viewers were disappointed in the series]: the failure of Rings to maintain a believable sense of realism grounded in historical societies and technologies (something the Lord of the Rings, books and films, did very well) makes it impossible to invest in the stakes and consequences of a world that appears not to obey any perceptible rules.
I found as I wrote this that I had broadly two kinds of critiques: the more substantive critiques of worldbuilding in the most literal sense and then a set of nitpicks focused on the presentation of things like arms, armor, tactics and smithing which annoy me but were probably less important for most viewers. So this post is going to focus on what I see are the more dramatically relevant failures: scale, distance and social structures; next week’s post will then be a companion to this one which will indulge in endless nitpicking on the other topics.
Now I do want to say that if you enjoyed Rings of Power, that’s fine. I am not here to tell you that you shouldn’t have. I enjoyed parts of it too (mostly the Dwarves; I thought those emotional beats landed best), so I’m not suggesting it was all terrible. What I am saying is that I wish those story elements that worked emotionally had been placed in a story that worked logically. Also, I am not going to hold back on spoilers, either from the show or from the larger legendarium; the story of the Second Age is already spelled out in detail in the Silmarillion and I’m not going to dance around those details.
Late Stage Rings of Power by Muse from the Orb
I don’t know anything about Muse from the Orb other than their stack is tied with Mercury Natis’s critique of S1 [de-queered] Celebrimbor for the award I’ve just invented which is “Robin’s Most Favorite Take on ROP of All the Ones She’s Read” (as of the date this post was posted)!2 It’s almost impossible to pick a single paragraph or two that sums up an overall argument, because Muse covers so. many. points (an approach I not only happen to enjoy but on occasion may fall into myself).
But here are two paragraphs that made me extremely happy:
Some people have positioned this show as a conflict between the “fake fans” writing the show and the “real fans” displeased with it. This is incorrect — Payne/McKay are real fans. They’re actually the most frustrating kind of real fans: Hollywood film nerds with industry clout and resources who approach things with the view that earnestness sets them apart, qualifies them to shepherd a project, and can supply them with the skills-equivalent of years spent doing on-the-ground work. If you listen to them on the Rings of Power podcast, it’s apparent that these guys were industrious, enthusiastic, and detail-oriented…about everything except confronting whether their writing was resonating as it should have been. They spent months and months in the production weeds: on the architectural strata of Númenor, on making sure the harfoots’ wagon wheels looked like circular hobbit doors, on discussing whether orcs preferred to be called “Uruks,” on building a working dwarf mine, and of course on inserting Payne into background art. McKay says that someone could write an analysis about how certain frames of the show reference classical paintings like Wreck of the Medusa or moments from Lawrence of Arabia. They stress their “references and cross-references,” but does any of that effort and complexity mean anything if the show’s basic foundations don’t work? If, comparatively, they plotted out the entire five-season-arc of a billion-dollar show in a “brainstorming session”? Ultimately, neither the richly-produced sets nor the symbolic interconnectedness nor the intricate philosophies of art mean anything when relegated to the background of a script that strains human believability at every turn.4
Anyway, the show. I’ve actually come to the conclusion that the version of Middle-earth depicted in Rings of Power is actually a Boschian hell dimension to which certain characters, who seem like they belong to the loftier Jackson/Tolkien universes, have been sent as some kind of punishment. These characters emit a certain maturity and presence that feels out-of-place; they stare with sunken eyes at the inanity around them, as if wondering: How did I get here?5 You feel like these particular characters could actually exist in a much better adaptation of the Second Age — as in, the show that people wanted this to be.
*Happy Sigh*
This next article doesn’t have the excellent writing that my first two links do—the interest is more in the subject matter (racist fans having more temper tantrums about Rings).
Of course, the news that one of the episodes of Rings showed an Orc cuddling with his wife and baby zoomed around the internet and brought out (sigh) all the usual racist bs as this article in Marshable documents: fans started declaiming about “disrespect” to Tolkien; claiming that the episode (incredibly brief, I gather, and never referenced again as far as I can tell) was more “forced diversity,” insisting that Tolkien’s Orcs were totally evil all the way through, including the WTF claim that “Tolkien literally wrote that they are grown like plants" [WTF????] and live to kill, and oh yeah, only males only allowed, no girl Orcs,3 so overall we can clearly see that these fragile fanflakes are clutching things in horrof at the desecration of the Holy Handbook of Orcdom as created by, well, these guys.
The article has embedded tweets—which include replies from other fans pushing back by quoting Tolkien’s letters and referencing evidence from The History of Middle-earth in which Tolkien later struggled with the theological as well as biological questions about his Orcs.
