J-Tribe Perspective: The Lord of the Rings rooted in racism

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The Lord of the Rings rooted in racism

Postby icelander93 » Mon Apr 25, 2011 9:32 am
http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/jan/08lord.htm

An American academic, who teaches at the Warwick University in the United Kingdom, has described J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy as an 'epic rooted in racism'.

Dr Stephen Shapiro, an expert in cultural studies, race and slavery, said the author used his novels to present bigotry through a fantasy world.

Following the release in UK of the film The Two Towers, the second in the series, Dr Shapiro told rediff.com that the books represent anxieties about immigration in mid-1950s Britain.

He said: "Put simply, Tolkien's good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde."

In the trilogy, a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against a foreign horde and this reflects long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-Europeans, he said.

This is consistent with Tolkien's Nordicist convictions. He thinks the Northern races had a culture and it was carried in the blood, Dr Shapiro said.

While Tolkien describes the Hobbits and Elves as amazingly white, ethnically pure clans, their antagonists, the Orcs, are a motley dark-skinned mass, akin to tribal Africans or aborigines. The recent films amplify a 'fear of a black planet' and exaggerate this difference by insisting on stark white-black colour codes, Dr Shapiro said.

He added: "Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because he wanted to recreate a mythology for the English, which had been destroyed by foreign invasion. He felt the Normans had destroyed organic English culture. There is the notion that foreigners destroy culture and there was also a fantasy that there was a solid homogeneous English culture there to begin with, which was not the case because there were Celts and Vikings and a host of other groups.

"We have a pure village ideal, which is being threatened by new technologies and groups coming in. I think the film has picked up on this by colour coding the characters in very stark ways.

"For instance, the fellowship is portrayed as uber-Aryan, very white and there is the notion that they are a vanishing group under the advent of the other, evil ethnic groups.

"The Orcs are a black mass that doesn't speak the languages and are desecrating the cathedrals.

"For today's film fans, this older racial anxiety fuses with a current fear and hatred of Islam that supports a crusading war in the Middle East. The mass appeal of The Lord of the Rings, and the recent movies may well rest on racist codes."

Dr Shapiro said that the trilogy, which began in the 1930s and published in the 1950s, was written at the onset of de-colonisation, when the first immigrants from the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent came to Britain. The Midlands, Tolkien's model for the Shire, was becoming a multicultural region.

A spokesman for Harper Collins, publisher of the trilogy, accused Dr Shapiro of mixing up his dates: "The copyright for The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in the series, was 1954. Tolkien would have finished writing the book quite a bit before the mid-50s and certainly the idea would have come a number of years before, given the sheer size of the book. So I think the timing is out.

"A number of academics have commented on Tolkien's work and this is the first time anybody has ever seen these issues in it. Of course, if you look hard enough at many great epics, you can extrapolate what you like, particularly if you have academic kudos behind you.

"A number of people have said that they think The Lord of the Rings could be an allegory for the Second World War, or indeed the first, as Tolkien fought in it, but it was never a view that he agreed with. His great abiding passion and interest came from the Icelandic sagas and mythology, and this was his version of one of those sagas."

Richard Crawshaw, a trustee for the Tolkien Society, said: "There was definitely no racial intent in his work. He detested racism."

http://forum.christogenea.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2286

[Yo Mama]

Dr Stephen Shapiro, an expert in cultural studies, race and slavery

     

[Yo Mama]

[Yo Mama]

[Michael K.]

Dear Crack Smoke Republican,

I grew up reading "The Lord Of The Rings," and have re-read each book at least three times.  I never thought too much about the implications until it somehow became a super high-budget film series.  Then I had to consider that there were other forces at work, forces which shape the mass-psychology and don't care how much it costs to do it.

