Monday, December 26, 2011

Why The European Debt Crisis Would Have Horrified Frodo Baggins.

Why The European Debt Crisis Would Have Horrified Frodo Baggins

There’s a grand tradition among American men between the ages of about 15 and 45 of overthinking Star Wars. Wouldn’t light saber wounds cauterize themselves? Why was Obi-Wan Kenobi a pathological liar? Wouldn’t the Empire have named the Death Star something positive, like the Order Orb? Why couldn’t the forest moon of Endor been populated by wookies instead of ewoks? Were the surviving Jedi really stupid enough to try to hide Luke from Darth Vader by stowing him with Darth Vader’s brother on Darth Vader’s home planet? Why was Vader so stupid as to not find Luke there? The pinnacle of this kind of thought is probably the discussion in the movie Clerks about whether the independent contractors who were probably on the second Death Star got a raw deal.

There are probably people who do this with the Lord of the Rings, both books and movies, but you don’t hear as much about them. Well, after watching the extended versions of the movies and discovering – to my shock – that they do actually add something to the versions that were in theaters – let’s watch more four-hour movies! – I feel myself slipping into some serious overthinking of at least the movies. Having never read the books, but also having never heard of Rings fans roaming the streets like rampaging Uruk-Hai over the movies’ misrepresentation of the books, I’m going to trust that the movies accurately reflect the books. Accordingly, I’ll share the three things that have occurred to me as I have put too much thought into the Rings saga.

First, if Gandalf could summon eagles whenever he felt like it, why didn’t he just do that in the first place? He summons an eagle to bail him out when Saruman has him confined to the top of Isengard. He summons eagles to fight off the Naszgul during the battle at the Black Gate. He summons eagles to pluck Frodo and Sam off the slopes of Mount Doom at the end (although they clearly would have been fried by the volcanic gasses emanating from the ocean of lava that surrounded them). Why didn’t he just summon some eagles to fly Frodo directly to Mount Doom at the beginning, or at least after the defeat of Saruman, and save everyone the trouble? (I am assuming that, before Saruman’s defeat, he would have had the power to summon flying creatures to intercept the eagles chauffering Frodo to Mount Doom.) It never looked like the orcs had much airpower to defend against eagles.

Second, Theoden, King of Rohan, is the worst military strategist of all time. We’ll let him slide on the point that, in the Two Towers, he banished all of his horsemen – Rohan’s greatest strategic asset – because he was under the influence of Saruman at the time. (Tolkien’s editor should have asked him the following questions: “Seriously, there’s Saruman and Sauron? And they’re working together? Are you trying to confuse absolutely everyone?”) Once Theoden cleared his head, though, couldn’t he have gone and found the horsemen? He said they would be leagues away by then, but how would he have known? Judging by what the movies showed, his horsemen routinely destroyed the orcs and Uruk-Hai and it took a long damn time for everyone in Rohan to walk to Helm’s Deep. Wouldn’t spending the time to go find the horsemen have been a better option than dragging the whole population into a box canyon? Saruman was manufacturing Uruh-Kai out of mud, so there was no way that Rohan was going to outlast them at Helm’s Deep, even before Saruman invented explosives and suicide bombers to detonate the wall.

Theoden’s bizarre maneuver at Helm’s Deep, however, pales in comparison to his unfathomable tactics at the Battle of Minas Tirith. Recall that Rohan’s horsemen overwhelmed the stationary orcs with a charge dependent on their speed and momentum. As soon as that part of the battle was over, the elephants associated with the nameless men with headdresses appear. So what does Theoden – commander of the fastest, most mobile military unit in all of Middle Earth – do? He orders a frontal assault on the elephants, having his men charge directly at the elephants from the only angle at which they can defend themselves. Wouldn’t Rohan’s horsemen have been 1000% more effective if they had flanked the elephants, attacking them from the sides where they apparently had no defenses other than archers would have been as likely to shoot the other elephants as the rapidly moving horses? Did Theoden learn nothing from the Revolutionary War and the Battle of Hoth? When you’re in the role of the Rebel Alliance, you implement guerrilla warfare, not frontal assaults. Theoden seemed like kind of a cool guy, but Rohan is probably far better off with Aowen running the show.

My third, and much more egregious, example of overthinking Lord of the Rings is my conclusion that the whole trilogy is an argument in favor of a European Union and, by implication, the euro. Tolkien apparently denied that the books were an allegory for World War II, but the parallels are just too strong to ignore, particularly given that he wrote them over the ten years following WWII before publishing the books in 1954 and 1955 when the formation of a European community was a live issue. The parallels leap out. It isn’t very hard to see Sauron as Hitler or Mordor as Nazi Germany, but the whole exercise of manufacturing Uruh-Kai as a super-army also sounds a lot like the Nazi’s experiments with eugenics. The elves are pretty clearly the Americans, with the elves having fought with men in a previous war against the same enemy, deciding – after some initial reluctance – to ally with men again in the current war and then “going into the West” back across the ocean at the end of the story.