A few years back, I read through the Orc Archives for an essay I was writing on a fanfic that completely transformed Tolkien’s Orcs by (this is my theory of the narrative choices, that is my interpretation) removing some of Tolkien’s assumptions and choices in characterization while hewing closely to other aspects of Tolkien’s published works. Basically, the narrative focus is entirely on the Dwarves and Orcs (and undercuts some of the systemic racism in Tolkien’s portrayal of their cultures as well as individual characters).4
Anyway, I don’t remember Tolkien saying they were grown like plants (sounds too nice compared to some of his other ideas that I remember!). Now, I’m not saying they weren’t—this was before the pandemic, and Tolkien’s early drafts often present lots and lots of different ideas about his character creation and world-building, all complicated by the fact he kept revising some of this stuff for decades, and moved in his later years to theology/philosophy instead of fiction, and plants mighta been dropped in as an idea at some point. However, to cite that as *canonical* and *untouchable* and *intentional* is just wrong, because, well *waves at volumes of HoME.*
I liked the person who replied to one of the attack posts by saying:
I’m caught up on the show and I don’t recall ever seeing an “orc family.” I must have blinked and missed it. Does this one second of screen time define the show, wherever it was?
I had a bunch more links (it’s an addiction) but I was originally planning to just post links. Deciding to go in and find great pull-quotes and then get snarky about one of them means that the other links will have to wait. They’re all on Tolkien, or mostly, but not about ROP, so maybe another potpourri post later on.
A “peer-review” manuscript means it’s complete, and the chapters in it have been revised after the three editors accepted them, but it now goes to peer reviewers (the manuscript has been anonymized, and we will not know who the peer reviewers are) who will read and write reports on the strengths and weaknesses of the collection for the publisher.
And Muse cited Mercury’s essay and then built on it beautifully, leaving me applauding them both and throwing rose petals: here, have a bonus paragraph that also made me incredibly happy:
An interesting essay on the subject by Mercury Natis makes the case that Payne and McKay reimagined the characters this way in order to preclude homoerotic tension. It makes sense: two obscenely beautiful young men in an obsessive, physically-involved creative partnership would probably have registered as gay for mainstream audiences. The essay is worth reading, though one thing I’d add (Natis’ essay predates S2) is that the Celebrimbor/Sauron relationship we eventually got, while not overtly homoerotic, does not feel particularly straight either. If anything, I’d call it camp and tragicomic in the Old Hollywood way. The elven smith’s relationship with Sauron feels reminiscent of All About Eve, or better yet Gods and Monsters:7 Celebrimbor as a greying, lonely, gay sophisticate who’s captivated by this rugged, young, helpful, probably-straight-but-maybe-not? stranger. (Charles Edwards has called him “besotted.”) They pass phallic-looking tools back and forth, and murmur personal confessions by the forge. Celebrimbor is never seen without one of his velvet Barry Manilow shirts.
Does anybody but me want to point out that some plants have male and female individuals — although in other cases, the plants have male and female parts (including BISEXUAL FLOWERS!!!!). And of course there are spore-producing plants which Britannica says are more complicated! Because Nature is always more ComPLicAteD than what Some People think!
And I remember learning this about the problem with increased allergies due to the pollen of (ahem) DUDEBRO trees years ago, and I’m still cackling about it. Urban planners (what are the odds they were 99.9999999% Dudebros?) thinking, yes, let’s avoid those messy flowers and FRUITS, and just plant MALE trees, tra la la and OOPS, unintended consequence is ALLERGIES! (How many of you remember the It's Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature" commercials (for some reason, they had a major impact on younger!Robin as I was growing up). I may have mentioned that I love Trees!
Interestingly, many street trees are dioecious, and, to avoid the mess of flowers and fruits, only male trees were often planted. Unfortunately, this proved to be somewhat of a failure in urban planning, as pollen allergies have worsened in some places, thanks to the high density of male trees happily producing pollen (emphasis added).
My paper can be read on the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research . Between Tolkien’s Letters and the internal debates as shown in HoME, it’s clear he was extremely conflicted over Orcs, free will, their “creation story,” etc. and could not seem to write himself out of the corner he wrote himself into. Dimitra Fimi has a great point in her Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History about how portraying “evil” characters in the mythic prose of the earlier Silmarillion materials worked vs. how working in the more novelistic prose of The Lord of the Rings resulted in different (indeed contradictory) characterizations. The Orc specialist in Tolkien Studies, Rob Tally, has an excellent essay that covers Orc characterizations in LotR: “‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Orcs’: Simple Humanity in Tolkien’s Inhuman Creatures.” Highly recommended. I also remember vividly the debate in Tolkien’s supplementary material over whether Orcs were descended from Elvish prisoners of war (which presumably had to include female Elves!), or from Human prisoners, or from both, because he set himself up with his foundational belief that only Eru Ilúvatar could create life, and could never settle on how Morgoth (let alone, later, Sauron and Saruman) ‘created’ the Orcs which he thought wouldn’t be as strong as Morgoth’s because of that pesky problem of things degenerating over time, and them being so much less powerful.