I prefer "both/and" to "either/or"

PSA: Terry Pratchett was a Tolkien fan, so there!

Photo by Anastasiia Malai on Unsplash

I’ve been catching up with All the Stuff I pushed onto “do later on” lists while I was getting the latest anthology copyedited and off to McFarland—it went off, finally, early last month! *happy dances*

And then I suddenly realized I had not posted (stacked?) here for a month plus! In my defense, I have *five* posts (which included this one until I posted it!) in draft form on my Dashboard. Apparently Substack has given up on reminding me I started a post and didn’t finish it, probably in frustration, because there are so many stacking up. Don’t worry, Substack: you are not alone! I have that effect on a lot of people!

So let’s try to start getting some of those drafts public in between All the Other Things on my list . . . .

First, I am thrilled to announce that the Studies in Tolkien Series webpage is now live at McFarland, and I am ready to hear from people who want to write a book in the genre of Tolkien academic scholarship:

Studies in Tolkien is a series devoted to scholarship in all areas, period specializations, disciplines, and critical theories about Tolkien’s work, its adaptations, transformative works, translations, and reception. The primary goals of the series are to add significant original contributions to Tolkien scholarship by developing, creating, and supporting greater diversity in the field by embracing a wide definition of what Tolkien scholarship includes in relation to authors, texts, topics, theories, and methods.

Tell your friends!

p.s. As often happens, this post is too long for some emails to open.

Second: I managed to clear enough piles and do enough organizing to generate a list! of things I am doing that are due in the next few months [granted, some deadlines are more concrete than others]:

April ?: Turn in my essay for Asexuality and Aromanticism in Tolkien’s Legendarium for editorial review (the editors are doing a themed issue for the open-access [really open-access by which I mean nobody pays anything to read or to submit to it!] Journal of Tolkien Research at some future TBD date! Current title of essay: “Here, There, Maybe there? Oh, Yeah, HERE! (But Never Back Again): An Asexual Autist’s Meander.” The deadline was March 31, but Other Things leapfrogged to the top of the list (the reviewer reports for “There are many paths to tread: Queer Approaches to Tolkien's Middle-earth came in, and we are trying to get revisions from contributors and turn the final draft in before April 30; then the proof for my “Note” for Mythlore arrived, and I need to check that and return by April 7).

April 16: Present a paper relating to my Web Project at the Popular Culture/American Culture Conference in NOLA: “A ‘Tolkien’ of One’s Own: Women Making Their Own ‘Tolkiens.’” [scroll down to the second half of linked post to read about this one!]

You can see a list of all presentations given at the Tolkien Studies Area since 2014, including the list for this year at the Tolkien Studies Area PCA/ACA page on my Substack.

Actually, most of my presentations this spring/summer are parts of the Web: and yes, I am leaving heavily into web and spider imagery! Bwah-hah-hah!

PCA/ACA is the only f2f conference I have this year, and it will be the last PCA (or f2f conference) I attend in the forseeable future—due to health, economic issues and, oh yeah, the dismantling of the FAA along with so many other federal agencies turning this country into a christo-techno-fascist hellhole! I plan to attend only virtual and hybrid conferences in the future.

May 8: Present my paper, “An Incomplete Academic Fellowship: The Exclusion of Queer Feminist Women from Tolkien Studies,” at GIFCon 2025, "Queering the Fantastic” (Online, free, May 7-9, a fantastic programme, check it out!). This paper is also part of the Web project.

July 5-6 is when The Tolkien Society’s Seminar 2025, “Arda’s Entangled Bodies and Environments” happens. My presentation, should it be accepted (and the TS gets so many amazing proposals that I am not assuming it will be!), will be on “Race-ing to Gender Arda: A Stylistics Analysis” [scroll down because the linked post has info about three presentations!]. This presentation is only sort of orthagonally related to the Web project (which is a big messy reception study rather than a textual analysis though a bit of that may creep in, especially relating to Éowyn, Berúthiel, and Ioreth). But the common thread is a focus on female characters/women, and intersectionality.

This presentation will focus on Goldberry and Galadriel and will be an intersectional “phenomenological and stylistics analysis of how Tolkien’s narrative voices entangle female characters and Middle-earth, resulting in a racialized (White) gendered (feminine) world.” It’s sort of a proof of concept: if it works, I will probably expand it to include more female characters (possibly *GULP* including some from the 1977 Silmarillion).

July 19: I’m putting this in although I am *not* presenting—but will be attending— because it’s going to be so much fun and some of you might like to also attend: Mereth Aderthad 2025, Silmarillion Writer’s Guild, in celebration of their 20th anniversary!

August 2-3: Online Midsummer Seminar 2025, More Perilous and Fair: Women and Gender in Mythopoeic Fantasy. Registration: $20. I’m one of the three co-chairs, and we have a bunch of *fantastic* proposals, so reading those, meeting with the others, and notifying presenters is also on the list for this week in April.

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Third, as my list above shows, I’m spending a lot of time thinking/writing (writing is the major way I do most of my thinking) about Tolkien, his work, his readers, all in the context of genders and sexualities. And when that happens, I tend to drag all sorts of things relating to what I am thinking about that I see around me into my web (thus, the topics of some of those draft posts lurking on my Dashboard).

So this post, Discworld Rules by Venkatesh Rao, is one I saw in my “Notes” (I guess the way that works is I see posts that people I subscribe/follow restack maybe? I’ve found a lot of great Substacks that way!).

