Transcript
Speaker: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Fear Lodgings, the Fear -led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Alicia. I'm an independent Tolkien scholar and the member of some leadership of a Tolkien -related society. And I am here with Grace and Leah.
Speaker: I'm great. I am a fan and occasional Tolkien scholar, definite Tolkien nerd, and also serve on some leadership councils for Tolkien scholarship organizations and some activism boards as well.
Speaker: And I'm Leah, and I'm just another token nerd who hangs around here and, I don't know, makes everybody else here look really smart, so. And let's not forget our Tolkien white guy, Tim. Yes. Hi, everybody. I'm Tim. I am the non -queer person on the podcast, and I will just be kind of here periodically as for the non -queer producer kind of guy.
Speaker: I have did another podcast previously for about five years called Cancer by Pants. I recently sort of went to Punks, but I am married to Alicia and we are a house of Tolkien nerds. Yeah, so we decided to start this podcast because we saw, let me put on my marketing hat briefly, a bit of a need in the market for a Tolkien podcast that is
Speaker: ones centered on fairness and to just not centered on white dudes talking about white dude stuff. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, we, we saw, we definitely saw a niche for some women and non men to come in here and approach token from a deliberately intersectional anti -racist stance. And one that was not afraid to really question token and question, question fandom in response token.
Speaker: but I know all of us have had some pretty interesting experiences on social media lately.
Speaker: I know Grace has been doing kind of a deep dive on various groups lately. Well, and that's one of the things about why we're releasing this episode now, this little sort of part of episode, half episode, half foot episode, if you will, that there's been some timeliness in the discussion relating to, I think, the need to approach Tolkien and Tolkien scholarship and fandom with this particular lens.
Speaker: folks on the internet have been really great at providing that case study of late, shall we say? Indeed. That is a fantastic segue. What a segue. Indeed. So in today's not quite really a real episode, bonus episode,
Speaker: photo episode, however you want to say it. We're discussing the backlash surrounding Amazon's Rings of Power. Yeah, exactly. It's been 100 % fun. Not white supremacist backlash that doesn't exist. As of right now, none of us have watched the episodes. I know a few people who have watched episodes. They went to the New York premiere. I did not get in on that, sadly.
Speaker: Um, but so we are attacking this from a, we have not seen any of this yet. This is just kind of what we've been dealing with for the past, what year, two years. Um, just to give everyone a little bit of background about where I stand on this personally, I.
Speaker: And my hands are tied in terms of fighting with people on the internet about this because I actually administer I moderate one of the one of the big whole team Facebook groups big a whole team Facebook group that has a Few hundred people who are a part of it. So I am not allowed to really speak my mind fully about their bullshit arguments He's not an actor
Speaker: No, not in that group. And I don't actually go on to any other groups because my husband is constantly in a lot of other Tolkien groups and reports back to me about the horseshit that he's dealing with on a day -to -day basis. Not just groups, also official Facebook pages. That's why I don't understand is the people that are like still following the Facebook pages or like rings of power or onering .net when like anytime anything gets dropped about it.
Speaker: are just ready like hands down ready to take shit all over it. Like a wet, fucking nasty, scheming pile all over it, even though they have a fucking seat. How do these people live their lives? What are you doing with your lives that you're ready to do this?
Speaker: Why is this what you choose to just fucking spend your time on? That's what I don't understand. You're so mean. What a fucking hobby. Go read the books if you're pissed off that an adaptation is coming out. Touchgrass. Read the books. Man. But yeah, we're kind of jumping the gun a little bit. Are we?
Speaker: But we really wanted to have this photo episode to kind of vent our spleens a little bit before the show starts because, as Alicia said, none of us have seen the show. The vast majority of people on the planet have not seen the show and yet there are a lot of
Speaker: opinions being shared about the show that are pretty shitty. And specifically, a lot of these complaints are deeply racist, bigoted on several levels, and extremely antithetical to a lot of what our values and what a lot of rings of power
Speaker: I think is setting out to do. And so we really wanted to talk about it amongst ourselves and also bring some class facts to these complaints. I just want to head this off in the past before the accusations come.
Speaker: None of us are paid by Amazon. I mean, look, if Amazon wants to pay me, I'll fucking take their dirty money, but I have not been given any. I don't like Amazon and I spend too much money there anyway. So if they wanted to pay me, like that might balance it a bit, but not happening yet. Yeah. None of us are big fucking fans of Skeletor Bezos or anything like that. Like we're just
Speaker: a bunch of token fans slash callers that are optimistic about a new adaptation that is focused on a world that we are all passionate about. In fact, one of my frustrations is that some of the opinions that people are presenting us back on the internet are making me have to defend Amazon, and that's just rude. Yeah, not a great position to put any of us in.
Speaker: No. And it's just, it's such a cheap, like, fallback. It's like, oh, they're just, you know, you're just paid by Amazon. You're just a shill for the show. Blah, blah, blah. Or like, you know, oh, you just love, you know, capitalist pesos. Like, no, I don't. But that's who's making the fucking show. Who else is going to make it? It's got to be someone with fucking money.
Speaker: Yeah, we didn't choose who bought the rights and we didn't vote for them, I mean, to buy the rights. And we don't have any say in how that goes. But now that it has been made, we do have a lot of things to say about what we feel about how other people feel about it.
Speaker: And yeah, none of us are being paid. And honestly, if they were going to pay me out, consider it kind of a form of reparations. But for all the grief that they've caused me here personally in Amazon headquarters, Seattle, but I guess in terms of
Speaker: turning to some of these complaints. Shall we, shall we kind of launch into that and kind of see kind of, yeah, how folks what's been going on? One of the things that people will say all the time and a lot of these just just ever so lovely social media comments and YouTube videos and what have you is that their complaints have absolutely nothing to do with topics of race or misogyny or whatever and all that.
Speaker: and proceed to go on to some statements that would seem to contradict that. So maybe it may just make sense to take a minute here and just state the case of what we've been seeing.
Speaker: Is this where Angry Nerd actually comes in? Yes, I would like to invite Tim, the token white guy, to read some of these complaints. Fantastic Angry Nerd comic book guy voice for us.
Speaker: So, I guess the first one is just like, you're just casting colorful people for the point of, you know, to like, force diversity. Like, what's the point? We're no fucking like, Black Lives Matter.
Speaker: Thank you so much. My first response to that is usually if someone complaining about specifically, well, Middle Earth is based in medieval Europe, there weren't black people there. There fucking were. There were black people in medieval Europe. Just get over it, guys. Yeah, they were there. And to say otherwise is to ignore the vast swaths of history and to honestly
Speaker: I think at the end of the day what it does, a lot of this insisting that Tolkien based his mythology on Anglo -Saxon Celtic dramatic myths and they were all white and blah, and I'm like, no, he didn't. And also, it's not really true that they were all white and you're doing the work of Nazis when you say that. So Tolkien was being angry at you because who didn't like Nazis? It's Tolkien.
Speaker: Yeah, even if you were to say, okay, sure, everything is based on North, which is probably, you know,
Speaker: influence doesn't mean half of 100 % obey the kind of tub, right? You can have some of that influence and then in other places you can entirely fucking subvert that influence. It's not a all or nothing competition. Yeah, I guess I should say like it's not, I think it's like influenced by dramatic and Celtic mythologies and other mythologies of, you know, Northwestern Europe. Absolutely. But based on
Speaker: No, it's not. This is a work of fiction. This isn't, you know, this isn't a work of a culture of an ethnic culture, you know, telling each other stories and distilling it down over centuries. Right. Like this is one guy. This is one guy who said this and who made this fictional story, which isn't mythology. And a lot of people have been getting kind of confused about that. Also, like relatedly, have been getting confused about
Speaker: calling Hogan a saint, which I think that he would be really uncomfortable by. I have to do an episode on canonization bullshit at some point. Stop making this into a religion, right? Just stop making him into a religion, especially.
Speaker: He would be really pissed off about that given how upset he was when C .S. Lewis decided to start writing all of his apologetic books because Tolkien didn't think that laymen should act as if they're in any sort of religious authority over other people. Exactly. It's gross. It's weird. He's just a man. He was a very brilliant man who created an incredibly
Speaker: world that you just want to curl up and fly in, right? It's an incredible feat, what he achieved. He wrote this over the course of what, 60 years? 70 years? Of course, it's really huge. It's hard to wrap your head around how detailed and the scope of it is. But that doesn't mean that he was superhuman or that he
Speaker: should be canonized or what? It's just, it's so strange to me. Yeah, it's, he's a human and all of the good and the bad that comes with being a human and all the foibles and flaws. He was actually, he was a very complicated person and a lot of what these people have been doing and trying to
Speaker: appeal back to Tolkien in their complaints or their anger about this is saying, Tolkien would, Tolkien did, Tolkien this, is appealing back to him is to again flatten him into a caricature of who he actually was and the man that he actually was. And it turns him into a reflection of that person's own personal beliefs.
Speaker: which may or may not be grounded in anything. I don't know what the word might be to be generous to them, but... Reality? Reality? Yeah, that's a good word.
Speaker: Yeah, it's not grounded in reality and it's often grounded in like, you know, kind of a revisionist sort of bigoted position about, you know, who he was, what he thought, and a lot of it is more reflective of the person's own bigotry and their own sense of the world.
