Episode 161 -- The Lord of the Rings w/ Michael Lutz
"Tolkien is turning in his grave", Elon Musk tweeted on September 5, 2022 having watched (i.e. not watched) the first episode of Amazon's new series The Rings of Power. Whether it's a new Galadriel-centered TV-show, the Peter Jackson trilogies or just people writing fantasy a little differently: right wingers are very happy to claim J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) as their own, their own reactionary impulses as fealty to his legacy, and his magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings (1954) as a source of right wing shibboleths. As guest Michael Lutz (part of the Ranged Touch network of podcasts) explains, that view manages to be both not entirely inaccurate and somehow completely misguided. Moira and Adrian ask Michael: What role does Tolkien's Middle Earth play in nurturing reactionary impulses within sci-fi/fantasy fandom? (If you'd like to hear more of Michael's analysis of The Lord of the Rings, head over to Shelved by Genre, where Michael, Cameron Kunzelman, and Austin Walker read their way through all of Tolkien!)
Comments (29)
A funny intersection of the canon obsession in nerd spaces is how the Witcher series is overtly and didactically pro-choice - the languages used is along the lines of "its natural law for women to have the right to an abortion". The author Andrzej Sapkowski openly does not care to write a big "lore" of the world and was just directly responding to Polands abortion debates. Conservative fans have occasionally dealt with it by saying "while i dont like abortion but its the lore so it's okay." Otherwise the books are paradigmatic pervert masculinity in a lot of ways that gets slimy but i appreciated that aspect..
Notably. the videogames that made the series popular for english audiences never talk about abortion directly at all. Not sure on the netflix show.
On the subject of Tolkien's Christianity and religious beliefs, Fleming Rutledge's The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien's Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings is a really enjoyable read. Rutledge is an Episcopal priest and author, and she's a big Tolkien fan. She goes through the narrative in order and discusses the Biblical/liturgical themes as they occur. It also helped to crystalize for me what I didn't like about the movies.
Episcopalians represent! We are nothing if not a bunch of history- and intellectual-theology-obsessed nerds.
I remember learning about Peter Jackson vehemently opposing a non white little person playing a hobbit. Also, I’m a casual LotR enjoyer (I watch the movies in extended editions tho). But I do like RoP. However, Charlie Vickers as Hilbrand is sexy but Charlie Vickers as Anatar IS NOT sexy.
Is ok to request a Dragonlance episode? ;) Actually, it's probably not worthy of an episode alone, but I do think the whole world of DnD and DnD based literature and gaming would be interesting, if only to help understand how a copy of a copy of a copy of something evolves and takes on its own meanings.
YES! I've spent my workday planning how to combat voter suppression and this showing up in my feed was the incentive I needed to make it through.
Conservatives by nature believe there’s only one acceptable answer to anything (including how to live a human life) so it’s no surprise that they approach all texts the way Christian fundamentalists approach the Bible.
It’s so funny hearing from people who were in the polar opposite end of Livejournal at the same time I was. Sometimes I forget it wasn’t all queer ladies and nonbinary folk writing slash fic and making vids and talking about systemic racism.
Hey, uh - I think the IBWTR Patreon page is auto-moderating comments again. I posted a reply to Amanda's recent comment that just got eaten. There are no links in it, so I suggest maybe checking the auto-mod settings? And if at all possible, could I get my comment un-moderated?
It’s so weird to have a podcast that feels like it was made specifically for me. Thank you guys.
Once again, I reaffirmed in my suspicion that Peter Thiel and all these tech bros never saw LotR, just watched the movies. Thiel also claims to be a biblical scholar but his lecture series on the Anti-Christ is obviously based more in The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby than the Bible.
THANK YOU! Every time i hear Musk run his mouth about Tolkien and LotR, it really feels like he has only engaged with the material at the most superficial level - like he got the aesthetics of elves and orcs and a grand battle, but absolutely none of the, you know, *actual story.* (Also, side rant that I am never more than five minutes from giving: every gender-essentialist whiny dick who complained about the "character assassination" of Galadriel in Rings of Power has truly, deeply misunderstood both the character of Galadriel in particular and the fundamental struggles of all LotR heroes as a whole. Guys. *Galadriel was never perfect! There's a whole-ass story arc about this in the books!* It's not some kind of retconning to have her be tempted by Sauron, or by the power that the One Ring can give her. It's not some violation of the canon to have her be just a little bit obsessed with Sauron's possible return. That's not "massacring the character," that's "writing a really solid spin-off that understands the core moral and personal conflicts of the established universe!" Also: wisdom is earned, not innate. I feel like if these guys understood that, Silicon Valley would be a lot less fucked up! Also "you don't have to put a sword in her hand to make her strong" - that is true, and we do need better representations of non-martial strength for all genders. But also, a) putting a sword in her hand doesn't ruin the character, because flowy dresses and graceful movements *are not character,* you dumbasses, and b) it really, really feels like you're not so much worried about "character assassination" as you are about "my perfect ideal of femininity stepped off her pedestal and now she has flaws and she's woke and she's doing the things that *I'm* supposed to do and I'm very, very mad about it!" Sorry. Thank you for coming to my surprise rant.)