Rao’s post compares LotR (Rao focuses only on that book, ignoring the rest of the legendarium) with all of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (except the Tiffany Aching series which. he. has. NOT. read!!!). The point of comparison and evaluation is which of the two authors’ works is the "best “ allegory for the world and technology” for “technologists” whoever they are.¹

For those not familiar with Pratchett’s work (there may be a FEW out there!): The Discworld portmantetau series (meaning many sub-series making up a huge SERIES!) apparently consists of 41 books published over 32 years [Source: Discworld Books Reading Order]).²

I love Pratchett’s work; I also love Tolkien’s work (some parts more than others in both cases). I first read Tolkien when I was in grade school; I started reading Pratchett in my early years as a tenured academic after a great academic presentation by a friend of mine (on wizards vs. philosophers in Pratchett’s Discworld), probabably at some point in the 1990s (fuzzy on dates, but it was when I was chairing the Science Fiction and Fantasy Area at PCA which was in the 1990s). Both authors changed my view of the world (as did others), but not in in the rather transactionsl forced “allegorical” way that Rao seems to be talking about. They are also one of a group of writers (of fiction, poetry, and theory) that also affected my view of the world (and humanity).

My immediate response to Rao’s post was that I love reading a good polemic even if I disagree with parts of it. I think in some respects “Discworld Rules” is a good polemic. It strikes me as coming straight from the heart, written with passion and concern by someone who wants to make a difference. He states his purpose early on, claiming that The Lord of the Rings is “brain-rot for technologists,” and if they’d just read Pratchett, they (technologists) and (I presume) the world, or perhaps “their thinking about the world,” would be better.)³

Discworld Rules

This post is an extended argument that as a lens for thinking about the world, The Lord of the Rings, is a work that you should “not set aside lightly, but throw across the room with great force,” and that in place of Middle Earth, you should install Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

I won’t get into whether Discworld is better or worse as a fictional universe than Middle Earth. That is a matter of taste and which elements of craft you admire. But as an allegory for technology and society, Discworld is so radically, vastly superior, and LOTR is so terminally bad, it is not even a contest.

The thing is, other than agreeing that “Discworld rules,” I disagree with the majority of Rao’s argument (i.e. I don’t think Middle-earth, or Tolkien, the author, drools.). Nor do I blame Tolkien for what the technologists think or do in the world. And, getting right down to the nitty-gritty, I do not think any work of fiction causes “brain rot” (any more than a work of fiction [all on its own] somehow enobles a reader; and yes, I have grave doubts about the recent iteration of that sort of thinking because I doubt “reading [fiction] makes you more empathetic.”⁴

I did not comment on the post, especially after reading the other comments, because I am fairly sure I am not Rao’s audience and that we inhabit completely different worlds (both in the Primary World and in our perspectives on fictional texts). I do admit, as a long-time (65-ish years!) reader and fan of sff, I do have a few Thoughts of my own on what the technology dudes (who may or may not be the Rao’s “technologists”) have done and are doing in the world, especially in fucking 2025.

I admit those thoughts are not particularly developed, mostly coming down to “what the fuck makes you think those books are instruction manuals, DUDE!”) [using Rao’s concept, I’d be willing to accept the answer of “pre-existing brain-rot” as opposed to blaming Tolkien’s fiction for causing “brain-rot.”]⁵

These excerpts make me think that Rao and I might possiby sort of more or less agree on that aspect of things:

I’ve thought about this a lot in the last few months, and I’ve concluded the whole program [AKA “meme a revanchist Great Power world back into existence” apparently one based on LotR, Ayn Rand, and Girard] is in fact exactly as stupid as it sounds, and will fail in profoundly stupid ways, doing a lot of irreversible damage (Brexit was a small scale model of what’s in store for us here in the US).

Agree!

But then he says:

But to some extent I’ve made my peace with what’s coming, and have no desire to convince you that this is where things are headed. If you’ve bought into that, have fun being miserable in Middle Earth.

HUH? First, I haven’t made my peace with it (whatever that means), but I also don’t see their extremely stupid plan resulting in anything I would recognize as “Middle-earth” (although it all depends on how you interpret the novels, and which PART of Middle-earth).⁶

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The Whole Web Thing involves a lot of reading what different people read Tolkien’s work and what they think it means *means* and how they respond to it compared to how I read, think, and respond. And once you get out of the “either/or” (or the good/bad binary), things (I think) become a lot more interesting.

My expanded response to Rao’s essay is directly connected to my current Web project in the sense that my theory of why my reading/interpretations of Tolkien’s work (and probably also Pratchett’s since the main interest I have in his work is NOT the worldbuilding/technology) differs notably from Rao’s (and from that of a whole bunch of other people’s ideas, mostly but not entirely men’s ideas).⁷

My theory for the differences has nothing to do with how the texts are written, but with the theory of how people read (in the sense of making meaning of the text). This theory makes sense to me in large part because I taught English classes (literature, theory, business writing, and creative writing) for over three decades.

It is fairly simple to state the theory, but complications arise once you start delving into it: different readers interpret (and evaluate) books based primarily on their own experiences. Part of that theory (sometimes called reader response, sometimes reception theory) involves the complicated concept of reader communities that are one part of how we read/interpret texts.⁸

Nobody has explained the results of this theory in operation better than Verlyn Flieger (I consider her one of the three founding scholars of Tolkien studies) in her brilliant essay, “The Arch and the Keystone” which I highly recommend reading in its entirety.