Speaker: You're saying that they might be projecting a little bit. So much of what folks are saying in these just, you know, awful videos and comments on the internet and everything is
Speaker: is revisionist, it's reductive, and it's not reflective of Tolkien's texts or letters or the documentation that we have. There are a lot of opinions being stated as facts that are directly contradicted in all of the written records that we have. And there's certainly times where Tolkien contradicts himself, and we will certainly not shy away from the times that that happens, but we will go
Speaker: He constantly contradicts himself about literally everything. You can build a case on basically any side of any opinion based on Tolkien's own words. He changed his mind constantly and up to the end of his life.
Speaker: I feel like when people ignore that they do a really great disservice to him and they try to tout themselves as like they're the great defender of token or sort of like the true fan the true you know the pure token fan and I'm like here this is the most like disrespectful thing I feel like you can do to the man by you know insisting that you know
Speaker: what he thought at any given time when, you know, he's dead and you didn't know him and constantly changed his mind about everything. So although there were some things that he was pretty, pretty clear on as a through line throughout his life, one of those would be, as mentioned, he was not a fan of Nazis or ideologies of white supremacy.
Speaker: And there are quite a number of points in his letters without even having to explicate his texts or anything like that. Just in his letter that he just absolutely issued those ideologies, which are the ideologies that a lot of
Speaker: these statements about Tolkien are grounded in today, and that's quite troubling to me. But the idea that everyone is based in Nordic myths or whatever, there is, in letter 375, he said, not Nordic, please. A word I personally dislike. It is associated through the French origin with racialist theories. He was very keen on pointing out when this was not okay with him.
Speaker: Yeah, we have had some like joking discussions about whether it's because it was racialist or because it was French. Okay, famously hated words that come from French and like when he was writing the Lord of the Rings and he needed a synonym, he would go and make sure that it had Germanic origins and not French origins because he was, you know, in the 1900s still pissed off about the Norman invasion.
Speaker: Oh lord. This is part of where folks I think get the idea that that makes sense because he was trying to create this Anglo -Saxon myth of Middle -earth in order to be a myth for England and all of that but Alicia do you want to tap in on that's not maybe perhaps quite true? Yeah so like
Speaker: Obviously Tolkien was a scholar of Anglo -Saxon and therefore everything that he does is going to kind of be touched like that because if you are like really enmeshed in a field in that way
Speaker: It's going to kind of bleed over into everything else, but I'm just going to go ahead and just say, if you haven't read Demetri Fimi's Tolkien race and cultural history, you should. She goes into this in a lot of detail. It's positioning Tolkien as a man in his time and how he is dealing with the leftovers of basically eugenics.
Speaker: and how that is during his lifetime being proven as being unscientific and how he's dealing with that from the time he's 19 until he dies essentially and how the intersection of what's happening scientifically and therefore what Tolkien believes scientifically and his individual study in Anglo -Saxon like how those two things intersect because when he's reading medievalist works those are actually based on
Speaker: medievalist prejudices, and those sorts of things work their way into Tolkien's work, even though Tolkien, you know, the man seems to have really eschewed racialist stuff. Like in letters 37, he says, I should regret giving any color to the notion that I subscribe to the holy pernicious and unscientific grace doctrine. And he's coming out really hard against that.
Speaker: But like what he's doing in his, at least what he's doing in the original, in the first iteration of Middle Earth, which is the Book of Lost Tales, which is stuff that most people don't even read, because who actually reads the history of Middle Earth, just like the real big dorks. But like what he's trying to do, AKA us. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: When you hear people talk about the mythology for England, which we're going to get into in a second, what they're talking about is specifically the Book of Lost Tales, his really early writings. And what he is trying to do there is actually, in his very early life, a lot of countries in Europe were re -finding their folk tales. And what he realized was that England doesn't have its own folk mythologies. So he figured much like
Speaker: Finland did with the Kalawala that he wanted to do something similar to that, but he's coming at it from like a philological, which is the scientific study of language and literature and how they work together. He's coming at it from that angle and then he realized that there's just not enough to really build
Speaker: actual folklore out of, so he started creating his own. I've really gone off on a tangent. No, I was going to say that, you know, the idea that England has a separate entity that didn't have a folklore, quote unquote, is
Speaker: kind of is incorrect in the same way that the whole idea of the reconstructing different ethnicities and reconstructing the history of different cultures that sort of existed like that was all part of the same medievalist project right like that the nation building and the rediscovering of folklore
Speaker: It was all done with very specific aims in mind, grounded in nationalism and very often grounded in racism and in different supremacists, specifically white supremacy for a lot of the Northwestern European countries. Because during the Enlightenment, during the Romantic periods, these new studies of these new areas of science and these new areas of
Speaker: um investigation of history and you know archaeology all of these things were used and able to be used to support very specific narratives and often they were you know
Speaker: and completely ungrounded in anything that actually resembles the way that history unfolded. And it looks very, very different to these different studies today. But they also kind of have that same ground of being that has been really difficult to come away from. And I guess the point being that England as a separate sort of nation
Speaker: It's not what it is. It's never been what it is. It's made up of a whole bunch of different people. So it's made up of a whole bunch of different invasions and immigrations and a whole lot of different peoples from the continent who came over in different ways. And so the folklore that emerges
Speaker: mythology that emerges from it has all those same influences and so kind of feel like you know there really is no like pure like England and there really is no pure Anglo -Saxon despite what a lot of people have tried to construct because the truth is there was really no one people it was all these different peoples coming together into the
Speaker: live and occupy this little island. The truth is that Tolkien is influenced by the history of the place where he lives and that this nation that he loves and all that. But the idea that he was writing a mythology for England, that is not a phrase that Tolkien himself used.
Speaker: That's a phrase that we're all familiar with because it was introduced by his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter. And so the idea that that's what Tolkien was doing is an assertion by another individual. It's not something out of Tolkien's own language.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a poor paraphrase of a letter that he sent to his publisher, but it is a very poor paraphrase. I do want to get back to this England as its own group of people thing, because what it sounds really similar to what is currently happening in America, where people identify as white and don't understand why that is problematic. It's because white people aren't like really, that's not your
Speaker: ethnicity is not your nationality. And the reason why, I mean like in general, it's okay in quotation marks to claim to be black, but it's not okay to be white is because white people enslaved black people and took that ethnicity and nationality away from them. A lot of black people in
Speaker: North America have no idea where they actually came from other than just generic Africa, whereas a lot of white people can pinpoint where their, you know, five times great grandparents came from and it's, you know, England, it's France, it's Norway, whatever.
Speaker: What is happening around the time that Tolkien is actually trying to write his quote unquote mythology for England is that the Celts are starting to rise up and push against England like Ireland's making a case for why they should be free. Scotland is making a case for why they should be free. Tolkien too, although his works are
Speaker: decorated with Celtic things. Apparently, this likes Celtic people, and he said in one of his letters that Celtic influence was an affront to his essential Anglo -Saxonist, which is a hell of a quote. He's trying to make a group. It really highlights, though, how his definition of race and culture is based in culture and language.
Speaker: rather than physical characteristics like skin color. Right. And in speaking to the point about claiming to the white culture, it's like, no, whiteness isn't a culture, it's an absence of culture.
Speaker: I'm sorry, I thought white culture was having birthday parties for your dogs and doing gender reveals that catch California on fire. Yeah, that catch the country on fire. That is my culture. You're absolutely right. Oh my God. For the record, then some of you can't see it. Everybody on this podcast is white. Is white as fuck. So yeah. Look, and sometimes we're complicit. We probably have all had birthday parties for our dogs or cats. Oh, 100%.
Speaker: Yeah, I make him a meat cake. It's a whole thing. Yeah, I wake up. But like, in order to become white, our ancestors gave up their cultures, right? In order to
Speaker: these privileges and this power of whiteness. We had to erase where we actually came from and cut ourselves off from that history and our cultures of the various, you know, where ancestors all came from.
Speaker: the actual rich story histories to make this like basically artificial culture. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I feel like I sometimes wonder if some of that kind of grief, in a way, is something that Tobin was sort of reaching for when he talked about
Speaker: creating a mythology for England and kind of trying to reconnect with something that didn't mean the British Empire, that it didn't mean colonization, it didn't mean the eradication of so many other
Speaker: other cultures, it kind of meant like, what was it that the various peoples here on this island in this space where I live, what were their stories and what were their beliefs? And I guess we want to, as I say, I don't know if we want to keep going on with some of this, like the mythology behind a white medieval Europe
Speaker: I don't know, I get really frustrated with it when I see this complaint happening online and I've seen it pop up in a few times in Facebook. Because again, the long argument in response to that particular complaint is
Speaker: grounded in needing to know the history of racism, the actual medieval histories, the history of what we've been talking about with nation building and the romantic and enlightenment movements of science and eugenics and the grounding and racism of that.
Speaker: There's a short argument against that complaint, which is Nazis, my dude. Nazis are not, you're saying Nazi shit, you know? And like, you're doing, again, you're doing the work of white supremacists and Nazis when you say things like the Middle Ages were white. And when you say things like medieval Europe was white. And I'm like, that's, that's like, that's like the TLDR without needing to know, like,
Speaker: all that complex history and that nuance of what we mean when we say things like Anglo -Saxon and white and all this other stuff. It's like, no, Nazis have been saying this shit for decades. It's been a campaign of theirs for decades, even before there were Nazis, white supremacists for saying this shit. And so I'm like, when you say it on Facebook or on Twitter, you're doing their work for them.