I’m about halfway through and haven’t heard any politics yet. I feel a little like I could have gotten this discussion just by listening to my husband and his best friend at the bar. Doesn’t seem like we’re going to get gender discussion either, which is a shame; I’m sure Moira would have very interesting things to say about gender in LOTR. But are these boyos going to let Moira speak at all?
I will be in these comments manifesting the Warhammer 40k episode until it happens 😁❤️ A full LotR episode is surely a step in the right direction. 🤔 (Love everything you guys have ever done!!)
Admittedly I'm biased because I play 40k and want to hear you talk about my thing, but here's my case for why it deserves special consideration and isn't just covered by what you've already said on fandom: 1) The "Satire" angle. This word gets deployed constantly as a thought-terminator (Not that type of Terminator!) within the fandom, which is one of the things that really put me off 40k initially. I feel like a lot of people try to have it both ways.. "it's satire" makes it ok to engage in this sort of fashy LARP that is part and parcel of engaging with the game, but also, "don't bring politics into this". What's the satire for, then? 1b) Also I don't really see the supposed anti-fascist satire in the setting! It's tongue-in-cheek, it's hyperbolic, etc, but I don't see how it satirizes fascism. There's plenty of satire about how corrupt the Imperium is, of course, but it seems to want to lead us to the conclusion that what they really need are Men of Action to cut through all that and make the Imperium run smoothly. That's not anti-fascist satire, that's fascist satire! That's exactly what they believe about martial prowess and wisdom going hand-in-hand, and that lack of direct exposure to conflict makes people soft, corrupt, indolent, etc. 2) The design of the universe in 40k seems to come from a place of "What kind of world would be required to make fascism necessary?"/"Giving fascists better arguments"/etc. I've never read "The Mote in God's Eye", but from your recent episode, that reminded me of 40k. They literally do have ravenous hordes at their shores. "Wrongthink" really is dangerous at the primeval universal level (aka "Chaos"). The typical fascist propaganda that they represent "order", rather than actually being the chaotic ones, is affirmed at the level of the metaphysical. (This is actually something I feel is an opportunity for satire that is sadly underused. Do the Space Wolves and Blood angels not empower Khorne? Do the AdMech not empower Nurgle, with their unnatural attempts to cheat mortality? Do the conspiracies of the Dark Angels and Inquisition not empower Tzeench? Do the Sororitas reveling in pain not empower Slaanesh?) 3) "The medium is the message" angle. Even if this really is anti-fash satire, is it possible for such a thing to perform its function, as a game and setting meant to be enjoyed and inhabited for long periods of time? To engage with the lore and miniatures is to treat endless war as still being meaningful and interesting. Imagine if they made "1984: The Video Game", and tried to get us to enjoy being a general in the eternal phony war against Eurasia/Eastasia, and to play it as long as possible. Like you COULD make a game there that reinforces the satire, but it would make its point after a few hours, and send you on your way. I don't actually think true satire is possible in this medium, especially not when we consider there's a corporation here with a capitalistic framework that means we need to stay on their treadmill. 4) The fact that, despite all this and more, the community is actually pretty much fine? Like, it's a nerd thing, so yes we still have "those guys" around, but so does Magic The Gathering, which has NONE of these structural forces at play that would seem to make it a fash-friendly hobby. Maybe it just doesn't need to mean all that much at the end of the day, and people can don and doff this headspace without the significance I want to assign to it?
Loving this sci-fi/fantasy mini series! Would LOVE a star trek version of this...👀
We're working on one!
Thank you for this episode! I would love to hear you folks talk with Michael about being an Ayn Rand Survivor. My ARS story: My high school friend who was the "Ayn Rand guy" went on to be a union organizer and lefty political activist. Young men can escape her cranky embrace! Even Neil Peart of Rush learned to be embarrassed of his Ayn Rand phase.