However, if you don’t have time, here’s my favorite paragraph from it.

And the main point (italicized in the paragraph below) to keep in in mind to understand my approach (to Tolkien, to Rao, and to, well, a lot of things) is” “when we look at Tolkien we are likely to see ourselves, and thus to find in his work what we want to see. This is as true of his most devoted fan as of his nastiest critic.”⁹

We have pasted labels on him, called him a medievalist, a modernist, a post-modernist, a royalist, a fascist, a misogynist, a feminist, a racist, an egalitarian, a realist, a romantic, an optimist, a pessimist. He’s been variously characterized as homophobic and homo-social in both work and life. His fiction has been interpreted as Boethian, Manichean, Augustinian and Aquinian. He’s been typed as a radical and a conservative, a Christian apologist and a pagan, a Catholic who believed in Fairyland, a monarchist who exalted little people, a Tory whose political views leaned toward anarchy (Letters #52, p. 63). The fact that all these labels can find a fit only adds to the confusion. . . .when we look at Tolkien we are likely to see ourselves, and thus to find in his work what we want to see. This is as true of his most devoted fan as of his nastiest critic. It is as true of me as it is of Edmund Wilson or Germaine Greer. Or, I dare say, of Peter Jackson. But the result is that the more I read about Tolkien the less homogenous a figure I find. What I find instead is increasing fragmentation and polarization. Everybody has their own private Tolkien--more Tolkiens than you can shake a stick at (8-9, emphasis added).

All the readers who see different Tolkiens exist in communities that have, in part, influenced what labels we use. One of Rao’s reader communities is, I suspect, fellow (?) technologists. Or the ones he thinks have avoided the stupid “brain-rot” of using Tolkien’s novel to understand the world.

One of the most important differences I have with Rao is that I don’t believe any book can, or should be, read as or given the status of the “allegory for society and technology” (in the sense of being a model, I guess?), or that a book can somehow be the primary cause of “brain-rot” although I’m not sure if Rao is arguing LOTR causes brain-rot; or that brain-rotted technologists somehow seize upon the book for "an allegory” to live their lives by; or that something else is at work.

It seems likely that one of Rao’s inspirations for this post was how a bunch of the Silicon Valley Fascists name their companies after some of Tolkien’s technology, but that raises the questions of why Rao doesn’t call them fascists (or authoritarians, or oligarchs, etc.) as opposed to the general but more neutral term “technologists.” I guess it’s possible he does consider them oligarchs (but is appealing to other “technologists,” which he defines in some other way).¹⁰

If my guess is accurate, then fair enough—I was disgusted to learn that JD Vance (who came out of Silicon Valley and is connected at the hip to Peter Thiel and the other technofascists—credits LotR with developing his “conservative view” of the world. But I don’t think that even if he had somehow avoid reading Tolkien, his view/ideology would be that different (although apparently he zipped pretty fast from condemning Trump as Hitler to sucking up to him in every way possible, so who knows). And I doubt Trump (and many of his minions) ever read LotR so where did their “brain-rot” or fascist tendencies come from?

I doubt any of that group is going to sit down to read Terry Pratchett to “correct” their Tolkien/Rand/Girard-influenced views of the world and technology (they’re too busy trying to destroy everything to make themselves lords of their own corporate controlled nation-states). Even if somehow somebody convinced them to read a Terry Pratchett, there’s no guarantee they’d get the same “message” (allegory?) out of it that Rao does.

Speaking of which, those of you who read Pratchett, what is the one you would recommend people start with? I asked my friend who gave the presentation that got me hooked on Pratchett for a starting place, and he recommended Small Gods which is a pretty damn good place to start, I thought. If he’d suggested a Rincewind one, I’m not sure I’d have kept reading.

Some of us in Tolkien studies (who draw on Marxist, feminist, critical race, queer, and intersectional theories to analyze Tolkien’s work which we love while acknowledging its problematic aspects) are finally calling some of those people out (not for reading Tolkien wrong, but for, you know, trying to destroy everyone’s rights and lives).

See: Robert Tally’s Tolkien's Deplorable Cultus and my posts that link to sources on far-right extremism. For years, the Tolkien scholars have been ignoring white supremacist fans/readers, or dismissing them as reading Tolkien “wrong.” That stance is dangerous nowadays: the Tolkien fans who are in conservative and far-right ideologies have been around for decades as a friend of mine, Craig Franson, who studies the far-right appropriations of Tolkien’s work has been analyzing for a book he is writing.

I don’t know if Rao is aware that non-technological christo-fascists fascists are also fans of Tolkien, and not just in the U.S., or if Rao is aware that the fascist lurve for Tolkien is just part of their appropriation of an imaginary Pure White Manly Male Past of the Classical period, especially the Romans, and of the Medieval period, especially the Crusades. Even if the technologists took Rao’s advice and read Pratchett and, I guess, began agreeing with Rao, that wouldn’t solve the problem Rao identifies.

I do know that classicists and medievalists in recent years have been reporting on their current work which presents a much different (AKA “not White”) view of their respective historical periods and cultures (often facing death threats as a result).

But that’s a whole other complex topic, and my main critique of Rao’s discussion of Tolkien and Pratchett’s work is the how he completely ignores the existence of female characters in Tolkien’s and Pratchett’s worlds, and the (implied) absence of, well, women (technologists or otherwise) in this whole discussion. I have another post in the draft stage about this phenomenon in other contexts—it’s not at all original to Rao, or unique to fantasy; it’s part of the kyriarchy.