Speaker: I would also like to point out that Nazis got their ideas from Reconstruction America. Like the KKK directly gave Nazis their ideas on how to do the horrible things that Nazis did. So like don't even try to say that, well, you know, I'm an American and I believe in freedom and whatever.
Speaker: There are aspects of the American caste system that actual meeting groups of Nazis determined that they could not simply implement in Germany because it would be too noticeably awful. Jesus. Just for the record, I'm from Georgia. I grew up really enmeshed in this horrible racist horseshit.
Speaker: And it's mildly triggering for me. Man, it's just like learning that shit. You're just like, Jesus fucking Christ. We have been sold something in American schools about ourselves for sure.
Speaker: lies. Those things are lies. It's all lies. Anyone, by the way, who wants to investigate a little bit more of what I was saying about Nazis actually holding back on some of the American traditions, I would recommend cast the origins of our discontent by Isabelle Wellperson.
Speaker: And if anybody wants to read more about the whole mythology for England and why it's kind of largely a misconception, Luke Shelton, who is a co -host on the Book Experience podcast, and also a Ph .D. Tolkien scholar himself, has hit a whole great heart on it.
Speaker: that is all, why Colin Colkeen's work on mythology for England is wrong and misleading. And it goes over sort of the academic arguments for where it came from and why it's not really something that can be truly attributed to Colkeen, especially in his book. It also goes into detail about Demetra Famy's book and why you should read it, because it is one of the cornerstones of modern Colkeen scholarship.
Speaker: It is probably going to end up being like the unofficial. Yeah, basically. Pretty much read and just read that book and then you'll know all of our arguments. Yeah. Yeah. We, we started talking about inclusive casting and then like hard right trade into cocaine wasn't a racist. Let me. Hard left. Hard left. Oh my God. Shit. Oh God.
Speaker: Yeah. Oh, Lord. Tolkien hated the French, but he was OK with people with different colored skin. It doesn't really even fucking matter what Tolkien thought, although, like, I'm always going to think it matters because I like Tolkien and I like his work. And I don't want to be disappointed by him being a closeted racist, which he wasn't. This is 2022. And if they want to adapt a Tolkien work and put in black people, there's nothing stopping.
Speaker: One, I don't think that it would make Tolkien particularly angry because Tolkien doesn't really seem to see race in the same way that like a North American person living today would see race. Two, there is no textual evidence to say that there weren't black elves.
Speaker: That's been one of my favorite things to throw back in the faces of trolls on Facebook and Twitter is I asked them to specifically cite me where Colleen said that all elves and all four of the Middle Earth were light -skinned. Nobody's been able to yet because it doesn't fucking exist. Right. And three is 2022. And like,
Speaker: The racial makeup of the group of people who are going to be watching this show is significantly different than it would have been even 20, 30 years ago. So just fucking get over it. I love, too, the argument that I see a lot crop up on Facebook and other such lovely places that, well, Tolkien was writing this in the 1930s. In 1930s Britain, it should reflect what 1930s Britain looked like. Well, guess what?
Speaker: There were a lot of different cultures represented in 1930s Britain too. And so there's really no excuse for a reductive reading of who can and can't be in this
Speaker: fictional land of Middle Earth based on skin tone. I love that, too. I love that that's what's breaking the illusion for them is the fact that some of the elves and dwarves have dark skin, not the fact that they're having trouble being immersed in this world where fucking lizards and goblins and fucking dragons. Yeah, wizards and dragons and light comes from trees. Yeah, because somebody's fucking skin pigmentation is too dark.
Speaker: That's what breaks the illusion. Yeah. Like fucking bellrogs and dragons and a gigantic flaming spiritual eye. But black people is where you draw the line. Like some of them will start going off into these stupid fucking like genetic arguments. And like, I do. They're created by fucking magic.
Speaker: They looked up next to a fucking lake. They were sang into goddamn existence. Why? A fucking race of -
Speaker: Shapeshifters, basically, by the Falar, who could assume any goddamn shape that they wanted to. By Eru, who is, you know, supposed to be God, I guess, but is, we could talk about that later. That's a whole nother episode. Reviews of future episodes. Yeah, and then the tours, made by Kalle, right? And Kalle, also Falar, also fucking Shapeshifters.
Speaker: There's no reason why he couldn't have magically made them in all the fucking colors of the rainbow kind of thing. Yeah, I would like to while we're talking about Tolkien's actual depictions of things, just give you a couple of short descriptions of men that Tolkien gave. Please do. Please.
Speaker: So in the Quintus Silmarillion, which was written in the mid to late 1930s, which is mostly what became
Speaker: the published Silmarillion, there's additional work that got worked into that. But so there's, there's the three houses of the adine, which are the men who align themselves with elves, some of them became Numenoreans later, there's the house of Hador, which were described as yellow haired blue eyed, for the most part, greater in strength and stature than the elves.
Speaker: what Treebeard would call hasty. There's the House of Halla, which were like the House of Pador, but not as tall. They were broader and slower and had slow but deep thoughts.
Speaker: And they actually changed to be physically closer to Beor's people in the 1950s iteration of the Someralian. In the House of Beor, which are darker brown hair, gray eyes, faces that are, quote, fair to look upon, shapely a form but hardy, equal in height to elves and smart. And I want to go forward to the Lord of the Rings, where they talk about the Dunedain, which are the,
Speaker: The House of Pay, or at one point, are also described as having skin color ranging from hair to spar.
Speaker: There you go. Inn of Dwarves and Men, which is in the middle of home with history of Mill Earth. This was written in the late 60s. They are the folks that Bayore and Hadore are shown as being related by their speech. And the House of Bayore is described as, this is a direct quote from that. Contrast and speech was probably connected with the observable physical differences between the two peoples. Many were less fair in skin, some indeed being swarthy.
Speaker: Sparthi, I wanted to take a second and define that term because there are a lot of people that will say, okay, he just meant a trainee, you know, olive skin, whatever you want to call it kind of thing. But like, Sparthi, yes, that is one historical application of that term. Sparthi is descended from the Anglo -Saxon word, spirit, which means explicitly black.
Speaker: Tolkien being a fucking scholar of Anglo -Saxon would have been very familiar with that usage of the term. Tolkien being also such an exact linguist and being so careful with his word choice, if you wanted to prescribe a certain image in your head, you would do so. And he did many times. How many fucking times does he talk about ladies having light, beautiful arms?
Speaker: Which I'm sure at some point we'll end up talking about Colleen's weird fucking arm and hand. It's not king -shaming, but it's there. And so any time that he leaves it open, that he uses the term like bear or scar,
Speaker: is leafing it up to interpretation. And your interpretation may be that the party means Mediterranean or all of 10 or something like that. Your interpretation may be that the mayor is like him, but that is your interpretation is where that ends. It is not something that you can prescribe to anybody. Oh, I almost skipped over something important going straight to Lord of the Rings. The Numenoreans are made up of those three houses of men.
Speaker: I would also like to point out that in letters 154, Tolkien specifically says that Numenoreans are quote, hardly distinguishable from the elves. And therefore, I am putting out there that elves can fucking be black. Numenorean men can be black. Elves can also fucking be black.
Speaker: Yes. And there's also that that letter I'm looking for right now where he basically says the Numenoreans he envisioned as being closest in like cultural descendants. It was one of the later letters Amy talks about it in depth in her book. It is from letter number 211.
Speaker: So if he says Newton -Oryans and Gondor are proud and familiar and archaic, and they are best pictured, in parentheses say, in parentheses, Egyptian terms. In many ways, they resembled Egyptian. Love of Empower to construct gigantic masses.
Speaker: And yeah, and the Egyptians were majority brown and black skin, but there were also when the Greek invasion came in, tons of different peoples were in Egypt. Like, I feel like a lot of this, like some of this talk about, you know, like where certain people should be coded as being from based on their skin color is, you know, it's yet another example of
Speaker: this whole medieval Europe was white and it's like no shit you guys you don't remember the fucking you know Roman Empire like they were all over the damn place and so it's sort of like it's a whole I want to see I want to see all all sorts of skin colors in in Numenor and I feel like Rings of Power is trying to bring that same reflection to their casting
Speaker: One last thing before I completely go away from these men. The dunadine are specifically described as being taller and darker than the men of Cree. So also give me black araborn. Oh yeah. Snaps for that.
Speaker: Who would be a good black arrow corn? Another show, sorry. Yes. The answer is yes. All of those adaptations that would be beautiful. But no, this matters in our present day. As there is a TV show that is being produced that has been cast, it matters to have representation.
Speaker: So just for a little bit of a picture of where at least US markets currently stand, US -based data about streaming TV shows, all of this comes from a research project from Common Sense Media called the Inclusion Imperatives.
Speaker: Asian people are about 6 % of the US population and make up about 2 % of leading roles on streaming television. Black people, 12 % of the population, 5 % of the main roles. Hispanic and Latino people are 19 % of the population and only 6 % of main roles. While white people are only 62 % of the population but occupies 76 % of leading roles.
Speaker: So where we are statistically is about 50 % off of what actual representation would be, and that matters for our ideas of who gets a voice at the table, who should be included, and if they're being overrepresented.