Although I don't expect you to just believe me, I will at length support what I am saying as the future allows.  But for now I will state a thesis of sorts and see what you think:

"The Lord Of The Rings" contains the programming for the White masses which is intended to make them receptive of the Anti-Christ.  The Bible tells the true story, which is similar in many regards to the Tolkien story, but the outcome and meanings are at odds.  In the Gospels, Christ tells of his future return and warns us to watch out for false Christs and those who say they come in his name.  The scene where the Riders of the Rohorim, led by Gandalf, appear in a supernatural brightness from the East to destroy the armies of the wicked is in part taken from Revelation, where Christ returns seated on a white horse to annihilate the armies of the Anti-Christ in similar fashion.  

However, at the return of Christ the entire planet is burnt with nuclear-level heat, "reduced to the elements".  The salvation of the righteous is that they are swept up to safety the moment before it happens.  The good future we all hope for is miraculous, "under a new heavens and on a new earth", possibly a renewed earth, resurrected as a planet.   But in Tolkien's story, the salvation of Middle Earth is materialistic in that it comes from the restoration of the "True King," and the destruction of the Ring of Power.  In this, it leads men to hope in a false hope.  This false hope is the hope of the Anti-Christ.

The Revelations tell us that the Anti-Christ is to burn and utterly overthrow the Great Harlot, Babylon.  The Anti-Christ is a tool of God's justice when he does so, paradoxically, but not later on.  As the liberator of the Earth from the grips of Jew-Babylon, he will be heralded as the hero of the people.  Like Arthur and Merlin, Aragorn and Gandalf are together in their accomplishments, and complimentary to each other.  This Bible tells us to watch out for two men of like countenance, the Beast and the False Prophet.

Ultimately it will be easier for one's mind to believe in the fleshy salvation and "Kingdom of God" offered by the ultimate and last Anti-Christ and his False Prophet.  It is a greater stretch to believe in the supernatural Kingdom of Jesus Christ, and the total destruction and rebirth of our planet.  To this end, Tolkien's story, when imprinted deeply on the mind, takes the place of the true story from the Bible.  It is a story of a different kind of savior, one who fulfills the hopes and longings of the flesh, turns the stones to bread, and saves his people from the hordes who will attempt to destroy them.

I hope this gives you some insights, and I'd be interested in any response you might have.

[Wimpy]

Not Crack Smoke here but I will chime in.

Your interpretation is a way of looking at the Trilogy through the eye of the Bible; a rather sound one in this regard.  If one were to take your argument to it's natural conclusion then no matter how just the cause against evil and no matter how righteous the results of the savior pair (Aragorn and Gandolf) are, they will inevitably be that of the Beast and False Prophet.  

So are we to do nothing and wait for Jesus?  Trust no man, sit on our hands, pray to God and welcome Armageddon?  Seems to me that Jesus taught his followers to resist and confront evil or am I mistaken?

I believe the Trilogy only addresses the corporeal affairs of the World and the storyline rallies "good" against this crumbling foundation of the physical World, via Suramon (sp?), the Orcs and other minions.  It is true that certain spiritual elements enter in to the story but these Good and Evil elements stradle between the Physical and Spiritual.  Gandlof is a man who dips into the Spiritual to combat Evil while Suromon is mainly 'Spiritual Evil' dipping into the physical realm of man to spread evil.  Much like the Jews who follow the Kabbalah and Lucifer.

The embodiment of Evil is represented by Suromon and his armies; Lucifer on earth.  The forces of 'Good' are only helped along by a Human whom has a link to the Spiritual 'good' and is, I believe, in no way suggested to represent Jesus or some False Prophet.  At the end of the story Evil is vanquished and sent back from whence it came, Humans regain their natural physical path and the enlightened man of good departs the physical, with other enlightened folks, for Heaven, I presume.

I enjoyed the Trilogy, watched it with with my "They Live" Jew glasses.

[mchawe]

However, at the return of Christ the entire planet is burnt with nuclear-level heat, "reduced to the elements". The salvation of the righteous is that they are swept up to safety the moment before it happens. The good future we all hope for is miraculous, "under a new heavens and on a new earth", possibly a renewed earth, resurrected as a planet.