In his discussion of Tolkien vs. Pratchett, Rao cites “Chiang’s Law” which is described at length in the first issue of Protocolized: Stories, Studies, Science (of which Rao is an editor/founder/contributor) which grew out of the “Summer of Protocols”¹¹ Protocolized explains that:

We hope to do for protocols what Astounding magazine, one of our inspirations, did for science fiction and technological literacy in its 1940s golden age. Or what the Whole Earth Catalog did for technology-adjacent counterculture in the late 60s and 70s.

How that goal seems to get applied in the “Discworld Rules” piece is that those who aren’t content to be miserable in Middle-earth can read this piece and “truly learn to think in pluralist there-are-many-alternatives ways. . . . with the rules of Discworld.”

If by “pluralism” Rao means how to avoid the “Chosen One” script that he claims (without much evidence) that Tolkien’s work is based on. By the way, I don’t disagree that some people, almost entirely men, do start to consider themselves the Chosen Ones after reading Tolkien, as does the author of a brilliant post that I recommended a while back, argues. Tony Ginocchio’s “The Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence” (in his Substack, Grift of the Holy Spirit,” is written to argue that JD Vance’s appropriation of LotR means it’s time for Cathlics, especially, to replace Tolkien’s novel “as the definitive Catholic fantasy epic” with Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series.

I tried to choose a few paragraphs to quote here, but as Ginocchio points out, the series is “insanely more complicated” than a plot summary can convey, so, you know, if you haven’t read Wolfe’s series (I did years ago, appreciated it was one of the most brilliant works of speculative fiction every written, and could never re-read because of the torture element).¹² But I highly recommend reading Gnocchio’s post for a good argument about an entirely DIFFERENT work that should “replace” Tolkien’s for Catholics at least (since I’m not Catholic—lukewarm Presbyterian childhood, wiccan for a couple of decades, then atheist but still an animist because of Tolkien—I don’t have to choose “either/or” and don’t). I think that some of the technologists might benefit from reading Gene Wolfe’s series although perhaps in a different way than Ginocchio images for Catholics.

Back to my main critique of Rao’s argument: ignoring ALL the female characters and women generally.¹³

So, by my quick count, his essay is 6234 words long (I cut/pasted it into a Word document for word count, FYI, but did not save it). With his focus on the Great Chosen Manly Hero. who is all he can see in Tolkien, Rao makes no mention whatsoever of female characters (yeah, right, I know “there are more male than female characters in Tolkien, blah blah blah sexist,”—men have been pointing that out for decades while claiming “feminists hate Tolkien”). And all that pointing out proves that a lot of men suck at paying attention to what women (let alone feminists!) say about . . . .anything.

Edith Crowe pointed out in 1996 that, especially when you look at The Silmarillion, the question of “Power in Arda” is a bit more complicated than many readers acknowledge. It’s not just all about “Great/Chosen Men.” The theme of renouncing power is an important one (plus, there are different types of power):

Abstract: Power and renunciation of power has long been recognised as an important theme in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. This paper will examine the issue of power with particular attention to Riane Eisler's dominator/ partnership model of power relations and the power within/power over dichotomy. It will consider the sources of power: spiritual, political, physical; and how these are wielded by the various peoples and individuals of Middle-earth.

I consider this essay to be the first feminist essay on Tolkien’s legendarium (because Crowe identifies herself as a feminist, and she uses a feminist theorist).

Here is her concluding paragraph which knocks the stereotype that to be a feminist is to hate Tolkien into a cocked hat:¹⁴

This, then, is why I conclude that a person of feminist persuasion, while not necessarily agreeing with Tolkien’s attitudes in toto, can find much to appreciate in his work. Arda is a world in which females share power in spiritual and temporal realms, although not always to the degree one might wish. More importantly, it is a world in which attitudes and values associated in the Primary World with the feminine are highly valued. Indeed, these “feminine values” triumph at the end of the Third Age, though not always incarnate in female bodies. Though Tolkien’s road was his interpretation of Christianity, and Eisler’s (and mine) our interpretation of feminism, the destination seems to have a great deal in common. Our mutual task in the Fourth Age is to resist the temptation to divide and dominate, whether we characterize this misuse of power as that of the Blade or the Ring. May Varda look with favour upon our efforts. (277, emphasis added)

And there have been a lot of women (and a few men) (and nonbinary and genderqueer readers and critics) writing feminist, gender, and queer approaches to and about Tolkien’s work—since 1971!

Now the profession of “technologist” has for much, if not all, of its existence, done its best to exclude/ignore/drive out and erase, women technologists (coffcoff Ada Lovelace coffcoff) so I am not particularly surprised by Rao’s focus on the male characters in Tolkien and, mostly, in his discussion of Pratchett).¹⁵

Rao does mention a *few* female characters, mostly in a 69-word-paragraph (out of over 6000 words) sort of about the witches in Discworld:

The Witches novels, featuring a milieu of witches in the countryside, with Granny Weatherwax as the no-nonsense elder. Like the wizards of Unseen University, they too don’t really make much actual use of magic, preferring to solve problems through wisdom and skeptical common sense, frequently battling Chosen One ambitions in their own ranks. They hold the wizards of Unseen University in affectionate contempt, as wild theorists doing weird experiments.