The analogy to European history also explains what was, to me at least, one of the more inexplicable aspects of the story, namely the existence of two nations of men. Maybe there was more backstory in the books that I haven’t read, but wouldn’t you think that the nations of men would have gotten the message during the first war against Sauron that they had better stick together? Ah, but, if they had done so, they would not have been such a neat analogy for Britain and France. To me at least, Rohan is Britain and Gondor is France.

This analogy explains a great deal of what happens in the Lord of the Rings. Theoden retreated to Helm’s Deep behind Rohan’s historically impenetrable wall because that was a neat analogy to Britain’s pre-WWII confidence that no army could ever cross the English Channel. Saruman’s use of new technology – explosives – to breach the wall mirrors Germany’s use of new technology – aircraft – to jump the English Channel and nearly win the Battle of Britain, which, on this theory, mirrors Saruman’s near-victory at Helm’s Deep. Theoden’s earlier possession by Saruman and his minion Wormtongue reflects how deep and broad the influence of Nazi sympathizers, or at least apologists, was in Britain before WWII, going all the way to King Edward VIII, who eventually abdicated so they could have the movie The King’s Speech.

The similarities between pre-WWII France and Gondor are just as striking. France’s pre-WWII Third Republic government was something of a mess, just as Gondor did not have a king, but rather only a steward, who was not effective in preparing to fight Mordor. The garrison on the river, Osgiliath, bears similarities to the Maginot Line, which the French built to guard the German border, but which had little effect at the beginning of WWII. After the orcs took Osgiliath, there was little between them and Minas Tirith, just as there was little between the Nazis and Paris once the Nazis invaded the Low Countries. And Minas Tirith is an awfully grand city, like Paris. Finally, Rohan effectively had to invade Gondor to drive out the armies of Mordor, just as the British (and the Americans) had to invade France to drive the Nazis out.

Now, I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “What about the One Ring and the hobbits? They are the stars, after all.” They are, along with Gollum, a metaphor for the use and abuse of the power that comes with winning wars. In the standard history, the allies that won WWI contributed, to some degree, to the conditions that led to WWII by imposing very onerous reparations terms on Germany because of its role in WWI. Before that, Germany and France traded Alsace-Lorraine back and forth, depending on who had won the last war.

To me at least, Tolkien’s theme that the One Ring must be destroyed is an argument that people must forego the traditional taking of war spoils in order to have lasting peace. In this reading, the hobbits are the good angels on people’s shoulders and Gollum is the bad angel. The One Ring is the power to impose yourself on everyone else and that power must be destroyed. Tolkien clearly thought of the hobbits as English, given that they appear to live in some fantasy of the English countryside, but they aren’t really affiliated with any of the major populations of Middle Earth, which apparently tend to forget that hobbits exist. Maybe you could see the hobbits as Irish – it’s awfully green in the Shire – but the Irish were not exactly enamored of the English historically. Same with the Scots, although William Wallace’s fight with the English – to quote Mel Gibson, “Freedom!” – is much further back than Michael Collins’s. Viewing the hobbits and Gollum as metaphors jibes with the facts that hobbits don’t fit into Middle Earth’s demographics very well and that Frodo and Sam are on their own for much of the story.

If you look at all of this together, you can take the Lord of the Rings book as a big argument for a Europe community of countries. Recall that, at the end, Gondor and Rohan do not unite as one nation, but rather appear likely to live together in peace and harmony, just like England and France (more or less). The Americans, excuse me, elves go back into the west across the Atlantic Ocean, taking Gandalf the wizard and Frodo the metaphor with them. There doesn’t appear to be any discussion of a Marshall Plan for Mordor, but that wouldn’t have been too much of a jump from the ending of the Return of the King.

Now I know there are a lot of loose ends to this theory. What about the dwarves? What were they? I’d have to say the Russians, given that the orcs apparently inflicted massive casualties on the dwarves in a battle in which the main protagonists did not participate – a la the Nazis’ invasion of Russia – and that Gimli joined up with the protagonists in the main battles. What about the wizards? What were they? It’s a fantasy series, you have to have magic. Moreover, without Gandalf, who would have been Obi-Wan/Dumbledore to Frodo’s Luke/Harry?

In light of all of this, you would have to think that the European debt crisis would have seriously concerned Tolkien, particularly after the Cold War with the dwarves. We don’t want anyone forging any new currency in the fires of Mount Doom.


KH


.
.
.

No comments: