The Vibes Around "Tolkien"
LotR:ROP & FRE Fans so not totally GOOD vibrations
Have some more links with relatively (for me!) few and short comments after the introduction.
As usual, this post is too long for email!
Part 2: FRE Academics, Think-Tanks, and Politics
Am suddenly seeing the word “vibes” all over the internet these days—though apparently it’s been around long enough for The Guardian to write about it over a year ago. I am old enough that yes, my first response to seeing it was being earwormed by The Beach Boys (link leads to Wikipedia article on the song because I hate clicking on links and being slammed by a loud video!).
However, the more I thought about it (and the more I see it used in the context of the current election year, especially in the media discussions of the campaigns and recent debate), the more I was reminded of one of the major features of my autist’s brain: my tendency to see that *hands waving* EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED!!11!!1
*Points to stock photo above* That is just how I think about things: ALL the things connect! And my visual for how I see my brain working is, yep, a spider web (although I must admit that the Pepe Silva meme which I only learned about fairly recently though I’ve seen on the internet for years) is not an inaccurate description of how I look/behave when Explaining All the Connections!
My own preferred metaphor for how I look/behave in the midst of an autism monologue was chosen decades before my diagnosis, in my twenties (late 1970s) when I was taking all the classes on the Romantic poets in my undergraduate program: and that metaphor is the very apt description of the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner! (Although both metaphors show how a certain mode of delivery seems gendered masculine . . . .now that I think about it).
So two of the threads of the web are current discussions of Rings of Power (not so much from professional critics for but from fans posting online), and how the issue of JD Vance’s Tolkien fannishness which goes hand in hand with his christo-fascist FRE politics connects to, well, the larger FRE threat in the world today.
One obvious connection is that the first season of the Amazon series was met with a major misogynistic-racist backlash against “diversity” by FRE fans who considered “Tolkien” to be their own private property! And yeah, that’s obvious (I don’t know if my sense that there are strong resonances (or vibes) between the clash over “Tolkien” and the centuries long conflicts over who gets to control “Shakespeare” is just me, or if others see it as well—feel free to discuss in comments!).
NOTE: Some of the Substack posts I link to below are doing a whole series on Season 2 and have already updated with newer posts since I started this post. I subscribe to all of them and recommend them to anyone interested in Tolkien. (Some are all text; some are podcasts; some are both!)
PART I: RINGS OF POWER
Outside Substack: This incredibly lovely discussion of how someone who had never read Tolkien’s fiction, and didn’t enjoy Jackson’s films all that much has suddenly found themselves more interested in the Film! characters, backgrounds, stories, after falling in love with the Amazon series: I Rewatched Fellowship Of The Ring After Loving Rings Of Power, And It Totally Changed My Mind About LOTR's Original Movies.
I *LOVE* Riley’s essay!
This phenomenon is not new, btw: Dawn Felagund has an excellent discussion of how Peter Jackson’s films (so.many.years.ago!) brought many fans to the books for the first time: Becoming Bookverse: Jackson's Films as an Initiation Point for Tolkien's Book Fandom.2
But the issue of how different viewers come to films that are adaptations with wildly different experiences is something worth keeping in mind (as is the fact that an adaptation cannot be made solely for the fans, although some seem to think it should be!).
I admit that as an fan who spent decades immersed in Tolkien’s fiction and who disliked the earlier films I never acknowledbe by name, I was not looking forward to the Amazon series. I was willing to give it a try because I wasn’t looking forward to the Jackson live-action films *either,* and then after I saw the first trailer in the theatre, I proceeded to see The Fellowship of the Rings 45 times before it left theatres plus added whole new layers of Tolkien scholarship to my academic writing!
I adid watch S1 because of how FRE fans of “Tolkien” reacted. I did not find it in the least enjoyable (I don’t “hate” it in any way, and found some of the characters interesting [Disa, Arondir mostly], but they weren’t enough to really keep me interested (plus Amazon’s/show-runners’ baby-steps toward “diversity” are just about what I expect from EvilCorporations—meaning, minimal and in theory trying not to upset thie white male fans that much).
Add in the fact that I’m neither a major SILM fan nor an Elf fan and am relatively unfamiliar with the chronology of the First and Second Ages, and I’m just not the ideal or intended audience for this adaptation.3
But, I love reading what fans who love the show have to say about it, and I’m having great fun reading those posts (including the ones I’ve linked to above!). Let’s just say I enjoy all the varied vibes around a text that is now part of the greater global “Tolkien” phenomenon, i.e. connected to all the things, even if I don’t much like that particular instance!