And I cannot help but note that of the three whole sentences devoted to this not very important topic, two start with the the wizards at the Unseen University [only men allowed]. Now, as a faculty brat, and graduate student, and then a tenured academic [in one of those nasty cultural marxist feminist postmodernism queer disciplines, AKA “literature”], I freely admit that I *adore* the skewering of academia in the UU novels

BUT, I am also quite aware that Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Magrat Garlick, Agnes Nitt, and *YES* Tiffany Aching are doing a whole lot of important work in their communities in Ramtops and on the Chalk that is completely fucking missed/ignored/dismissed here where they are described only in relation to the wizards (and only as a group, with only the “leader,” Granny Weatherwax being named).

And a careful reader engaging fully with all the “Witches” novels might notice some important developments (evolutions?) about the witches (and the wizards) and constructions of gender and power generally throughout the various sub-series.

But to fully see that, the careful reader would have to read Tiffany’s series which Rao never did.

From The Discworld Wiki:

Pratchett said that Tiffany Aching "...started with a girl lying down by a river, on the first page of The Wee Free Men". In his youth, Pratchett was "fascinated" by a nearby chalk pit, and like Tiffany knew how to read words before being able to pronounce them. The Wee Free Men features "a lot of [his] past" in its descriptions. A lot of Tiffany's understanding of the world is based on Pratchett's own experiences. Pratchett said, "It sounds amateurish to say that characters invent themselves, and in truth they don't. That's just a short-hand phrase. Of course the author invents them. But while the creative channel is being held open, all sorts of memories and thoughts creep out, somewhat to the owner's surprise." With Tiffany, Pratchett wanted to "restate" the purpose of magic on the Discworld and the relationship between wizards, witches and others. He included ideas of responsibility and "guarding your society" as he felt it drew closer to the reality of a witch – that is, "the village herbalist, the midwife, the person who knew things". Throughout the series, Tiffany grows both as a young girl and woman and as a witch. Pratchett chose a young protagonist because when you're young "you have to learn". He chose the name "Tiffany" because it evoked anything but a powerful witch. Given Tiffany's relationship with Preston, the doctor in the final book, The Shepherd's Crown, it would have been interesting to see what Pratchett did with the historical dichotomy between doctors and the village witch but unfortunately that was not to be (emphasis added).

The excerpt above is the opening paragraph in the fan wiki: there’s much more in the article. Anyone who hasn’t read Tiffany Aching’s books perhaps because of the stereotype that they’re childish/for children [I believe Tolkien warned us about somewhere!] might want to read this excellent article and re-consider their life choices.

In addition to the 69 words, a few other references appear (very brief):

• Granny Weatherwax is mentioned twice (in lists of major/important characters, all the others being male).

• Tiffany Aching (one of my many favorites) is mentioned once when Rao says that her series is the only sub-series in the Discworld that he didn’t read (OK THEN!). The built-in punishment for anyone who does not read Tiffany’s series is that they are, all unbeknownst to them, not only missing nout on Tiffany Aching, but also on the majority of the Discworld books in which the Nac Mac Feegle appear!

• And, finally, there’s slighting reference to Margaret Thatcher (in context of neoliberalism because no manly men/technologist? ever promoted it). Now I remember Margaret Thatcher and have friends in the UK and know something about the impact of her policies, but it’s not as if she operated in isolation from or was uniquely different from oh, Ronald Raygun, and other neoliberal dudes in politics. But let’s blame the woman, right? If it’s not neoliberalism, it’s an apple.

Rao does note the systemic racism of Middle-earth which is more than many do:

Revealingly, Roundworld isn’t even modeled in the Middle Earth cosmology, except via vaguely racist and lazy allusions (In Middle Earth, I’m presumably one of those turbaned men-from-the-east riding an Oliphaunt and uncritically allied with Sauron).

But he doesn’t acknowledge Discworld novels where Pratchett deconstructs British colonialism and racism (Rao devotes whole sections to “Gods and Monks” (not all the gods are male/masculine, of course, but that’s not acknowledged); the Elves (no mention of the Queen of the Elves, I notice!), and a section on Discworld is about how it evolves, and the technology (which isn’t wrong—it does—but is very limited).

Rao’s focus on technology reminds me of a quote from a review essay by Joanna Russ who wrote extensive criticism about science fiction (mostly published in in sf magazines but some in academc journals).

This quote comes from her essay, “The Image of Women in Science Fiction,” [published in 1970 in The Red Clay Reader; reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews.

In science fiction, speculaton about social institutions and individual psychology has always lagged far behind spculation about technology, possibly because technology is easier to understand than people (p. 207).

That might be something that people who are aiming at re-creating the effect of the 1940s Astounding might want to think about.

While it may make sense that Rao doesn’t bother to acknowledge any of the female characters in Tolkien, anyone familiar with all of the Discworld novels should see that Pratchett’s Discworld evolves more than Tolkien’s in regard to the scope and development of female characters.¹⁶ Here’s a fan wiki list of the Female characters in Discworld.

There are ninety entries.

Ninety.

Rao only considers one (or two if you count Tiffany!) of them important enough to mention in over 6000 words. I have to stop writing this stack now (it’s been worked on for days) but at some point, I am promising myself to write about all the female characters in Pratchett that I adore, just to get it out (I already did a bunch of posts in the “Web” series on Éowyn, and I might add some of Ioreth and Berúthiel (I was never that much a fan of the Elven characters; in fact, although I’m sure it’s blasphemy for some of the Elven fans, I really *liked* the Galadriel in The Hobbit best of all the “Galadriels”).