Speaker: more underrepresented. And that matters because it has real world impacts on how young people, how people who have grown up in this culture are impacted. This dissonance statistically, according to numerous studies, aggravates racial tensions, erasure and negative and stereotypical portrayals of people adversely affects how people see themselves, how people of color,
Speaker: people of other marginalized identities see themselves based on what is what is depicted on our TV screens. So it does matter that Amazon and any other group that is casting a television show today does actually make an effort to be true to representation as the world exists today. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's totally the thing is, it's like if if Middle Earth is ostensibly meant to be our earth in way, way back.
Speaker: There's absolutely no reason that it should look in a particular way, and specifically a particular white nationalist way of looking at things. There's no reason that Middle Earth shouldn't look like our Earth today. Because, I mean, it's ostensibly supposed to be our Earth. And the other thing is, you know,
Speaker: Middle Earth exists in context to where we are right now. And so I feel like some of these different arguments that people have been, or at least different complaints that people have been having about how certain peoples in Middle Earth should or shouldn't look is also kind of relevant here. And it's sort of like, who are you to say what that actually looks like when
Speaker: the earth itself is so diverse. So in looking at some of these, we want to transition a little bit from the men into the elves and the dwarves as well, and the hobbits, and how they should look, quote unquote.
Speaker: I mean, like, Poking is pretty fucking explicit about the Hobbits. He's not very explicit about elves and dwarves, though. I couldn't actually find anything about... There's nothing universal. There's both about certain, even certain groups, all having us, you know, certain characteristics, but nothing saying, you know, that all, every, universally, there's nothing all in common. There's very little in terms of
Speaker: physical descriptions of war period. And for an elf it ends up limited mostly to like fair health. I'm 100 % taking that Numenorean men being basically indistinguishable from elves as that's the kind of diversity you should be able to find in elves as well. Yeah, I think it's a good measurement, a good standard of measurement
Speaker: And again, if it's left ambiguous, then your interpretation is as valid as mine. And I think it matters that people are able to see themselves in Middle Earth. It's a fictional universe based off of our own Earth. So there should be representation and we should all be able to access that today. And the reality is that no matter how much so many of us
Speaker: love Tolkien's stories and Middle Earth and what have you, those of us who hold any marginalized identity are well aware of how painful it can be in reading especially the most productive ideas of who has access to this story. It's something you'll see online all the time with
Speaker: these folks having comments of like, well, if it's fiction, you should just be able to see yourself in the fictional universe. And why does it matter if elves are black or what have you? Well, it matters because anyone who is excluded from those descriptions has to work harder to see themselves in this place that we love, and that shouldn't be.
Speaker: And one problem is, you know, dark -skinned people are not unrepresented in Middle -earth. We have danced around the actual depictions of dark -skinned people in Middle -earth, which are Easterlings, which are the Dunlending, which are the Heart -dream, which are, you know, are a fucking disaster area of racial stereotypes. You know, people with, like, broad noses that are savage.
Speaker: or whatever you want to fucking imagine the people men are like kind of thing. It's a mess, like orientalism and shit like that. It's just not great. Unlovely Mongol types in the squint eyes. Yeah, exactly. So for having an example, and even in an adaptation where you've got, you know, people with darker skin that are represented as the more heroic, right?
Speaker: is honestly just overdue and kind of an equal act.
Speaker: Yeah, that's unlovely, least lovely mongol types. God, it makes me my skin crawl to even repeat that. That is a direct quote from Tolkien about how the orcs should look. It is interesting to note though that he often couches some of those things that make you go, oh boy. He often couches those in
Speaker: how someone who is not familiar with their group of peoples would perceive them. And so he does often throw that back onto the reader as opposed to perhaps the narrator. So there's some question there, some nuance, but yeah, the precincts are great.
Speaker: No, yeah, it's definitely like, I think that there's some nuance there, but I also, you know, I also definitely think that it's, it's fair to say that that's pretty shitty of you to say Tolkien, like come on. I would like to point out he said that in June of 1958. He should have known better by then. Yeah. For a lot of this stuff that we're talking about again, another episode about
Speaker: Colton's personal racism and like he's a racist in the same way that all people are racist and that we benefit from the systems of racism and are specifically benefit because of the color of our skin and
Speaker: in opposition to people who have different colors of skin. And yeah, I basically I guess I just I don't want us to let Hooken to off the hook too too much. Because but I do think that as we've been talking about, there was a lot of contradiction in what he was saying. And there was a lot of get a lot of different ideas about, about how he saw
Speaker: the various peoples of his creation. And I definitely think that there's a lot of room, there's more than enough room for Black people to be in Middle Earth. There's way more room for Black elves and Black dwarves in Middle Earth than a lot of what these shitheads online are saying. And I guess that's kind of like my ultimate point.
Speaker: One of the points where it matters a lot to me is the statements that some of the actors who are portraying these characters have made. So, like, Ismael Cruz -Cordova in an interview talked about reading Lord of the Rings as
Speaker: a kid and saying I felt very represented spiritually and intellectually but not in the image. There was no one that looked like me. I was a child and that was very present. So I traversed through life and had the stream of becoming an elf. So when I saw myself in the mirror with full armor and my ears on, I was an elf. I just, you know, there was a tear or two. That little boy felt very proud.
Speaker: And I know that that magic that I felt looking at myself in that mirror is something that I knew a new generation, but also adults are going to feel. That's my guy. That's me. I'm so excited to see him. And that's something that all of us as white people and generally a lot of these, you know, critics are largely white dudes, sometimes white women, very rarely people color.
Speaker: don't comprehend because they have grown up seeing themselves represented in every form of media, right? And so it's just, it's not something, they just lack the empathy to understand, hey, this does matter, even though it doesn't feel like it for you because you've been taking this representation for granted your entire life.
Speaker: You've never had it happen to you. And Sofia Novete, whose name I am probably mispronouncing. I apologize, Sofia. Who please? You'll definitely hear this. Look, gotta have high hopes. No. She's getting it on the ground floor of this podcast.
Speaker: Hey, Tim has had some tweets, like, by writers for the show, so, you know, nothing's impossible. But Sofia Novete talks about this in some of the interviews, too. She is playing a dwarf queen named Disa, who is largely a new construct for the show, and
Speaker: I'm sure it will surprise none of our listeners to recognize that she has drawn so much controversy and criticism just in the fact of her mere existence as a black woman being cast in this show and speaking openly about what that means. Also in a racial marriage. Yes, yes. But she's made the point several times that along the lines of like
Speaker: Now, in this instance, we're seen and we're heard and we're acknowledged as having a right to be here as much as anybody else. And that is what is so key for me is that the interpretations that we have of Tolkien's works and Middle -earth and all of that in adaptation are accessible to everyone because there is textual support for it, but also because we live in the world today.
Speaker: We live in the world of 2022, and so yes, the world of 2022 ought to be minimally reflected in the works that we create now. Absolutely.
Speaker: Lord. That's my life. Quentin Tarantino wrote White People in a Kung Fu movie. I love Quentin Tarantino, but I openly acknowledge that he is problematic and shit. Also, I have some things in common with Tolkien in terms of the endage fetish. Endage fetishism, yeah. That's exactly where I was going. Indeed, indeed.
Speaker: I would like to point out in terms of cultural appropriation, you can't appropriate the dominant culture. That's assimilation. It's a completely different thing. Yeah. It's white replacement theory. That's another show. It's like in the exact same way that there's no such thing as reverse racism, there's no such thing as
Speaker: black people appropriating from white people because, again, whiteness isn't the culture. I also like in response to a lot of this stuff is like, number one, it's like you can't appropriate from the dominant culture. And number two, when you say things like, oh, why don't you guys just make up your own stories? Why don't you go like, you know, make up your own fictional characters and tell stories about them? That's what we've been doing. Like, that's what Black Panther is, for one thing.
Speaker: and it's like it implies that it implies that you know like separate but equal maybe is that is that what people want yeah it implies that like that there's no room for it it goes back to like there's no room for you here it's like it implies that you're not actually a part of this story you're not actually a part of this culture cultural segregation the folks saying this are settling on themselves oh yeah yeah
Speaker: No, they really are. And it's just and it's just like the idea that, you know, like telling people to go make up their own thing, it's like that's that's what all marginalized people have been doing for ages. Where have you been? That's the existence of fan fiction is a testament to what we've been doing. And it's like it just kind of supports that division between between people and saying and kind of putting down that line saying that like you're not actually a part of this story at all and you never were.
Speaker: And that's absolutely not true. It's ahistorical, it's a textual, it's not a valid argument based on the texts that exist.
Speaker: Plus it's not as simple as, okay, I'll go make my own thing. There are still very real systemic barriers to minorities and underprivileged marginalized groups making their own media. Because look at the fucking executives that any major studio and it'll be 80 to 90 % white youth kind of thing. And those are the people that are making decisions on what, what doesn't and you're never gonna have any sort of equality whatsoever.
Speaker: in terms of who's represented in the story, who has those lead protagonists.
Speaker: One of my, uh, my Facebook friends, his name's Milton Davis. He is a black author who writes steam funk and fantasy and science fiction. He's a lovely man. Uh, he posted something about this exact thing about how black writers get shit upon for playing in other people's sandboxes for wanting to write for, you know, mainstream comic books, stuff like that. And people tell them, Oh, we'll just make your own thing. Like.
