Tag Archives: The Hobbit

Scientists Discover DNA Evidence of Middle-earth

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My son texts me: “In dungeons and dragons I created hawk-eye, Hulk and Thor”

This is a major breakthrough, even better than downloading superhero mods into Minecraft because it requires his own creative mixing. His uber-Aryan is a human paladin with a demigod destiny and an epic-tier artifact hammer. For the Hulk, you start with a human warden and multi-class him to get a monk’s unarmed strike while wearing bloodweave armor. Mix enchanted arrows and a throwing shield with bow-mastery and brawler talent, and Hawkeye and Captain America are ready to go too. I think he chiseled Iron Man from living metal.

It’s my favorite thing about superhero teams, how gods and aliens and androids can join forces, all their discordant realities merged in the ultimate melting pot of action-packed fantasy. Tolkien didn’t invent the genre, but he assembled one of the first super-teams. He would take it further with Lord of the Rings, but his first team of adventurers mixed dwarves with a hobbit and a human wizard. It was 1937. The Hobbit made a case for diversity in a time of Aryan purity.

Hitler had barred Jews from the German Olympic team the summer before. The “part-Jewish” fencer Helene Mayer was Berlin’s token exception, and she medalled, along with nine other Jewish athletes from other nations. The biggest winner was Jesse Owens with four golds, including a world record set with his relay teammates. Hitler left the stadium rather than shake a non-Aryan hand. In Berlin Owens stayed in all-whites hotel, but back home, he had to use a freight elevator to attend his own banquet. FDR, afraid of losing the Southern vote, snubbed him too.

Hitler wanted to cleanse Germany of ethnic diversity, believing it would return the splendor of ancient Greece and Rome. But go further back, and evolutionary geneticist Mark Thomas calls ancient Europe a “Lord of the Rings-type world,” with multiple human races co-existing for dozens of millennia. In addition to Early Modern Humans (including the hominids formerly known as Cro-Magnon), you got your standard Neanderthals, plus their recently discovered neighbors, the Denisovans. Instead of segregating themselves on separate continents, the three hung out together in Spanish and Siberian caves.

“It is possible,” writes Carl Zimmer for the New York Times, “that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover.”

Old school theories didn’t like the idea of Homo sapiens coming in flirting range with other groups after marching out of Africa, but analysis of a Neanderthal toe bone proves the ancient races didn’t keep to their prudish selves. If you have type 2 diabetes, you probably have a branch of Neanderthal relatives on your 50,000-year-old family tree.  The gene is biggest in the Americas, so the colony of Virginia was way too late when they passed the hemisphere’s first anti-miscegenation law in 1691. Since early humans didn’t discover Neanderthal love until after they’d exited Africa, Virginia’s slave population was the genetically purest on the continent. Even Englishman Ozzy Osbourne flunked the one-drop rule. He had his DNA sequenced in hopes of finding a “plausible medical reason why I should still be alive” given “the swimming pool or booze” and drugs he’d guzzled. The answer wasn’t racial hygiene.

Denisovans are crashing family reunions too. Europeans carry some Denisovan blood, but the biggest pockets are in Australia and New Guinea, with Brazil and China claiming some of the best Neanderthal-Denisovan mix. Denisovans also share about 8% of their genome with some million-year-old species, so that’s more bad news for Racial Purity Clubs worldwide. We are all, says computational biologist Rasmus Nielsen, “connected to other species.”

Robert E. Howard agrees. The father of sword and sorcery renamed ancient Eurasia “Hyboria” and populated it with a mixed-race of arctic warriors descended from the lost continent of Thuria.  The survivors of Atlantis devolved into ape-men, and the former Lemurians came westward, “overthrowing the pre-humans of the south.” This is about 20,000 years ago, after Neanderthals and Denisovans had given way to Homo sapiens. Howard published his first Conan the Cimmerian story in 1932. Conan’s people would evolve into Celts by 9500 BC and Conan into Arnold Schwarzenegger by 1982.“The origins of the other races of the modern world,” Howard writes, “may be similarly traced. In almost every case, older far than they realize, their history stretches back into the mists of the forgotten Hyborian Age…”

Howard committed suicide in June 1936, three weeks before Jesse Owens took his first Olympic gold. That left the Weird Tales realm of sword and sorcery undefended when Tolkien invaded the following year. Like any conqueror, he renamed everything, so Hyboria became Middle-earth. Both ages took place in Earth’s lost history, though Tolkien admits “it would be difficult to fit the lands and events (or ‘cultures’) into such evidence as we possess, archaeological or geological, concerning the nearer or remoter part of what is now called Europe.”

Tolkien’s reign ended with his death in 1973, and the realm was again defenseless during the Dungeons & Dragons invasion of 1974. I dabbled in a game or two with college roommates in the early 80s and now order second-hand copies of user guides and monster manuals for my son who organizes weekend adventures with fellow middle schoolers. I even found him a 2000 Marvel mini-series called Avataarz, featuring D&D versions of Captain America, the Hulk, Hawkeye and other sundry Avengers. He was disappointed it didn’t include their character sheets, but he’s good at building his own. Fantasy is in his blood.
 