So, yeah, here we are, in very different worlds.

And the ultimate irony (and really my very first response to reading this polemic), is that Terry Pratchett was in fact a FAN of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work.

Pratchett wrote a fan letter to Tolkien which appears in the recent Pratchett biography (the original of which I read at the 2018 Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibition at the Bodleian at Oxford).

John Rateliff, who wrote a brilliant essay on how Tolkien scholarship (misled to some extent by Carpenter’s biography), has ignored the importance of a number of women (family, friends, and students) of Tolkien’s,¹⁷ posted a transcription of Pratchett’s letter to Tolkien at Sacnoth’s Scriptorium

I don't know what there was in it that moved me to write this letter. It was something that 'The Lord of the Rings' never possessed except in very short measure, that feeling of recognition. You said something in 'Smith' which I hope I grasped, and there was a feeling almost of recognition. An odd feeling of grief overcame me when I read it. I cannot explain my feelings any clearer. It was like hearing a piece of misic from way back, except that it was nearer poetry by Graves's definition. Thank you very much for writing it.

Granted, Pratchett felt a strong identification with “Smith of Wootton Major,” not LotR, but later in life, he made a brilliant observation about the importance of Tolkien’s work to fantasy literature (presumably including his own!):¹⁸

J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.

So here we are at the end (not of all things! though it may feel like it) of this post! I wish I had some stunning conclusion—but, maybe not, given the whole web thing, I dan say this piece is one more strand of the web and links to some others in terms of different receptions of “Tolkien.”

1. I am totally not the audience for this post (or for others I saw when I skimmed through Rao’s Stack). I am not sure what/who he means by “technologists” (I may be assuming too much but I assume the mostly male people, who work in tech-related, meaning computer and programming types of jobs). He does talk about how the "actual, serious technologist[s]” should look to:

Discworld . . . for clues about how the world works, how it evolves in response to technological forces, and how humans should engage with those forces. It is catnip for actual technological curiosity, as opposed to validation of incuriously instrumental approaches to technology. If on the other hand, you’re really just a fantasist larping Chosen One stories bolstered by specious Straussian conceits, trying to meme your hyperstitional theory fictions into existence for a while, looting the commons with private-equity extraction engines until you get your Girardian comeuppance — by all means go for it. Though Margaret Thatcher and Neoliberalism are both dead, There Is No Alternative (TINA) — for you.

Rao also identifies politicians and economists as readers who “might identify with the [LotR] story,” only to dismiss them as people who:

enjoy little to no direct technological agency, harbor ridiculous Chosen One conceits, and operate in domains — political narratives and the dismal pseudoscience of economics — that are natural intellectual monopolies or oligopolies. Domains that allow fantasies to be memed into existence (the technical term is hyperstitional theory-fictions) for a while before they come crashing down to earth in flames, demonstrating yet again that no, you do not in fact get to create your own reality; that “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”

So, the phrase “hyperstitional theory-fictions” caught my attention and I searched for it to find this article from 2020 that provides some information (which I don’t have time to focus on at this point, so that’s why I’m noting it here and might alert some friends to it for later discussion [yes, the internet is full of rabbit holes]) about the theory: “Hyperstitional Theory Fiction.” I’m not sure how “hyperstitional theory fiction” or words from such fictions differ from language in general given that the linguistics courses I’ve had make it pretty clear that language does a crummy job of “representing reality” (Language vs. Reality).

2. I would argue that Pratchett’s novels got a lot better later on; I also think that any implication that the “rules” of Discworld [what Rao calls “clues about how the world works, how it evolves in response to technological forces, and how humans should engage with those forces”] changed a good deal over the course of the developing series, as did some of the characters (Granny Weatherwax in Equal Rites changes over the Witches novels/series, I think, and there is the sense of that accumulated characterization that comes from a series that is impossible to achieve in a single novel).

I found the earliest Discworld ones (especially with Rincewind) rather tooth-grindingly irritating (except for the Luggage; I love the Luggage; I would happily give the Luggage a home although I might worry a bit about how it will get along with my cat at times). OTOH, Hild, my cat, while still fairly young faced down and smacked around two terrier-chihuahua mixes:

Audrey (white & apricot) and Daisy (tri-color), the two TERRORS of the universe. But not of Hild.

Hild, the Majestic:

3. It even, for its genre (polemic, remember) has a bit of nuance, but it goes wrong for me about the time the “extended allegory” hoves into view:

As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.

I am *not* an allegory fan (with Tolkien on that one—applicability is so much better). I also think Pratchett’s work falls more into satire and parody than allegory, but litcrits have been debating the (fuzzy) boundaries of genre terms for decades now without resolution, so that’s just me.

I also think Rao is more optimistic than I after the effect of prescribed reading on people’s brains, but that’s probably because of my 35 years of teaching (and my mumble years before that in academia as a student).

4. Doubts being mostly about the over-generalized/overstated claims that is typically how the media conveys the results of scientific studies as well as the problem of identifying causality, plus the long-standing nature vs nurture debate that is, I suspect, impossible to solve, and how little I suspect we know of how human beings work (and how much some people think we know). See: How Does Reading Influence Empathy? And recently, as often happens these days, I found this great stack by Noah Berlatsky on “Fiction Cultivates Empathy, Not Morality (They aren’t the same thing),” which he opens by citing a passage from Lyta Gold’s excellent Dangerous Fictions (which I have read and second his recommendation) where she illustrates the “Empathy Industrial Complex” by a case where a neo-Nazi defendent’s white supremacism (which I’d classify as brain-rot) was not “cured” by reading classic British literature. I don’t have anything that dramatic, just as I mentioned above decades of teaching in English classes.