Speaker: make your own thing and make it like, you know, black lead and even his black fans who tell him to do that, then don't buy his stuff when he actually does that because they're characters they don't know. He's, you know, doing something new, but they, you know, they want another Spider -Man. Yeah, they've got so much invested in those existing characters that that's what they are ultimately looking for. Not only that,
Speaker: But those minority characters or characters that represent marginalized groups, they never get the same promotion that your big name characters do as well, right? So you're fucking like, recess line at the start.
Speaker: at this point he said he's just self -publishing because he couldn't find a publishing house that would give him equal status to other people so he just decided to start doing it himself and I mean he's actually doing pretty good so like who knows you but like it's a huge fucking problem like unless there's equal representation all the way up and companies you're just never going to
Speaker: get true, like, equity. It's starting to happen in comics, like the actual comic book, not necessarily. You're in my book and we ought to have self -care. Not necessarily in the movies and, you know, secondary media, but I, you know, like right now, there is Black Lives Matter that operates New York City. That is one of the sons of Lucius Fox, anybody that knows where he's born.
Speaker: There is, Superman's son is currently the Superman of Earth, and he is bisexual. One of the problems has come out as bisexual. There is a fantastic black female, I think at least bisexual, if not man, Green Lantern right now, written by N .K. Jemisin. If you have not read her many series of arts, I highly recommend it. It's really, really good.
Speaker: really great social issues and stuff like that as well. So that is starting to happen as well. In the comics, again, comics aren't what makes them... The only reason that's happening is because that's not the bread and butter of one of our brothers and just the effects of these games, right? They're making their money off of PM2, movies, and T -shirts and stuff like that. So, you know, they're like, okay, well, this is kind of secondary, so we'll play around with Sandbox here, along with
Speaker: What else did we want to touch on briefly? So that was our first topic. That was part one in our five part series. I have several other soap boxes to climb on you guys. As do I.
Speaker: Work women should have beards! Work women should have beards and you can always die on this fucking hill.
Speaker: women should have here it's dwarf women in the Amazon crime show do that is excellent. However, did right. There are three pieces of Perkins writing that mentions dwarf women and beards in histories of Middle Earth war of the jewels. We have an elf who's accounting for
Speaker: Like his narrative here that dwarf women have beards, it's a pangalod, and he's an elf and an outsider. So that's a point from his perspective because the most common thing that we hear about is that Gimli in Return of the King talked about that there are a few dwarf women.
Speaker: probably no more than a third of the whole people. They seldom walk abroad except a great need. They're in voice and appearance in a car if they must go out in journey. So like the dwarf men that the eyes and ears of other people cannot call them apart.
Speaker: This has given rise to the foolish notion that there are no dwarf women and the dwarves grow out stone and all that. So yeah, striking similarities and all that. But there is a note that Tolkien wrote in a letter and it's published in Nature of Middle Earth that talks about all male dwarves.
Speaker: have beards, but doesn't go into stating that female dwarves do. And it's not stressed in the way that male dwarves is in this marginal note that's published in Nature of Middle Earth. So there is definitely an argument that there wouldn't need to be this in the depiction, or there might be some flexibility. But for all the people shouting about it on the internet,
Speaker: kind of a moot point because the characters as depicted in the Amazon Prime show that they're yelling about do in fact have beards. Lisa has little baby fluff kind of stuff going on like a pin strap but it's not full. Yeah. Which I think lies in the face of you can't tell them apart.
Speaker: because if she doesn't have the same amount of beard as the other male dwarves, you can tell them apart. Alicia and I just want bearded women. I'm sorry. Fuck yes. I mean, yes. That's totally valid. I just don't understand the people that are making that one of the crucial points. If that is what you're going to let break the entire series for you, then you weren't really invested in it.
Speaker: We're just looking for something to publish it. If any hair is going to break this for you, it should be the elf hair. I mean, that's a whole thing, my gosh. The thing that I do note in that Return of the King reference is that the depiction of dwarf women being so alike in voice appearance and garb that if they must go on a journey, they look so like the dwarf men.
Speaker: This suggests to me that perhaps when they're at home, their grooming habits might be different than when they are traveling on the road or what have you. There's an argument or differences in adaptation that even if it's not the thing that we most want to see, whatever they put in the show, as long as there's a note back to a path back to what's in the text, I'll be happy.
Speaker: What if it's an issue of safety? What if it's the dwarven women who travel abroad who don't want to be perceived as dwarven men so that they're safe
Speaker: I am 100 % down for dwarf women not wanting to deal with middle -earth dudes fuckery, okay? Yeah, they don't want to deal with fuckboys. They put on their beards, they throw out their beards, they put on their beards, whatever it is in the same way that we all put on our headphones and read our books because we don't want to be talked to on
Speaker: It's like, you know, it's like ladies going out without makeup or like without having shaved their legs or whatever because they don't want fucking unwanted nail attention. How is it? This could be the exact same situation. I am super, super duper into it. Well, we were talking about Elle's hair.
Speaker: I know a lot of people have gotten really upset about short hair on elves. So there's two classes of this one, right?
Speaker: There's Ron here, the first female who has, you know, basically his hair is very coat -shaven. And then there's the fucking used car salesman hair on Celebror. It's so fucking bad. It's so, I'm sorry. It's so fucking bad. You did Celebror and Elrond dirty. I'm already mad about Celebror because I feel like
Speaker: the actors too old to play that the elf they cast him to play. And, you know, I understand that's at least mildly problematic. I don't really care. Celebrate Boers, my boy, him and Annatar are my favorite slash fairing. I'm mad. But the fucking brutes that they put on these guys are atrocious. They're so bad. It's like 70s porn star slash insurance like sales. It's so bad.
Speaker: Oh, listen, I call them the Pantene Pro -V elves. Oh, I love that. Because yes, it is not. Is it my vision? It is not. But I do have to acknowledge that Tolkien doesn't say anywhere in the text that elves all have long hair and that this is the stylistic choice of all elves through all three ages of Middle -earth.
Speaker: It's a choice, but it's not one that's prohibited by the text. So my ire has to be entirely personal. We just need to look at the second age as the 70s of Middle Earth. I don't want to. Yeah, why not? A lot of poor style and hair choices for me. Oh, I'm into it. Is there a fucking toll for your car keys when you walk into Rivendell?
Speaker: I mean, I'm not going to be mad if there is. It probably does exist, right? It definitely exists. Listen, someone was real, real mad on the internet and was like, what are we going to do next? Have polyamorous elves? And I was like, well, that's my deal.
Speaker: It's also nothing you can do. When you've been alive for thousands and thousands of years, you're going to get sick of fucking the same dude. Like, like third age collateral is definitely not fucking California. No, she's fucking Gandalf. And then she sailed off to Valinor with Gandalf and not with her fucking husband, left her husband to chill in Merkwood with Grand Wheel. Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, just saying. What are they doing?
Speaker: I also think that living for thousands and thousands of years, you're going to want to change your hairstyle maybe once in a while. I would get really fucking sick of long hair if I was 3 ,000 years old. They're not all going to be winners. Listen. They're not all going to be winners. And also, it's like just trying something new, just going through a fun phase. And a couple hundred years, we'll get it fixed.
Speaker: else do have a sort of unwinded times. Yeah. This might just be their bangs phase. The second age might just be their bangs phase. It might be the moat phase. You know? So what you're saying is it could be worse. It could get worse. Oh my god. You guys know that meme about how like Legolas talks with a really country accent because he's from Earthwood. Legolas with a mullet.
Speaker: It hurts as precious. Perfection. Perfection. Oh, I would, I would, I would watch the hell out of that show. Rock Dynasty, but Merkleid, basically. Okay, Emily gets to style his hair in a mohawk, like a gelled, cute mohawk. Yeah. Like the two of them are just attending a punk concert.
Speaker: Since we're talking about Galadriel and Celeborn now, let's move on to... Yes. Galadriel wasn't a warrior, she never wore armor, she never wore number four. Okay. Oh my god. Let me send to my soapbox here. My voice is almost too good. I'm like... So the idea that Galadriel could not have been a warrior is banana pants to me.
Speaker: There are so many points in the text where Tolkien talks about her leadership in an aspect or realm which is conceivably militarily oriented. So he says she's one of the leaders of the Noldorian rebellion against the Valar. That's in the Silmarillion.
Speaker: The first whole slew of references that I'm going to talk about are in the Silmarillion, and that's, you know, the most closely published to Tolkien's own lifetime, with the most editing of his own in there, so I want to prioritize those. In Flight of the Noldor, he says Galadriel, the only women of the Noldor, to stand that day valiant against the contending princes.
Speaker: I mean that term valiant is a pretty key one in terms of military valor and all of that. Tolkien does know words and does know what he's talking about and what the connotations of being valiant in this military setting means and he is suggesting this to us and these are even in the earliest writings about collateral.
Speaker: We also have led by Fingolfin and his sons and by Finrod and Galadriel as another reference within that same chapter of the Silmarillion. In of the Voyages of Arendil we have Pelleborn of Doriath and Galadriel, his wife who alone remained of those who led the Noldor exile in Valyrian. In Rings of Power in the Third Age he says she was the mightiest and fairest of all the elves that remained in Middle -earth.
Speaker: So this is just from the Silmarillion alone. There are a half dozen references that at least make a case for Galadriel as being a leader militarily among the elves as they fight. Those are not the only references by far. As part of, I'm sure we're going to end up mentioning our Wings of Power book club that Grace and Alicia and myself were part of leading in like five months leading up to.
