idrils reblogged
you guys are so annoying. why do i have to see discourse every year that's like "was tolkien really a woke king or was he your conservative uncle?" the guy was a devout catholic and a genteel misogynist who maintained lifelong friendships with queer people and women, and this isn't even paradoxical because that was part of the upper-class oxford culture he was immersed in. tolkien told the nazis to fuck off (and in doing so demonstrated a real understanding of what racism is and why it's harmful, beyond simply "these guys are bad news because they're who my country is at war with right now") but his inner life was marked by internalized racism that is deeply and inextricably woven into the art that he made. he foolishly described himself as an anarcho-monarchist, and it's kind of crazy to see people on this website passionately arguing that he likely never meaningfully engaged with anarchist theory, because...yeah, no shit, of course he didn't. tolkien didn't have to engage with most sociopolitical theory because as an upper-class englishman of his position, he was never affected by any of the issues that this theory is concerned with. what is plainly obvious from reading both his fiction and letters is that tolkien's ideal political system was that the divinely ordained god-king would rise up and rule in perfect justice and humility; he didn't want a government, he wanted a king arthur, even though (obviously) he was aware that outcome was impossible. why is it so hard for people to accept that he was just some guy! his letters aren't a code you have to crack. no amount of arguing or tumblr-level analysis is going to one day reveal a rhetorically airtight internally consistent worldview spanning jrrt's fiction, academic work, and personal writings, thereby "solving" the question of whether he was a woke king or your conservative uncle. his ideology was extremely inconsistent because, at the end of the day, he was just some guy.
suspension of disbelief isn’t enough i need to go back in time and stop Peter Jackson from making Gimli into solely a comic relief character when he is arguably the most well-spoken and poetic out of the whole fellowship
peer reviewed tags via @apollodrome
if anything gimli's humor is the most sarcastic of the fellowship "since gandalf's head is now sacred, let us find another one to cleave!" "we do not shape stone with battle-axes, nor with our finger-nails"
recommending the silm to people is like hey are you interested in a book where the world’s biggest battle that destroys the continent most of the story took place on is glossed over in two pages, most characters don’t have a single line of dialogue, many characters only have personalities in fanon, and also half the silm content isn’t actually in the silm and you have to scour through notes published across 14 different books
Anonymous asked:
can you do a Old luthien and beten moment?
Of course~
I apologize for the delay………. :,)
idrils reblogged
here have this grond meme that my partner made
idrils reblogged
alright mr. "what is a lamp post doing in Narnia"
idrils reblogged
one thing about Tolkien is that he never victim blamed women for the violence of men. the second kinslaying is never portrayed as Lúthien’s fault for not rewarding the men who kidnapped her with a Silmaril. the third is never portrayed as Elwing’s fault for not rewarding the men who destroyed her home and family with a Silmaril. the fall of Gondolin is never portrayed as Idril’s fault for not giving sex to her cousin.
and then I read takes on tungle dot com that are more sexist than a man born in the goddamn nineteenth century
idrils reblogged
To anyone who believes fairy tale romances never happen in real life, may I remind you that JRR and Edith Tolkien met and experienced a forbidden love in their youth, and then were separated for five whole years because of his guardian’s rules that he could not date till he was 21, and she got engaged to someone else only because she assumed he’d forgotten her and lost hope that she could ever be with him, but then on his 21st birthday, he wrote her a letter saying he still loved her and wanted to marry her, she responded basically saying ‘if I’d known you hadn’t left me on the shelf, I would never have said yes to anyone else,’ then a week later she greeted him at the train station and then immediately dumped her fiancé, and they got married and she converted to his religion and danced for him in a flowering field far away from the trenches into which he was drafted, which left such an impression that he crafted an entire story about the most beautiful maiden in the world who danced in the woods and made enormous sacrifices to be with the man she loved, and they had four kids and remained faithful to each other and blissfully grew old together and their gravestones are now marked with the names of that same fictional couple that he created, who broke every rule and overcame every possible obstacle to be together and get a happy ending, who only did all that because he based it all on their own real love story.
Obsessed with the fact that this really happened😳
When I was a student at Oxford, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were lecturing there, Lewis magnificently and Tolkien badly and inaudibly, and the climate of opinion was such that people explained Lewis’s children’s books by saying ‘It’s his Christianity, you know,’ as if the books were the symptom of some disease, while of Tolkien they said he was wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles…
I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid). I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every week how you could start with a simple quest-narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale – a story that still contains the excitement of the quest-narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.
– Diana Wynne Jones