5. I may have purchased a *blue* baseball cap with the message “Make Orwell Fiction Again” earlier this year which I wear when walking the two Terrors of the Universe.

6. See, I’m all about the Middle-earth that the 15th Century Feminist describes in her Substack in this brilliant post “Lord of the Rings: A Feminist Manifesto for the Boys!

7. I specify plural readings/interpretations because they have changed over! the 60 years I’ve been reading/re-reading Tolkien’s work (and although I stopped for a while during my Angry Young Feminist period, I *never* threw his books across the room!).

Speaking of different interpretations of Tolkien and Pratchett, let me highly recommend Christopher Lockett’s brilliant in memoriam post, “The Magical Humanism of Terry Pratchett,” in his Substack, The Magical Humanist, not to mention recommending his Stack period! The post contains a lovely comparison of Tolkien’s and Pratchett’s worldbuilding elements that I’m posting here to encourage you to Go. Read. The. Whole. Post:

The most elemental difference between Tolkienesque fantasy and Discworld (and, indeed, a critical mass of contemporary fantasy¹⁰) is essentially structural—a basic inversion of this extrinsic ordering logic. The most significant example of what I mean by this is Sir Terry’s reversal of the relationship between the divine and the temporal: gods are not transcendent and eternal, nor do they create the mortals who worship them. Instead, the gods’ existence is predicated on human belief. Which is to say, gods come into existence by way of people’s imaginative leaps of faith, and they gain strength, power, and status in direct proportion to the strength and fervour of people’s belief. By the same token, gods can wither and fade when that belief ebbs, or, in the case of Small Gods (1992), becomes corrupted into unthinking instrumentalist doctrine (the formerly Great God Om starts the novel so diminished that he is trapped in the body of a lowly tortoise).

This contingent nature of the Discworld gods exemplifies how Sir Terry allegorizes the mechanisms of reality-building. Gods existing as a function of people’s beliefs rather than as an eternal, transcendent Real stands in for the innumerable little concrete realities governing our lives that are, in fact, collective consensual hallucinations: currency, national borders, place names, jurisprudence, constitutional democracy, and so on.

8. For a great discussion of how the “1960’s Tolkien readers” community has been mishandled by Tolkien critics and scholars attempting to write about those darned hippies, I highly recommend Martin Barker’s brilliant essay:

Barker, Martin. "On Being a 1960s Tolkien Reader." From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, edited by Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance, Rodopi, 2006, pp. 81-99, Contemporary Cinema 3. (A public full-text version can be downloaded from this site.)

I was also a 1960s Tolkien reader (in that I was ten in 1965, living in small-town Idaho, when I first read The Lord of the Rings. That was an incredibly different reading community than the hippies or Martin Barker experienced.

9. My reading of reception/reader response theory leads me to expand Verlyn’s observation to Terry Pratchett, and, probably, if I get going to just about everything we read (with the possible exception of grocery lists!). I’ve taught enough non-fiction texts (literary essays, analytical essays, theory essays, etc.) to know that people “see” very different arguments and ideas in those as well. It’s a fascinating phenomenon to watch although as a teacher I had to first convince my students that I would not, in fact, punish them for not reading the assignment “right” (many were flabbergasted at the start that I refused to tell them what the “hidden meaning” of the text WAS so they could write it down! And then I made them talk about it—mostly in small groups at first, then in a larger class discussion. And then, even worse, I made them write about it instead of giving them a quiz or test).

10. On the other hand, there’s this paragraph in which Rao outright names Peter Thiel but also describes him as a “legit genius who just happens to have bought into a really stupid version of the world,” apparently caused by Middle-earth brain-rot supplemented by Ayn Rand and Rene Girard although somehow “it [? whatever the fuck ‘it’ is] takes real genius to buy into" that “version of the world”:

If you double down on the LOTR brainrot, and add things like Ayn Rand and Rene Girard to the soup, you get a profoundly stupid vision of the world that it takes real genius to buy into. Which is what, as it happens, a lot of real geniuses (and I don’t mean this snarkily — Peter Thiel is a legit genius who happens to have bought into a really stupid vision of the world) have in fact done as of 2025, as they try to meme a revanchist Great Power world back into existence.

I never read Ayn Rand because I had to suffer through several good friends becoming major fans when we were in college (undergraduate and graduate) and telling me all about how It Changed Them; they later recovered, thank the Discworld gods. I don’t know Girard’s work, but from some recent stuff I’ve read about it being used in the context of Tolkien studies (WE’RE EVERYWHERE!), equating Girard and Rand seems a bit simplistic: see this great post on Lyle Enright’s “Religion for Losers,” one of my favorite Substacks: René Girard, J. D. Vance, and You. Apparently Vance name-drops Girard just as he did Tolkien, but that does not mean either of the two writers share his politics (and it’s complicated to read a text, especially but not only a fictional one, and assign what you perceive to be its politics to the author).