Speaker: the premiere of Rings of Power, where we read through every last fucking word, contradictory or not, of what Tolkien wrote about the Second Age, you know, from somewhere really into, you know, the Unfinished Tales, the History of Middle Earth, everything. And there were a couple in there that were in, of Galadriel and Culver, right? It was a chapter. One of the last chapters in Unfinished Tales, and it is one of the last things that Tolkien wrote before he passed away. He was working on it in the final month of his life.
Speaker: And in that chapter, Olpina explicitly says, in reference to Cladriel, she fought fiercely against the Inora in defense of her mother's kin, and also she with Helleborn fought heroically in defense of Apollante against the Isdalethonold. Both of these are referencing the same event, referencing the first kin's name, but both of those very explicitly say that she fought.
Speaker: not, you know, resisted or something sort of ambiguous like that. It is thought. It is, you know, the violent hands -on battle kind of sense, or it's not like it was just like a political resistance or something like that. It's so much harder for me to see Celeborn doing anything of value than it is to see Galatriel as a warrior. That's the real unbelievable thing there.
Speaker: And we just had this discussion too, you know, that, you know, we were having it sort of facetiously with regards to changing their hairstyle stuff, but like legit, these are beings that are immortal, that live for thousands and thousands of years. They are not going to be static over that whole period. They're going to change. They're going to respond to events that are happening around them in different ways. But there are plenty of people that you can look at right now and say like, I bet that person's never been in a fight in their life. Maybe they were in the military years.
Speaker: Do not look at somebody now and say that you know what they were 20 years ago, let alone an aide.
Speaker: And there are plenty of people that, uh, that you look at now and think, gosh, I don't know that this is the person that I would want, you know, make making policy and everything down the road because of, you know, how they behave in, I don't know, college, uh, that turn out to have actually really great ideas as they get more life experience. And so Ladriel does get a little bit of life experience over three ages of middle earth. Like we're familiar, most familiar with this version of her from
Speaker: Lord of the Rings, which is a single year in the Third Age, there's a lot of her history that comes before that. And the different versions that Tolkien wrote are contradictory. Christopher Tolkien talks about there's honestly probably nothing more contradictory than the different versions of Galadriel and Celeborn's history. And there are all kinds of contradictions and tensions between these things.
Speaker: where they traveled at various times and what part of, you know, part of they were from and where they were and what at what point they joined a battle and all that he went back and forth on all of this. But the
Speaker: thing that comes through in all of the different versions is this commonality of Galadriel's involvement in what is arguably a military context. So in Unfinished Tales, as well as People's of Middle Earth, we have the Chibboleth of Thanor, where it talks about Galadriel and says her mother name was Nerwen.
Speaker: man -maiden, and she grew to be tall beyond the measure even of the women of the Noldor. She was strong of body, mind, and will, a match for both the lore masters and the athletes of the Elbar. Like, we're talking about Galadriel's physical prowess in athletic feats here. I want to go quickly on to what a mother name is as well, because the mother, so they also have multiple names, they have to name their mother, give them a name their father, give them one that I think just like
Speaker: but they sort of go by public, but the mother name in particular is, in some cases, voting rights, you know, in most cases, basically supposed to be the name that most represents the essence of that health, because the mother is supposed to have some insight into what their child will become. So you can make a case that Erwin and
Speaker: translates literally into man -made and is like Galadriel's truest name. Yeah. And Hopin in a letter, letter 348 also says of Galadriel, Galadriel was then back in her history of Amazon disposition and bound up her hair as a crown when taking part in athletic feats.
Speaker: And it is worth noting that every other time that he applies from Amazon to a woman in the legendarium, it is in the context of women who fought in battle, who had a warrior aspect to their experience. It wasn't just a descriptor or whatever, it was a very intentional and this maps onto a pattern of usage.
Speaker: No means no stranger to gender fuckery at all. Look at AO1 as a character. Look at I am no man. This is an idea he's played with in the past is female characters carrying traditionally male traits. It's not out of the realm of possibility to imagine, especially as he was getting further later in his life and had lived through the women's rights movement. He started to think like, maybe I should have written this character a little more dimensionally.
Speaker: And that is one of the last characters he was trying to sort of press on to help up to the month of his death. Absolutely. And then there's also some mentions in Unfinished Tales that she looked upon the dwarves with the eye of a commander. And what stands out to me in this is that the point that this phrase appears in the history of Galadriel and Celeborn is talking about the Second Age.
Speaker: between the years 400 and 750 in this version, she is present with Teleborn and Celebrimbor in a región. She's also noted that she studies under Aole, who's the member of the Valar, who is about craftsmanship and forging and whatever. So there's a whole lot of people on the internet who want to come out with like, well, she's a strong woman in her own right, so she doesn't need it. So we don't need to have a sword wielding version of her.
Speaker: Galadriel could know how to forge her own sword. Galadriel does not need your reductive revisionist ideas of who her character is over 8 ,000 years, my dude. She's fine, and she's cool. Yeah, and why not have a sword wielding Galadriel? I mean, why the fuck not? Well, it's also something that I noted because I started going through
Speaker: a lot of the Silmarillion at one point and kind of inspired by this like, well, you know, Galadriel doesn't need a sword sort of thing. Other people have, but Galadriel never has a sword kind of, you know, fuckery arguments.
Speaker: And I did notice something and the thing that I noticed is that people like to compare Galadriel in the Second Age to Gil -galad and Belendiel and people who are in the sparse writings of the Second Age.
Speaker: specifically noted as being military commanders and being part of the last alliance of men and elves and fighting against Sauron and all of that. And the first time that Gil -galad's spear, Agulos, is mentioned
Speaker: He is in his death scene. Spoilers, you guys. I'm so sorry. Spoilers. Spoilers for the series. That's what it's going to be. Yeah. What? The first time - He's my favorite. The first time that a Lindale story is mentioned is that Narsil is mentioned is in that same death scene. What? That's actually - What?
Speaker: What are guys? Spoilers! Narsil was broken? What? Narsil was broken? Oh my god! You guys, I'm sorry, spoilers. Spoilers for the Lord of the Rings' Fellowship of the Ring prologue from the Peter Jackson film. We know that like 22 years or whatever is too soon on, but the first 10 minutes of the film.
Speaker: spoilers. But no, this is actually something that we see actually fairly regularly throughout the Silmarillion. The way that Tolkien records this history is that he mentions a weapon when it is of particular importance usually in a grand battle scene that might in fact be a death scene for a character and a major turning point in the battles. So I mean Morgoth and his hammer Grand are actually only
Speaker: really noted in that scene where again spoilers where he's defeated and Fingolfin's male and sword Ringel are noted in that same scene. Tolkien's style of writing in this in this age and for the Silmarillion and these other historical notes is not the narrative style of a novel it's a historical account and so these details are added in at the point when they would be recorded
Speaker: in history in this way. And similarly, he doesn't use the word thought very often
Speaker: It's really iconic when he does. It's really important and impactful when he does. Usually, he's giving other synonyms or illusions. So Galadriel took up rule and defense against Sauron is something that's mentioned in Unfinished Tales. Celebrorn withstood the assault. But at the same time, you have Gil Galad defends Lindon and the Grey Havens and some peoples of Middle -earth.
Speaker: You have the lateral escape from Nargothran from the day of its destruction, or in a different version, fled Nargothran before its fall. While you also have Isildur escapes from the orcs who attacked them, Elrond was able to extricate himself from an attack. All of the time, throughout the Silmarillion, male characters escaped. They ate.
Speaker: They defend, they command, they guard, they're overwhelmed. And these are some of the same pieces of language that are used to describe Galadriel's actions. So there is at least a strong argument for Galadriel being a military figure and a fighter and a warrior throughout at least part of her time in Arda.
Speaker: as there is for all of these male characters who it's generally accepted for. And gosh, what could the difference be in our perceptions? It's hard to put my finger on it. It's just on the tip of my tongue. I'm sure I'll get to it someday. That's the gene. God damn it.
Speaker: Oh no. I was going to say it was kind of great that it was the dude who said that too. It's unwell. Yeah. Do we want to move on from, do we have anything else, anything more to say about collateral? No I do. Thank you so much for asking. There's always so much more to say about collateral.
Speaker: Just one more point, and this is my salty point. It's actually something that I started looking at. I picked up a copy of Karen Winstone Stead's Atlas of Middle Earth. I was looking through some of the maps and nerding out about them and noticed a particular note in there that I checked the index and went back to the Silmarillion and started looking at. And it's this particular note
Speaker: On the return of the Noldor, Tolkien notes that Finrod is a Nargothrond, Galadriel is living with Celeborn and Melian learning great lore and wisdom from Melian, and Turgon is in Neverest. Following the paragraph of each of these three examples of where these three particular elves are,
Speaker: He says, now Morgoth, believing the report of his spies that the lords of the Noldor were abroad with little thought of war, may trial the strength and watchfulness of his enemies. And of course, that didn't work out well for him in the long run. It's Tolkien talking about, by making these assumptions, Morgoth underestimates these particular characters, including Galadriel, who are in fact preparing for war and combat and defense.
Speaker: And I just want to point out that this is basically what the people ranting in the YouTube videos in the comment section are doing. They are making the exact same mistakes as Morgoth. Yep. So exact same assumptions get made grounded in kind of the same issues. Same mysterious issue that we can't name. Again, tip of my tongue. We're basically just calling Morgoth beside us at this point.