Isn't that the "Rapture" that people like Hagee and Robertson want to bring on ?   ....Like facilitating and hoping for the nuking of the planet (or the killing off by radiation poisoning of all life) so the Christian zionists can get their Rapture ?

[Michael K.]

Dear Wimpy,

The question of whether one engages martially with the evil of the world isn't either a yes or no, because it is not up to us.  We have a right to protect ourselves, and if that means fighting back at some point, then that's what it means.  The really big questions are whether or not we will surrender to blind wrath and whether we will hate those whom we are fated to call enemies.  Will we arrogate from God the right to decide whether somebody else is scum and should die?  Or will we rather be slow to use our weapons and keep a righteous fear of doing so?  It's not whether or not to fight, but when and how.  I say beware of when it seems pleasing to fight.

Dear McHave,

No, it is not the same "rapture" belief held by Zio-Christians.  What I am telling you is verbatim quoted from Scripture.  It is literally what the Bible says Jesus said.  Predominantly, it is in Matthew Chapter 24.  What Hagee and the evangelicals believe is that, before any great suffering or persecution of Christians begins, they will seem to vanish into thin air.  Then everyone one else who didn't go to church every Sunday will have to suffer it out until the end.  Then, they believe in what is called "chilaism," which interprets certain words in Revelation as a promise that Christ will both return and reign over the earth (seven years after they all disappeared in the "rapture") for a thousand years, at the end of which time he will test everyone once again, the Devil will be released to tempt man once more, and then the final judgment will come with wrath.

The point I am trying to make is that they are preparing you for the coming Anti-Christ with this Millennial Kingdom message.  There is nothing of the sort going to happen.  What the Bible really says is the the Anti-Christ will tempt man to worship him by acting as if he were Christ, himself.  This deception is meant to weed out the evil, vain, materialistic and spiritually weak.  They will have to choose a side:  Go with the ordinary old-fashioned Christians and be killed as an idolater and heretic, or go with the new Messianic Judaism version of Christianity and receive your promised portion in his earthly Kingdom.

The most important thing to learn is to discern Messianic Judaism from Christianity.  Hagee is leading his followers to the threshold of Messianic Judaism, while others have committed themselves to this heresy whole-heartedly, already.  And to distinguish between the supernatural narrative in the Bible which can not possibly be faked (come on, who can incinerate the entire world completely, then bring it back to life?  Not the Jews, that's for sure), and the materialistically believable, legalistic and theocratic, "Return of the Lost Christ-King," script.

[Michael K.]

P.S-

Wimpy, Arthur and Merlin, Aragorn and Gandalf, are all patterned on the dual Messiah-ship of the Old Testament Israel, epitomized by King Saul and the Prophet Samuel.  In fact Saul is an Old Testament type pre-figuring the Anti-Christ, a person who will also claim Israelite Messiah-ship himself, or so it seems to me.

McHawe, the war-mongering by the Christian Zionists is in order to precipitate WW 3, which will probably end with Jew Babylon destroyed by fire, as foretold in Revelations.  In the ashes of this hyped religious conflict there can arise the final Anti-Christ, but only after traditions everywhere are shattered and chaos reduces people to a programmable traumatic state.

[Yo Mama]

...as foretold in Revelations.

http://www.thebricktestament.com/revelation/index.html

 :lol:

[GordZilla]

Well said Michael and welcome to TiU.

 

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Tolkien is an interesting author. He was a professor of Anglo-Saxon literature and fought as an officer at the battle of the Somme during the Great "Jew Instigated" War for the Birth of modern Israel.