11. Which is somehow tied to/about research into “universal principles” about “protocols”:

The Summer of Protocols (SoP) is a seasonal research program that supports the study of protocols in and across fields. In late 2022, the Ethereum Foundation, which helps maintain the core blockchain protocol of the same name, commissioned the program in order to broaden their understanding of protocols and how to manage them. The program directors had a hunch, which would be affirmed, that there were some universal principles underlying protocols in fields as disparate as internet architecture, coal mining, and diplomacy.

The Summer of Protocols is an ongoing research and evangelism effort that aims to catalyze broad interest in the study of protocols as a first-class concept for thinking about the world.

It’s just me, perhaps, but people claiming “universal principles” and “evangelism efforts” make me rather nervous although I admit I don’t understand what they are doing (nor do I want to read the free 300-page pdf manifesto they offer). Here is their Call for Applications for SoP 2025.

12. On the other hand, Ginocchio’s concluding paragraph is so damn good and on-point that I am going to put it here in this nifty discursive note:

We need fewer Tolkien Catholics and more Gene Wolfe Catholics. I am literally the only person brave enough to say this. If you become a Tolkien Catholic, you run the risk of thinking that God has chosen you to do something great, that you are at the center of the story, that you need to form your fellowship and begin your journey to vanquish Sauron, however you define that. In the bleakest, darkest version of that scenario, you decide to enter American politics because of what you learned from Tolkien, you read a story about powerlessness and decide that you need to build up power for yourself, power like all the cool swords and big trees in the book. It is only once you become a Gene Wolfe Catholic, and try and fumble your way through all of the allusions and references and the different parts of the world that snap into place way later than you’d expect, that you get closer to the truth: that there’s a bunch of crazy shit happening around you at all times that you barely comprehend, that you live in a world trying to teach everyone to torture each other, and that the only thing you will be remembered for is whether you showed mercy to the person who begged it from you. I will never be Aragorn, or Gandalf, or even Frodo. None of us should assume we are any of those characters. We are all Severian.

Good advice although since, in my decades of reading Tolkien, I never for a single moment thought I was or likely to be or would want to be a “Chosen One,” I don’t feel any guilt (heh) at continuing to read and enjoy the “Tolkien” I know and love. (When I was ten, I identified mostly with Frodo because he was short and the Men treated him and the others as children—and while I didn’t identify with Éowyn, I was madly in love with her [and mad she married Faramir]. Nowadays, I tend to feel a great deal for Ioreth! But never Gandalf or Aragorn!)

13. Rao also completely excludes/ignores Pratchett’s Dwarves, and mostly the Night Watch (in his “City Watch” paragraph, he mostly talks about Sam Vimes, the leader of the Watch, who may not be a “Chosen One” but seems to show Rao has a habit of focusing on the “Leaders” (“Great Man”) (although a huge amount of what Pratchett does is deconstruct/subvert that epic/heroic trope!).

Now, it’s impossible to cover, even in summary, ALL the complexities and characters that exist in the 41 Discworld novels—one of the reasons I’ve never tried to write scholarship on Pratchett! Another reason is I want to keep some stuff just for fun reading, not also “work” although I find writing scholarship fun most of the time. But Rao’s discussion of the “rules” (instead of the “characters” that Rao claims Tolkien’s fantasy is built around) of the Discworld seems to devolve into focusing on certain characters. And although I’m not sure if “rules” in the sense that Ted Chiang argues, and Rao cites, applies to worldbuilding principles, there is a good deal of recent excellent scholarship on Tolkien’s worldbuilding/rules!

14. Some feminists I have known do dislike Tolkien’s work intensely (most simply do not read it rather than writing intense screeds about how much they hate it, unlike certain male critics), and, it’s trivially easy to find essays by men who find Tolkien’s work simply dreadful, and always has been, but I never hear anybody saying, oh yes, men hate Tolkien. In a misogynistic culture, men get to be individuals; women (or feminists) get to be a mostly indistinguishable hive-mind.

15. And were I letting my inner snark completely loose, I would point out that Raro’s replacement for the terrible no-good awful bad Tolkien is another white, straight, English man. And Rao’s only reference to one of the most well-known fantasy writers, although she also wrote science fiction (period, not just well-known women writers), Ursula K. Le Guin is in a comparison to another white male Scottish writer (Iain Banks). So, yeah, no women apparently allowed in this treehouse, or this protocol.

16. This claim is a bit shaky: there are more female characters and more powerful ones, in The Silmarillion (1977), but Tolkien did not publish that despite decades of trying; his son, Christopher, put together an edited version after Tolkien died, and then moved on to trying to give a sense of the scope of his father’s decades-long writing process in The History of Middle-earth (which is a curated archive, with notes, rather than a novel, although later he did novelize some of the “Major Tales.” But I think that’s a very different effect than Pratchett’s publications (and having read all of them, many multiple times, I can say that the scope, variety, and depth of the female characters changed over the years!).

17. Rateliff, John. "The Missing Women: J. R. R. Tolkien's Lifelong Support for Women's Higher Education." Perilous and Fair, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan, Mythopoeic Press, 2015, pp. 41-69.

Here’s a blog post by John, referencing his essay, but also another “missing woman”!

18. I found Pratchett’s quote reproduced in a brilliant post on Tolkien & Pratchett by Marcel R. Bülles (a Tolkienist whose blog I always enjoy and have linked to before, specifially in one of my most popular stacks, "Misquoting Tolkien"): “Tolkien & Pratchett: A Tale of Two Great Authors.” I’m seeing that there are a number of us who are fans of Tolkien AND Pratchett!