Love this episode! Re: Tolkien's declinist view of history - it's interesting how different readers take vastly different messages from that tone/lens. From my end, I've never felt that either the narrative or Tolkien as an author was at all interested in bringing the social order of "The Third Age" (when LotR supposedly took place) back to our current world. The Ring was destroyed, the elves have sailed west, and now humans must figure out how best to live and shape the world anew. The death of the old world is lamentable, and stories deserve to be told about it, but it also shouldn't be our mission to build our world in its image. This is how I made sense of falling in love with LotR as a non-white, non-Western, non-Christian teenager (in the early '00s) whose early cultural diet consisted of a TON of Chinese history and folklore, which often operate in a very similar mode. The "preface" of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (pub. circa 1500, about events in 200 CE) is one of the most famous poems in classic Chinese literature -- and it's a meditation while looking upon the Yangzi River, and observing that all the struggle, fury, horrors, and heroism of "the past" have gone inexorably the way of the flowing waters, and are now fodder for chatter, jokes, and storytelling of the present. It's elegiac without particularly wanting the present to be made just like the past. I feel like this is an attitude that can be found in many cultures with strong traditions in epic / historical storytelling -- and that it has frequently gotten a bit lost in the 20th/21st century US, but also maybe among much of the "modern West" (however that's defined)? And in any case yes, Tolkien would be utterly horrified that companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Mithril exist, let alone be named the way they are.
Thank you so much for this perspective! And yes, the "all things pass" attitude used to be much more present in Western (however defined) literature. It feels to me like it's been on a rapid decline since the end of WWII, but I'm by no means an expert and others may disagree. Victorian literature and poetry, for example, have a lot of comfort with the idea of death, of things passing and ending, etc. I'm by no means a stan for Victorian England, but like . . . they did understand that things end or die, and we'll feel things about that including grief, but this is just the way of the world. Also: naming your surveillance company Palantir is like naming your "defense technology" company Death Star. Guys. Come on.
When i was writing my masters degree on science fiction I asked people who their favourite female SF writers were. Someone told me that they didn't see the divide between SF and fantasy, so thei favourite female writers were Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. Which is when this person found out in some countries Tracy is a gender neutral name :)
What other genre of fiction do we look at and say "the world has failed because it didn't turn out like that"? Perhaps "fiction" is the wrong word, but that's how the followers of prophecy end up feeling when the end doesn't come and they don't get their promised paradise. We nerds didn't get our flying cars and replicators, the Millerites didn't get taken up to Heaven to sit at The Lord's table. The AI bros are talking in an apocalyptic tone, trying to build a God that will save them, condemn their enemies, and also do sexy things with them.
Police procedurals.
What a fun and engaging episode! As a true fantasy freak I always appreciate deep dives like this. I would also be interested in more specific discussions of gender in Tolkien— there’s the handful of female characters in the text, but also a large female fandom which is denigrated by right wing fans.
If you don't already, you might like some of the Ranged Touch podcasts. They aren't specifically sex and gender analysis podcasts, but the creators have a foundation in social justice (for lack of a better term), and that comes through in the podcasts. Their podcast on Stephen King, Just King Things, brings a critical eye to his writing of women, race, and other issues, while still appreciating the things King does well. It is a nice alternative to fan podcasts that aren't ever critical of the author.
cutest tolkien letter is to a girl asking what happened shadowfax, that of course gandalf brings him along on the ship to the west re "monarchy" stuff, at the time lotr was written as a rebuke of great man theory. though maybe looks the reverse from a modern perspective that's gone much further, but at the time the gk chesterton style "fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed" was dominant, and tolkien instead explicitly has aragorn be unable to save the day, and in the end even frodo fails his mission, because of his personal catholicism of "evil is a potential inside each of us, and nobody is a hero above it all and re race stuff, most interesting iterative-change was the problem of goblins・orcs, imported naïvely from common folklore at first, then post hobbit realises potentially problematic・racist and tries on several patch-job solutions, like "they're not people in themselves, just carriers for part of morgoth's evil soul" or "they're actually elves, just twisted by their own evilness" etc (things that fit into "sub-creation" theme as well). and the peoples of middle earth were born・created south and east and migrated into the euro region we saw. he talked about wanting to write stories in those regions, but never got around to (probably due to his own scandi-studies bias and not having that backing to fall on for other regions). to me a new story set there seems much more interesting than just tossing a "a few black dwarves" in the old stories (though would make sense for those to be around in real historical euro but, for people insisting on "verisimilitude
Please please could you do Ayn Rand?? I confess that I've never managed to get into Tolkien but still found this a really fun discussion, thank you!
I'd second that, but I'd feel kind of mean subjecting Moira and Adrian to have to read any of her work