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Tolkien as Post World War I Novelist

 Frodo and Gollum's passages of the Dead Marshes within "The Two Towers" ("For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry 'There are dead things, dead faces in the water,' he said with horror. 'Dead faces!'" () is likened against descriptions by British soldiers on the Somme, such as Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer ("Floating on the surface of the flooded trench . . . the mask of a human face . . . detached . . . from the skull." (9), Max Plowman's A Subaltern on the Somme ("as I look upon these evil pools I half expect to see a head appearing from each one." (10)), and John Masefield's The Old Front Line ("liquid gathers in holes near the bottom, and is greenish and foul and has the look of dead eyes staring upward."(11)).(12)

There are also comparisons to be made between Masefield's no man's land ("crested and scabbed with yellowish tetter, trickling and oozing like sores discharging pus"(13)), Willfred Owen's description ("pockmarked like a body of foulest disease . . . its odour the breath of cancer") and Tolkien's approach to Mordor (partially called "Noman-Lands" (14) --"Mists curled and smoked from dark and noisome pools. The reek of them hung stifling in the still air."(15))

Tolkien was not entirely oblivious to this debt from his experience. He wrote "Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence on either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme."(16)

The terrain was not the only aspect of the wars to which comparisons can be made. Considerations of the technology are herein relevant. Tolkien's Nazgûl(17) ("Out of the black sky there came dropping like a bolt a winged shape, rending the clouds with a ghastly shriek" (18)) is not unlike David Jones' description of incoming rounds In Parenthesis ("Out of the vortex, rifling the air it came - bright, brass shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the howling crescendo's up-piling snapt" (19)) or Fredrick Manning's description of the rounds in Her Privates We ("Something rushed downward on them with a scream of exultation, increasing to a roar before it blasted the air asunder and sent splinters of steel shrieking over their heads. . . ."(20)).

The effects on the men between the Nazgûls (". . . its defenders throw themselves to the ground, or stand, 'letting their weapons fall from nerveless hands'" (21)) and the incoming rounds ("Private Ball stands fixed, letting his mess-tin spill at his feet, or as Manning's Tommies cringe like 'men seeking shelter from a storm." and "he had lived like a hunted animal . . . hiding in holes from the monstrous birds of prey screeching and roaring overhead in search of human flesh." (22)) were not so far different either(23).

Brogan demonstrates, in similar manner, Tolkien's downfall of Sauron (". . . as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent; for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell" (24)) can be likened to a Sassoon's shell burst ("Against the clear morning sky a cloud of dark smoke expands and drifts away. Slowly its dingy wrestling vapors take the form of a hooded giant with clumsy expostulating arms. Then, with a gradual gesture of acquiescence, it lolls sideways, falling over into the attitude of a swimmer on his side. And so it dissolves into nothingness." (25))(26)

Tolkien's goblins are largely based on the goblins of George MacDonald.(27) Because of this William H. Green feels it is important we should look to where they differ. On this Green notes, "Tolkien's [goblins] are nevertheless gifted in the design and use of tools of destruction. They are blamed for the destructive inventions of the machine age, especially weapons of mass destruction, "for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them" (60). Here Tolkien is projecting on MacDonald's goblins his own vision of twentieth-century evil, the tanks, explosives, and machine guns that made their devastating appearance in the Great War, where he saw action at the battle of the Somme. Though Tolkien disliked mainstream modern authors such as D. H. Lawrence, he shared with many of them a demonizing of technology."(28)

We find an open confession that at least one of Tolkien's characters was born of his wartime experience, despite Tolkien's frequent denials that current or recent history had any influence on LotR: "Discussing one of the principal characters in The Lord of the Rings he wrote many years later: 'My "Sam Gamgee" is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.'" (29) This is not insignificant when one considers his growing importance throughout LotR and Tolkien's comment to his son Christopher "Sam is the most closely drawn character, the successor to Bilbo of the first book, the genuine hobbit."(30)

Tolkien has an orc snarl "Don't you know we're at war?"(31). This is obviously the same as the common "Don't you know there's a war on?"(32)