PART II: FRE ACADEMICS, FRE THINK TANKS, & FRE POLITICS
The Claremont Institute hove into my view a year ago (good grief, that long!) and was the topic of my post on “Misquoting Tolkien”. And here they are again—not that specific Fellow, and not specifically about their use of Tolkien, but the question of how, or even if, academic organizations should address the presence of far-right extremists who have been indicted for crimination actions attending their annual conferences.
“APSA” is the acronym for the American Political Science Association which seems to be the major national (international?) organization conference for political scientists. Another note: the indicted scholar in question is John Eastman.
I am interested in this issue because of previous events at one of the academic conferences I used to attend (and no longer do): a medievalists’ conference at Western Michigan University (although those events involved only one FRE scholar and one FRE activist—fewer think tanks in the humanities generally).
Before Covid-19 locked down a number of academic conferences, there was a fairly well publicized conflict over racisms, diversity, and inclusion between two medievalists. One of them moved the debate from academic spaces into the alt-right, sending her denunciation of the other to her friend, Milo Yiannopoulos, to be published on his site. Doxxing and harassment followed, as it increasingly does.
And, despite many people’s (and law enforcement’s) misguided ideas that online debates aren’t real / serious / threatening because it’s just words online, the academic brought Yiannapoulos to the medievalists’ conference.
The conference organizers were asked to take a very basic step to protect the first medievalist, a scholar of color, and they refused on the grounds of “academic and intellectual freedom.”
You can read more about that event here: Chaganty, Seeta. “Statement Regarding ICMS Kalamazo,” Medievalists of Color, 9 July 2018. (ICMS=International Congress on Medieval Studies; Western Michigan University is in Kalamazoo, Michigan).
The resulting fallout led to a number of medieval and renaissance scholars of color and their allies boycotting the Congress and establishing their own academic space at a university in Arizonia
RaceB4Race, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona State University.
RaceB4Race is an ongoing conference series and professional network community by and for scholars of color working on issues of race in premodern literature, history, and culture. RaceB4Race centers the expertise, perspectives, and sociopolitical interests of BIPOC scholars, whose work seeks to expand critical race theory.
The autism specialist who diagnosed me—when I was almost sixty!—firmly believed that the autists (and neurodivergent people generally) were “diagnosed” not because of completely unique/”alien” brain/mind features, but because those features, which are common to all human beings to varying degrees, were just, in some people, much stronger, often enough to cause major problems.
The Silmarillion Writer’s Guild is an independent fanworks archive (of some age, as appropriate for a site dedicated to The Silmarillion!). I am mostly there for the fan meta (aka: critical analysis and scholarship), but I think their policy concerning The Rings of Power is an a wonderful example of an existing “fandom” being willing to welcome the new fans who will come in through RoP while acknowledging the interests of the existing fans, not to mention confronting the issue of the problematic issue of Amazon’s violations of human rights.
OK a bit of a rant: In many ways, the pacing and plot elements seemed amateurish (and I keep thinking about how the showrunners were inexperienced yet still handed gazillions of dollars to play with). The pacing was uneven, and the storylines were jumbled. Add in what Mercury Natis accurately identifies as “de-queering” the Celebrimbor storyline, and my response was just, meh. Mostly, I was *bored* during about 80% of S1, and irritated during another 10%—I find Elrond absolutely obnoxious. And while I was very interested at first in the how they were planning to present Galadriel (armor! swords! fighting! making all the fanbois scream and pout), her characterization was incredibly disappointing for the most part. A Dreamwidth friend’s comment helped me realize the problem: the script by the writers, and how the male characters acted, especially the Elven ones, all treat her like she’s an out-of-control teenager (which you know, given her lineage and history in the FIrst Age is a pretty fucking stupid characterization.) Complex and flawed characters who learn from their errors and grow make compelling narratives—but that wasn’t what I was seeing (or, from what I’m reading now, likely to see). I may be wrong! Which is why I try to read as widely as possible.
Bret Devereaux’s historical-realist critique is one I completely agree with (and I also highly recommend all of his posts — which cover a range of popular culture texts): Why Rings of Power’s Middle Earth [sic] Feels Flat.
I’m not as grumpy as Erik Kain in Forbes, but I can see his point that screwing around with the timeline of Rings’s creation timelin doesn’t make any sense: ‘The Rings Of Power’ Season 2, Episode 5 Recap And Review: Another Slog Through A Jumbled Middle-earth.
And did they really copy more or less word for word a bunch of Tom Bombadil’s conversation with the hobbits and then port it into the Second Age???????????????????????
And yet Chris Rufo and his predecessors have successfully gotten us to believe that academia is rife with woke commie harpies who want nothing but to overthrow democracy and capitalism when the reality is most are being funded by and are actively courting the oligarchic right and far-right to solidify their weird plots making sure only *certain people* get to have college degrees or enter think tanks or *get put into positions of power*.