> On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, Brad DeLong wrote:
>
>> >one thing not mentioned in this discussion of THE LORD OF THE RINGS
>> >is that the bad guys in Tolkein all seem to be dark or "swarthy,"
>> >while the good guys are light or "fair."
>>
>> Dwarves are good guys. So are the hairy men of the
>> woods--Ghan-Buri-Ghan and campany. And the ents... the ents are
>> definitely non-Aryan mongrels...
>>
>> But in broad sweep you are right: it's somewhat creepy...
>>
> Even more telling are the regions the evil enemies reside in:
> The East and the South. Our heroes the Hobbits, in contrast,
> live in the innocent, bucolic North of Middle Earth.
One could reply that Tolkein's novel is "simply a story," and that one needn't try to find analogies to current events. Of course, it's _fun_ to do this, to read Sauron as Hitler and the Ring as some weapon, and one might even work up some interesting insight out of the process.
But I'm sort of fascinated by this effort to read the story, and ferret out sone telltale signs or signifiers for unsavory values. The evil side tends to get the thick, eldritch adjectives, black, dark, smoky, barren, violent, their language is grating, rotten teeth, etc. Not that this is without precedent in myth, of course. But particular references are then cited as evidence of... well, something _really bad_. The Bad Guys are described as "dark?" Hmmmm....
Why do people expend so much energy on this task? Is literature a minefield, where one has to keep an ever-vigilant watch out for hidden symbols in order to avoid being turned into a fascist or racist? Or, is this vigilance undertaken to protect _other_ people, those readers ignorant of political theory who wander innocently into Middle-Earth, from the insidious mind-viruses of "hidden" allegory? How is this unlike the careful analyses of the _Malleus Malificarum_, that charming guidebook to sniffing out heresy and witchcraft in the most mundane of everyday details?
I mean, what is the point? If you're going to read Tolkien with antennae raised for doubleplusungood signifiers, then what do you plan to _do_ about it?