There is also a matter of "the polarization of consciousness - what [Fussell] calls 'the gross dichotomizing' - imposed by the war - the habit of reading the world and all experience as a struggle between our side and 'the enemy'"(33) Fussell writes "'We' are all here on this side: 'the enemy' is over there. 'We' are individuals with names and personal identities; 'he' is a mere collective entity. We are visible; he is invisible. We are normal; he is grotesque. Our appurtenances are natural; his, bizarre. He is not as good as we are . . . Nevertheless, he threatens us and must be destroyed . . ."(34) Brogan points out "'He', the reader of Tolkien must reflect, is Sauron, who never loses his name or his title 'the Dark Lord', but is nevertheless alluded to, more and more frequently, as 'the Enemy' as The Lord of the Rings proceeds."(35)

Fussell "remarks that in this world of trenches, day and night are reversed: it is the night which is filled with busy activity"(36) This recalls Mordor (". . . the most easterly of the roads followed them . . . Neither man nor orc moved along its flat grey stretches; for the Dark Lord had almost completed the movement of his forces, and even in the fastness of his own realm he sought the secrecy of night." (37) ).

Even 'the Road' has significance. T. E. Hulme wrote "You unconsciously orient things in reference to it. In peacetime, each direction on the road is as it were indifferent, it all goes on ad infinitum. But now you know that certain roads lead, as it were, up to an abyss." (38) Brogan comments "It can need no stressing that the road taken by Sam and Frodo leads them, precisely, to an abyss."(39)

http://www.fortunecity.com/westwood/nak ... lkwwi.html

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Glimpses of the battlefield do occur within Tolkien's epic tapestry - Morgoth's monstrous iron dragons surely owe something to the tanks first used in combat in World War I, which terrified the horses of the cavalry. When he describes the desolation of the battlefield, strewn with the mangled corpses of friend and foe, at the end of combat, we sense that Tolkien has himself witnessed that bleak devastation.

Common cause

But in the main, Tolkien's imagination swerves away from Wilfred Owen's despair, mining the depths of his own sense of waste and loss, to salvage from it emotional, spiritual and moral meaning. This imaginative determination finds its way deep into the narrative fabric of his tales of Middle Earth.

In spite of the horror of total war, Tolkien chooses in his writing to focus his attention on the redemptive power of individual human action offered unconditionally as part of a common cause. Frodo Baggins is each of us aspiring to do good within modest limits.

"I should like to save the Shire, if I could," says Frodo early in his quest. "Though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words."

Tolkien's epic works are large-scale memorials to the modest struggles of ordinary people doing their best for good against the forces of inhumanity. They are a brilliantly achieved exemplar of the way the human imagination can configure a better future even in the aftermath of senseless, bloody destruction.

As such they sustain and offer solace. In 1940, Tolkien spoke of how "to be caught in youth by 1914" was a "hideous" experience. "I was pitched into it all just when I was full of stuff to write, and of things to learn; and never picked it all up again."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5133000.stm

Many years ago I corresponded with Tolkien's son, a schoolmaster like myself. He said the Dark Riders in his novel were based on a real recurring nightmare from the First World War. Tolkien, riding a good cavlary horse, had somehow got lost behind the German lines,and, imagining he was behind his own trenches, rode towards a group of mounted cavalrymen standing in the shade of a coppice.

It was only when he drew nearer he realised his mistake for they German Ulhans, noted for their atrocities and taking no prisoners. When they saw him they set off in pursuit with their lances levelled at him. He swung his horse round and galloped off hotly pursued by the Germans. They had faster steeds but Tolkien's horse was a big-boned hunter.

They got near enough for him to see their skull and crossbone helmet badges. Fortunately for Tolkien (and us, his readers)he raced towards some old trenches which his horse, used to hunting, took in its stride. The Uhlans' horses weren't up to it and they reined in leaving Tolkien to get away to his own side.