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He and my wife and I watched The Hobbit parts 1 and 2 together and have been waiting for the last installment. We skipped the Conan the Barbarian reboot, as did most of the world’s Cimmerian-descended population, but rumor has it Arnold will be returning to Hyboria soon. His last super-team included Grace Jones and Wilt Chamberlain, but I’m sure Hollywood can assemble an even more discordant melting pot of a cast. That’s what the genre is all about.
 

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Adventure, Small As Life

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This appeared on Splice Today a while back.
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Old Took’s great-grand-uncle Bullroarer… was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse. He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.

That’s one of my favorite bits from The Hobbit. It’s also, perhaps, the passage that pushes most insistently against Tolkien’s reputation as it’s developed. Tolkien is generally lauded for his careful, monumental world-building—for his intricate languages and his sweeping sense of history. And yet, here he is, with deliberate whimsy, knocking (driving?) his reader out of Middle-Earth and back to just-plain-England for the sake of a silly and utterly gratuitous joke. I suppose it’s possible that the elves and dragons play golf in Middle-Earth, but whether or not, it’s an incongruous idea, which makes tends to make the milieu unravel, rather than weaving it together. Putting hobbits and golf together is the act of a storyteller who has his eye on effects other than consistency.

Those effects are, broadly, those not of epic fantasy, but of children’s literature. It can be hard to remember after reading the very serious, very dark Lord of the Rings, and even harder after watching the definitely-for-adults movies, but the fact is that The Hobbit is for kids. There is certainly a lot of danger and tension, and I’ve no doubt it’s given many a six-to-eight-year-olds some serious nightmares. But be that as it may, the fact remains that in its approach to character, and to its own world, it is in some ways much closer to something like Doctor Doolittle or Alice in Wonderland than it is to Tolkien’s more sober trilogy. For example, when Bilbo is trying to distract giant spiders and lead them away from his companions, he sings a taunting song that is essentially a children’s rhyme. After he’s done, Tolkien writes:

They made for his noise far quicker than he had expected. They were frightfully angry. Quite apart from the stones no spider has ever liked being called Attercop, and Tomnoddy of course is insulting to anybody.

Again, this isn’t world-building, or even logic, exactly. It’s silliness for the sake of silliness, where motivations and narrative are subordinated to the joyful clip-thunk of language. The monstrous Shelob that Frodo fights is a terrible monster, gross and inhuman. But the spiders Bilbo battles act like children, driven to madness by schoolyard taunts. And the pleasure of The Hobbit is, in no small part, that shuffling of kids’ perspective and adult perspective; the way the adventure shifts from larger than life to smaller than life in a blink, so that you feel that, in this universe, children (or hobbits) really can conquer the great, grand world, or, alternately, that the great, grand world really can be child-like.

I love The Lord of the Rings too, movies as well as books. But it’s too bad that critics, readers, and writers of fantasy these days are much more comfortable with the modes of the later Tolkien than with his earlier, lighter prelude. Harry Potter, for example, largely abandoned its Roald-Dahlesque nonsense impulses in favor of supposedly more sophisticated good vs. evil bombast. Twilight, The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials all might have LOTR somewhere in their heritage, but certainly none of them have The Hobbit. There are series that still hark back to fantasy’s children’s literature roots, like How To Train Your Dragon, but they don’t seem to have the same impact, or to be taken as seriously as cultural touchstones.

This is a shame in part because the children’s literature tradition is so vibrant; there simply aren’t many fantasy stories, in any mode, better than Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan—or The Hobbit and Narnia, for that matter. But it’s also unfortunate because those children’s stories are decidedly more sophisticated than the adult epics with their grim quests and bloodshed and high seriousness. No matter how intricate the world you build, that world still isn’t the world. A story that acknowledges its own nonsense is, to that degree, more true, and more knowing, than one that doesn’t. Golf is, after all, more real than beheading goblins, no matter how grim and epic you make the latter.

The 3-D Gave Me a Headache and Seven More Complaints about The Hobbit

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1. The movie spends over half an hour introducing the dwarves, yet doesn’t give a single reason to care about any of them. It’s hard to even keep them straight. I remember the king, the fat one, the old one, and the one with the stupid hat. Beyond that, I don’t remember them and don’t care. By any standard of characterization quality, this movie compares poorly with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. At least I knew what to think of Grumpy.

2. Somewhere in this great big world, there is a movie that successfully combines musical numbers, snot gags, and rampant violence. The Hobbit is not that movie. The plot retains the cutesy qualities of a children’s adventure, but with incongruous levels of violence. Though now that I think about it, this is familiar territory for a comics blogger.

3. PG-13 violence is remarkable, and not in a good way. The movie has decapitations, eviscerations, multiple stabbings, and a body count in the hundreds, yet there is very little on-screen blood and the camera never lingers on the gruesome consequences of violence. The Hobbit is too gory to be cartoonish yet too tame to be explicit. It’s the uncanny valley of violent entertainment.