Speaker: I mean, why not? I mean, I believe that he contains multitudes of other problematic behaviors, but I mean, let's not excuse him. It's the boot fits your lame foot. Deep cut. Deep cut. Deep cut.
Speaker: So again, as we talked about with, you know, the depiction of casting of ethnicities in Middle Earth, there are certainly all kinds of arguments and interpretations that are available based on how the lateral is depicted in the text.
Speaker: But there are so many threats that run through that it's really, really difficult to make any sort of compelling case that Galadriel can't have this physical prowess, can't be a warrior, can't wield a sword. That may not be your personal preference, it may not be your personal vision, but it's really hard to make a case that all of the instances in the text should be ignored in favor of your personal vision that is the one and only way. Totally invalid.
Speaker: Totally. Yep. Why don't we move on to some of the kind of more general complaints that I think are grounded less in some of this misogyny and racism and kind of more talking about some of the issues with that are inherent in adaptation. And this is kind of like the whiny cry baby section that I'm kind of like
Speaker: Guys, just grow up. You know how adaptations work, you know how movies are made, or don't you? This is kind of the complaints that are things about, like, the timeline being compressed and original characters. Oh, that's my job. Excuse me. Stepping up my lines. How about it? How about it?
Speaker: There's only five fucking seasons my dude, that's why. Because it's not gonna be super exciting, super engaging series if like every season you're beating like multiple generations of new minority of theaters.
Speaker: It took 57 years for Sauron to, you know, basically get in the good graces of our Tarzan in Numenor. It's like, we're not going to wait, we're not going to watch 57 years of this, of this show. Like, good lord.
Speaker: If we're gonna do that, we're gonna do this series in real time. We're gonna be here a long time. Yeah. As someone who just read everything Tolkien has ever written about Numenor, do I wish that they would start this earlier and not start with Muriel and our Farazhan? 100%. There's so many good stories that happen in Numenor. But I also understand that it's a fucking TV show and they're not wanting to
Speaker: bring on a new cast member, build trust and love for that cast member and then just have them die over and over and over again. Yeah, because they're mortal men and that's what they do. With the way that Tolkien writes the immortal characters and long -lived characters and then characters who have lifespans closer to our current age of humanity, you would have people dying every quarter episode
Speaker: And it's just really hard to make a compelling narrative argument in about eight to 10 minutes of why we should care about that person. Yeah, or even less, you know, I think, you know, you kind of make a lot of decisions about what you're watching and what you're reading in just a few minutes. So I'm kind of like, the same reasons that in the Fellowship of the Ring, we did not watch 17 years pass between Bilbo's birthday party and
Speaker: Gandalf telling Frodo about the One Ring. I think the timeline being compressed from about, you know, several thousand years to, you know, maybe a few years is a good and wise choice. I think it can still reasonably be like half of a lifetime kind of thing, right? Like there's some of these characters we can grow up
Speaker: There could still be big time jumps in seasons. It's just big time jumps meaning like a decade or two, not a century or two. Yeah.
Speaker: make this and everybody we've met and grown to love has gone to the ground. And in our human perceptions, a timeline jump of 10 years when in the actual timeline it would have been 140 or what have you,
Speaker: It means the same thing to us. Our lives are not 140 years long. And so we do understand time passes on a different level than what it means for a Numenorean or an elf. And that's OK. It's going to be humans watching. Yeah.
Speaker: Tim, would you like to read the next complaints here? Why did you just pick the Tolkien role? Why did it kind of involve new characters? This is basically just fanfiction at this point. This is just fanfiction. It's like, man, I wish it were fanfiction. I'm sure that there's plenty of fodder there that would blow some of these people's minds. The thing is, is like, ultimately,
Speaker: Hooken didn't write that many major characters for the second age. And so there's going to have to be some creative license. There's going to have to be some invention even around those characters that he did write about.
Speaker: such as Tarmierio at our horizon. And the reason being that most of what his writings were for the second age read as histories rather than as narrative arts. And so in order to bring an audience into the world, you're going to have to have, you know, things happen in a way that brings us along with the characters rather than kind of in retrospect and in telling us. And the other major point here is that
Speaker: There are fewer than 1 ,000 characters in Middle Earth and in Almond across three ages that span over 10 ,000 years. At some point, somebody whose name we don't know is going to need to be there and is going to show up, right? There's all sorts of stories about all the people who are not named in these histories.
Speaker: And I think that that gives us a lot of opportunity to make new stories and to kind of imagine what life is like for these folks, these kind of normal folks really, who aren't necessarily these big names
Speaker: these big -named characters and how they're responding to the actions of these big -named characters. Now I'm kind of spiraling into fanfic territory where I'm kind of like, what kind of feelings would a tellery have at the kinslaying? What kind of feelings would
Speaker: with some other folks and, you know, what were, what was going through the minds of all of these normal people when the War of Wrath happened and Balerion saying it was like, you know, the end of the fucking world, man. How all these angels and gods and stuff are like flying around in the air.
Speaker: you know, what's happening on the ground? What's happening to these people? And so I get more excited about the idea that there are more original characters coming into this because I'd like to see a Middle Earth that reflects the elves to men from hobbits and Harfoots to ants. I want to see a range of peoples because that's the Middle Earth to talk about. It's about a whole bunch of different people.
Speaker: I'm excited about this too, and I'm also excited because I keep joking about spoilers, but genuinely, there's the least written about the Second Age. A lot of these stories are going to be new for a vast portion of the viewing audience.
Speaker: But for some folks, who let's face it are nerds like us, and have read every single page about the second age that we can get our hands on, we know how a lot of the character stories turn out. And so I'm excited for the mystery of some of the original characters.
Speaker: and not knowing what their fates are if there is happiness waiting for them or tragedy. I want to experience those stakes as a viewer also. I don't just want to know what's going to happen everywhere. I want to be surprised and I'd rather be surprised on some storylines that I'm not familiar with than have something be changed dramatically
Speaker: that's truly in contrast to Hogan's writings, not just the things that he's already contradicted himself on.
Speaker: We've mentioned it a couple of times now. There are only about 200 pages written about the second age across all of Tolkien's work, not including the notion club papers and things like that that are really kind of tertiary. The notion club papers were Tolkien's foray into time travel science fiction that's based around Numenor, which doesn't have a lot of bearing on what actually plays out in Middle Earth.
Speaker: But yeah, so there's about 200 pages and I have two thirds of that or about named characters. We already know they're about collateral and teleport and
Speaker: like Numenorean kings and all of that. Yeah, there is there is a lot of room to have additional characters and I'm 100 % praise. I don't want them to be taking like horrific liberties with people whose stories we know how they're going to
Speaker: end up, like if for whatever reason they decide that Gil Galatte survives the last alliance. Yeah, no pulling off Elrond or you know things like that. It's like that's I mean that's number one that's not gonna happen but it's like I want different things that I don't know about to happen because I'm like like you guys say we we know what happens to these to these folks.
Speaker: And I think that some of the mystery and some of the surprises can happen and be found in how these things will kind of unfold in this new story.
Speaker: I want space for the storytelling because Tolkien gives us all of this amazing history, but I want to see the story adapted to screen too, and that's going to take a lot of liberties beyond what's on the page. In a way that's really, I think, respectful to Tolkien's work, I think that's really possible. But if we were just adapting a history book, it wouldn't be a particularly compelling adaptation.
Speaker: And the Tolkien estate shared that sentiment, right? They signed off on this knowing how little was written in stone about the Second Aid and knowing that the planks were going to need to be filled in and trusting that, you know, the showrunners and the writers were going to do that back in the way. I trust the judgment of the Tolkien estate, you know, Tolkien's actual family, you know, that in some cases still knew the man, like there's still some of his grandkids that are
Speaker: involved with the estate. Simon Tolkien, Christopher Zoldis, was consulting on the show we found out not too long ago. And, you know, I trust the judgment of those people more than I do. Random fucking internet comments are number three. I also don't understand how random internet comments are number three if he has actually read all 200 pages of Tolkien's writings on the Second Age.
Speaker: wants to see a series that is based exclusively on those materials, because it would be fucking unwatchable. Look, we all know that you hate Algarion. Just get over it. Honestly, I would watch that just for the fucking rage bait. But no, it's just there's so much in there that is disconnected that has nothing to do with the primary thrust of the rings of power and the downfall of Numenor.
Speaker: that are just tangential. And there's so much in there that are unfinished notes that are contradictory within themselves. And I don't understand how anybody can say, hey, I want something that is totally true to the lore. And the quote unquote lore of second age contradicts itself every other page. And it's fragmentary and incomplete. And I would like to see, yeah, I just wanted to see that. I want to see the potential of what was unwritten and explored.
Speaker: It is fascinating to me too how so many of the folks who have such strong opinions in this regard are really willing to exclude the pieces of this fairly small amount of writing that they don't necessarily agree with, which doesn't leave all that much left, unless of
Speaker: Of course, by chance they haven't read the material and aren't aware of it, but I'm sure since they speak definitively, they must, in fact, have found the reading. And not just looked it up on Wikipedia or Tolkien Gateway or something like that. Yeah, right. How dare you make such accusations.