He was terrified and the cruel faces of those Uhlans and their badges haunted him in nightmares for a long time afterwards. Years later, when he was writing his novel, the Dark Riders were the result of that terrifying chase.
Revd John Waddington-Feather, Shrewsbury

[Whaler]

[youtube:lhb4tznw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iysdpCL58w0[/youtube]lhb4tznw]
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[youtube:lhb4tznw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0a6_ovNKms[/youtube]lhb4tznw]

1978 Lord of the Rings Cartoon Playlist

http://www.youtube.com/user/Comandercat ... 5FD8B4B71D

[Whaler]

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[Michael K.]

Dear Crack Smoke Republican,

Thanks for the last post, I got some cultural enrichment from it and it reminds me of how much I love Tolkien.  Especially that last part about the Dark Riders.  I say everything about the tie-ins to the Anti-Christ with a measured respect for whom I am talking about.  There is no way that he could possibly have seen it the way I do, he was not the kind of person who would have dared blaspheme against God in a novel.  

But, he was essentially living in a lie, a big Jew lie as we mostly all know too well.  And in addition to the big Jew lies behind the war, there were the underlying British Israel race myths which had already taken hold within the popular English imagination by that time.  And there were whatever Arthurian, crypto-Rosicrucian notions and Masonic mysteries were current in colleges and the middle class in England at that time.  

And then we have creative, imaginative and mythologically-minded Tolkien trying to recapitulate his trauma in the context of what he saw as hope, in the context of the political inheritance he grew up with.  It seems figuratively, that he hoped in the return of a long-lost, righteous and messianic king to the throne of the British Empire and everything finally getting better.  

What is unfortunate about this is that such a narrative is exactly what the Stuart Monarchy has had in mind for centuries, since they lost the crown to Cromwell, and to that end they created the Scottish Rite, and did so with the goal being to use this rite of Freemasonry to restore the Stuarts as popular heroes and race-messiahs to the throne of the Empire.

[Wimpy]

Michael K.,

Thank you for your thoughtful and genteel replies. :clap:

[Anonymous]

Michael K, I greeted you in the greetings thread, I am utterly disapointed in your use of Christian religion in this thread. Claiming that any other belief system is anti-christ (according to them) is just pure garbage. I used to be christian, read creativity material and then Christian Identity and I will pretty much say that all religion is crap, that is why I am creating my own and it has a great foundation and based on 100% observable or reasonably inferred truth. The entire white race has been locked into this christianity enslavement. Reading about jesus, even the positive things he supposedly done like turning over the money changers tables, it could have been something Jesus did to get Street Cred like alot of Jews do today. I think the whole thing is complete crap, you'd be better off accepting reality as how you can perceive through your senses rather than accepting someone elses reality which conflicts of what is observable, and a silly promise that when you die you will go to heaven if you behave yourself according to their rules (christian political correctness?) I am really tired of how christians act and sayhow could you pass up the gift of eternal life, there is no greater gift etc etc. It's no different than someone in the street handing you a million dollar cheque claiming that it is real and that you would be foolish to refuse the gift. I don't know about you but I would be pretty sure that cheque would not clear. TO gain everlasting life they claim it is a free gift, yet on the other hand they say you have to give your life over to jesus, Christianity is full of jewish double standards.

I would suggest you read these articles.

The Unavenged Outrage: A Closer Look At the Judeo-Christian Hoax
http://www.phpbbplanet.com/forum/viewto ... um=library

Getting to Heaven: Project impossible: Or, Everybody is Going to Hell
http://www.phpbbplanet.com/forum/viewto ... um=library

It has been my observable opinion of many christians is that they are refusing to face up to the realities of life.

The only Christianity I support or recommend to those who still want to believe in christ and remain a christian and that is to become a Christian Identist, there simply is no other way assuming you are white, if you are black or yellow then a broader type of christian identity would be ideal, not sure if that exists, have not looked for it.