4. The action scenes are not exciting. Several reviewers have noted the video gamey quality of the action, particularly the big battle/chase sequence with the goblins. There is shot after shot of indistinguishable dwarves killing indistinguishable orcs. Noah compared it to a “body count video game,” which sounds about right. While body count video games can’t be defended as good art, they can at least provide a base level of entertainment and a pleasurable empowerment fantasy. But watching The Hobbit is like watching someone else play a video game, which  is never fun.

5. Every scene is about 10 minutes longer than it needs to be. It’s bad enough that such a short book was split into a trilogy. But there’s no conceivable reason why each installment has to exceed 2 hours. Though now I can’t help but wonder what sort of scenes were cut from the theatrical release. And what will be included in the extend cut DVDs? No doubt there are many more thrilling scenes of characters sitting around tables and explaining the plot to each other.

6. The film is tragically lacking in hobbit feet close-ups. Why even make The Hobbit if you’re not going to showcase hobbit feet?

7. To harp on the 3-D again, it adds absolutely nothing to the movie experience. 3-D is just a silly gimick, so if you’re going to use 3-D you might as have some fun with the audience (for a great example, see Friday the 13th part 3, which is all rats and marijuana and eyeballs in the third dimension). The Hobbit doesn’t have any fun with the 3-D, so it feels suspiciously like an excuse for theaters to jack up the ticket price.

7.5. Speaking of ticket price, two tickets cost me $38. Thirty eight fucking dollars.

The Genocide Against the Orcs

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I have a piece up this week on the Atlantic about violence in the new Hobbit movie.

The post has generated a long comment thread. I posted several comments myself here and there…and I figured I’d highlight a couple of my longer ones here since I don’t know that anyone will read them otherwise. They’ll be a bit disjointed…but what the hey, it’s a blog.
 

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I think there’s a lot of truth to this. But Tolkien could also see racial antagonism (as between Elves and Dwarves, for example) as evil and hurtful. And the Hobbits (especially Sam) are kind of supposed to be working class too, in some ways.

As with the violence, I tend to see race as an issue that Tolkien struggles with, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.

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I don’t think sentience in and of itself predicates against the logic of genocide. In fact, I know it doesn’t. On the contrary, genocide really only makes sense in terms of sentience — you don’t use genocide to refer to the mass killing of the dodo, for example. The fact that the Goblin wants to find out what they’re doing first before killing them also seems beside the point. The issue isn’t whether they always fight each other in every circumstance; the issue is whether Tolkien presents goblins, orcs, etc., as people who can be good or evil or in between, and who it is a sin to kill if you don’t have to, or whether he presents them as vermin who should, ideally, be exterminated. I think he tends very much to present them as the second.

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No…it’s quite different. Twain was a committed anti-racist; Huck Finn is explicitly committed to racial equality in a way that was very courageous for its time…and for our time, for that matter.

Tolkien’s stance towards race is a lot more ambiguous. And…for those who say it was just of its time, it’s worth noting that Huck Finn was written a fair bit before LOTR. There were people at that time (Langston Hughes, for instance) who were anti-racist. Tolkien’s stance certainly could have been a lot worse — but comparing him to Mark Twain definitely shows up his limitations in this area.

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I think you can see the enjoyment of violence in, for example, Beorn’s attitude towards killing goblins, and the book’s satisfaction in the dead goblin and warg he displays in front of his door. Or in Legolas and Gimli’s contest to see who can kill more orcs. Or even perhaps in the Ent’s spectacular destruction of Isengard.

 
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Saying evil is real, and embodying that evil in a particular race or group of people — that’s the logic of genocidal violence. The claim that you need to kill every one of the enemies because they are genocidal — that’s how genocide is justified too. To say that it’s a fantasy sort of misses the point as well — genocidal fantasies are also fantasies. That other tribe, over there, isn’t *really* unhuman — it’s a story you tell. But stories can have real results. Fantasies can kill.

Like I said, this is a tension in Tokien’s work, not an absolute. He very eloquently argues for peace and mercy in many way. But he also finds genocide appealing. That’s the case for most of us (it is for me — I like lots of bloody body count films.) I think Tokien actually makes us think about that, sometimes quite deliberately. How do you fight Sauron without being Sauron? How do you pick up that ring without becoming the ring’s servant? Those are pretty important questions, not less so because Tokien sometimes (not always, but sometimes) seems swayed by Sauron’s logic of murder and force.

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Hobbit Tunes

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If you’re going on the quest, best make sure you have the right quest music. Tolkien songs are always reliable for any quest involving lots of walking.

“The Road Goes Ever On” from The Hobbit
by J.R.R. Tolkien

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.
Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.

Or if you prefer, the version from The Lord of the Rings:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Just one problem: what does the song actually sound like (and where can I download it?)

Option 1: Drinking song


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