Speaker: You know, every single one of these dude bros has read every single word. I love it when the gatekeepers are the people that haven't even read. My favorite is the gatekeepers that like constantly misspell like characters names or the worst is not even
Speaker: handle the proper spelling of Middleford, the hyphen, and the lowercase key. If you can't get that right, and yet you're going to play Vulkan here, it's just fucking awesome.
Speaker: Right. Now, it's something that Tim gets very petty over. When they start the pettiness, I don't feel at all bad about throwing it back in their faces. You want to be clear about this, except you can't fucking even spell the name properly. My gosh, Tim's pettiness does mean that I have not misspelled this at any point since meeting Tim.
Speaker: See, and I would give you a pass because I know that you're not petty about shit. It's just the people that are like overly petty about that. And it's honestly something... It's the hypocrisy and the pettiness that... It's like... Yeah. Go for it. Yeah. Alright, do I dare go into this last point that's gonna start a fight? Wait, let us all lace up our boxing gloves. How much did you guys show up until the third age of five? You do not even end us up at age.
Speaker: Okay, so let's go. This is correct. As far as we know, do not exist before the Third Age. And here are my fucking notes about this. Okay, from Lord of the Rings, page two, Fellowship of the Ring, the beginning of hobbits lies far back in the elder days that are now lost and forgotten.
Speaker: Okay, that's kind of ambiguous. Also, if you were to go back to the dwarves and men from the history of Middle Earth, hobbits are specifically described as a type of men, you could make the assertion that hobbits have been around as long as men have based on those two things. Cool. Except
Speaker: I make that assertion. Also, in Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf is talking to Frodo about the origins of Gollum. And he's talking about something that happened after the events of Gladden Fields. So firmly Third Age, and says long after, but still very long ago, that's what's connecting it to when he's talking about Gladden Fields. And then he goes on to describe
Speaker: Gollum's people as they clever -handed and quiet -footed little people. I guess they were of hobbit kind akin to the fathers of the fathers of the stores. And later, Gollum, in the two towers when they're in the dead marshes, is talking about the origins of the dead marshes and says that there was a great battle long ago, yes, so they told him when Smeagol was young. That's just to me.
Speaker: that if Gollum is from a people who are akin to the fathers of the fathers of the stores, which are one of the kind of three houses of hobbits, and those people did not exist until after the Third Age from what we can tell. Hobbits are Third Age. And I understand that it's an adaptation and they have to have hobbits because it's Middle Earth and people fucking expect that. Fine.
Speaker: But it's not fucking canonical in my opinion. And as much as I don't want to align myself with these fuckheads who say shit like this, I agree. See, here's the great thing because Alicia and I can disagree on this and still want to like have a cup of coffee together. Because when I look when I look at like the elder days statement here, now admittedly,
Speaker: This does seem weirdly out of place to me, but the Elder Days typically in Tolkien's writing refers to the First Age. So there's an argument. There's an argument that they've been there all along and nobody's paying any attention to them. And that would seem like a little bit of a silly argument to me, but Elrond, and I think Gandalf,
Speaker: pretty much all of the elves just paddle on themselves in this regard at multiple points in time throughout the story and are just like, yeah, we didn't actually make note of them in our records. So hard to say, hard to say.
Speaker: And that's one of their inherent characteristics with Hobbits too, right? Is that they are good at going unseen. Is that they're light -up quit. They can hide. I'm with you guys on this one. At the risk of alienating my life. But Gollum is a fucking hobbit!
Speaker: How come she'd know about what happened when he was alive? Because he's supposed to happen, and he was alive. Also, when you're talking about Elder Days, that's in the prologue to the Lord of the Rings, and that is, to put that completely into context, that's about finding the translation, right? So when they're talking about the Elder Days, they're talking about the entirety of the Red Book.
Speaker: There's nothing in what you've put forth that specifically says to me that Gollum and like a couple generations before him were the first of the hobbits or proto -hobbits. But they couldn't have existed long before him. And he was just at some point, you know, still the hobbit kind of thing, but that, you know, you don't know how long proto -hobbits, either Harfoot's or Stewart's or whatever, were around
Speaker: It's the fathers of the fathers of the stores part that really says to me, kind of towards the beginning.
Speaker: Yeah, because I read Fathers of the Fathers as like a rhetorical, like, you know, a long once upon a time and long ago and far away. Like, I read that as a generations in very multiples. Because I think you can take it as a fairly literal generational argument, especially, like, given how long Gollum ends up living and all of that.
Speaker: And I think you can also take it as a very figurative argument of the almost like the peoples that came before the peoples that came and so it's like an age argument. But I think I read this as like ancestors, like, you know, deep ancestors, you know, rather than like,
Speaker: great -grandma, or like great -great -grandma, you know? And of course Tolkien doesn't give us enough to go on here. He gives us just enough knowledge to be dangerous. So I think honestly I also would have only expected to see hobbits in the Third Age because so few peoples of Middle -earth are aware of them, but there is a textual explanation for that.
Speaker: there's also some evidence that makes me go, okay, I have to expand my assumptions past what I had previously thought. So I think that this one is indeed a stretch. It is definitely a stretch that the producers of the show are making here, but I don't think it's a stretch that absolutely has to result in injury.
Speaker: Yeah, I agree. I'm actually I probably fall on the other side of like, you know, I'm like, oh, yeah, of it, of course, because I kind of fall into like, in my head canon, I'm like, yeah, they've been around for ages in the same way that like, all of these peoples in Middle Earth have been around for ages and ages.
Speaker: And so I definitely fall on the, you know, when it comes to hobbits, I'm like, they've been around here for a time in memorial. So I'm excited to see them here in the second page, for sure. The one thing I'm really happy about with how the hobbits are being depicted is for the proto -hobbits are afoot is that they are being depicted as nomadic. That is canonical, that Tolkien wrote that specifically.
Speaker: They have not settled down in the Shire yet, but realistically, like how easy is it for another race to pin down the existence of hobbits or proto hobbits?
Speaker: when they're nomadic, right? When they're at a race that is notable for their ability to walk around unseen and they never stay in one place. Catch me a lot angrier if they're shown like crossing the end of it and like settling in the Shire in episode two than I am about their existence in this age.
Speaker: I think that might be something nice. We didn't talk about it during the book club, but I think, you know, if we thought that in, like, the last season, I think, I would be totally happy with seeing how it's fine with the Shire. Absolutely! What the fuck not? That doesn't happen until the fall of the goddamn North Kingdom! We're not going all the way to Farakal and fucking killing Arthur Dwee. That's not something that's happening. That happens halfway through the goddamn Third Age!
Speaker: Yeah. Are you now going to fucking defend Mooji's farm here? Look, some things are really hard. Well, apparently, yeah. Apparently, some things are... Some things are the brand new one, but too far. Yeah. Oh, that's just... There are very few hills that I'm willing to die on about this show.
Speaker: And it's fucking the horrible wigs on the elves and the hobbits just existed. I feel yeah, it's standing your truth. Standing your truth. It's not my truth, but that's cool. Well, and there are plenty of things that I
Speaker: I have strong opinions on too about the way that something might be depicted that there are going to be plenty of things that I will be able to trace the truth read back to Tolkien's writings and see the genesis of that idea and think I understand how the council came to that decision.
Speaker: But being, as I think, the stupid -ass decision, I'm not going to listen to. I have to. It'll be the canon of the show, if not the canon of Tolkien. That's fine. Knowing where the idea comes from is really, really helpful to me, actually. But I certainly have strong preferences about how certain things may or may not be depicted. Buy me a coffee and we can talk for about it three hours about how I'd like to see Tar Miriel's storyline go.
Speaker: And that's before we even started the show. So yeah, we all have pretty strong opinions. But I think it's really helpful to know what the grounding in the text is. And as Alicia points out, if you're ever trying to make the case that token definitively meant something that is your own worldview, it's a really hard case to make.
Speaker: Yeah. And I think that in a lot of this stuff, it's like it comes back, coming back full circle back to the beginning. We haven't seen this show yet. We don't know what choices have been made. We don't know what things are going to happen, how things are going to happen. And when they deviate from the text, like that's definitely a conversation we can have. And I think that the conversation we're definitely going to have on future episodes of this podcast.
Speaker: But I can tell it's just from the trailers, but it's just the fuck I have without cash cash. It's gonna be super disrespectful to token. It's gonna be terrible. I can just tell. Well he's gonna be fucking rolling around in his twin thighs. Oh my god. And I'm like, I can really just hear like, one how like, excited Tim gets about fighting with people on the internet and also like, how soul draining it is to me.
Speaker: Just like, god damn it. Shut up. No one fucking cares. You're one more angry white Catholic man. No one cares. I've heard your fucking opinion already. Well, I've heard it like 10 ,000 times. I should get paid every time you say an opinion so that I can afford health insurance for reparation.
Speaker: You're draining me of my health, you owe me. All right, well, we are at over two hours now, so I'm really excited to listen to this after Tim edits it and figure out how much of this that we actually end up keeping.
Speaker: What a journey. What a journey future James is going to go on. Indeed. Yeah, so this was our not quite a real episode, our point five episode of queer lodgings. You can find us on the interwebs or on Facebook as the queer lodgings and on Twitter as queer underscore lodgings. And if you have an episode idea or whatever,
Speaker: You can email us at cheerlodgingspodcast at gmail .com. See you guys next time, where we're going to be angrily talking about something different. Angrily or maybe not. Tune in to find out. Because we want to leave folks with an air of mystery. Indeed. We want to be surprised.
