On Tolkien and Orwell | Hacker News Reader

On Tolkien and Orwell

darcymoore.net

147 pointsBerislavLopac74 comments

I think some of the comparisons are a bit superficial. E.g. the all-seeing eye of Sauron and the panopticon gaze of Big Brother. The supplied quotes actually show that one failed (Sauron didn't perceive Frodo until it was too late) while Big Brother's succeeded. In fact there are several places in the LoTR where Sauron is definitely not all-seeing, and fails to see what is going on, notably with respect to the heirs of Isildur, the locations of the Elven rings, the betrayal of Saruman, and others.

And while I accept some of the academic similarities between Tolkien and Orwell, their own life trajectories were radically different. Tolkien's experienced the horror of WW1 but apart from that lived comfortably in domestic happiness (once he was able to marry his childhood sweetheart) in academia. Orwell had a much wider array of experiences including Imperial administration in Burma, civil war in Spain and extreme personal poverty. He was a prolific writer on social and political issues, while Tolkien, bless him, was deep down the rabbit hole of Middle Earth (as demonstrated by his writings and letters).

I like and admire both authors.

> ...the all-seeing eye of Sauron and the panopticon gaze of Big Brother...

There's actually a depth in the comparison and contrast there. The man of faith saw hope in the limits of evil people. In particular, lack of perspective and hubris can bring down even tyrants. And there is a Creator to give confidence that coincidence and divine plans can be the same thing.

There are different flavors of atheism, but many atheists see governments as being the most powerful agents in existence, so an evil, competent, and observant government is quite terrifying indeed. There's no particular reason to hope that a person can ever escape or defeat that kind of monster.

That feels like even more of a stretch. If anything, you could argue that Sauron, who ruled for entire "ages" and whose immortal power was destroyed by the happy accident of another eternally corrupted individual stumbling into a chasm was considerably less limited than the dictatorships composed of mortal individuals Orwell wrote about (and actually personally involved himself in fighting against). Orwell was optimistic enough to counterpoint the end of 1984 with an appendix which obliquely referred to the dictatorship and Newspeak as in the past, strongly implying it failed within a generation or so and was regarded as a historical curiosity; Tolkien's appendices and followup work suggested its near-immortal evil had enjoyed absolute power over generations of humans and orcs

In Tolkien mythology, Sauron was powerful and long lived but even his power isn't all that impressive to someone who believes in the Abrahamic God. He could not suffer a defeat like Sauron, does not miss details, and has no need for armies or siege weapons.

It's common to question a Creator who waits generations to remove evil persons from the picture, though at some point we're having an argument about deism by proxy and straying from critical analysis as such. It's enough for me that the different ideas and perspectives infused different works.

I like your point about Orwellian optimism. At an historical scale, possibly Orwell was an optimist. I think he was still a pessimist on the scale of individuals, however, in a way that Tolkien didn't seem to be.

I am no Tolkien scholar, but my layman's take is that Sauron failed to see the ring because he was so blinded by the lust for power that could only conceive of actions taken by his powerful enemies to claim more power. He (nor Gollum) could not imagine someone willingly giving that power away.

That said, neither author imagined surveillance on the level that we have today with AI "watchers."

This is pretty much correct. Sauron kept most of his gaze upon Aragorn and Gandalf and their movements, as he would have suspected one of the two of them would most likely be carrying the ring.

As you said, Sauron expected his enemies to act as he acts, and he would never have thought to give the ring to a creature as lowly as a Hobbit.

> he would never have thought to give the ring to a creature as lowly as a Hobbit.

Actually, it is explicitly said (by Gandalf, in Book III, Chapter 5) that Sauron knows the Ring was borne by a hobbit. What Sauron is not clear about is why a hobbit has it or what the Fellowship's destination is. According to Gandalf, he assumes they are going to Minas Tirith, and that once there some more powerful person will take the Ring and use it. In other words, he doesn't expect a hobbit to keep the Ring, much less to be taking it to Mount Doom to be destroyed.

Interesting, I didn't remember that part!

In AI terms, you could think of Frodo as an adversarial example, specifically chosen to exploit a known bias in the watcher’s model.

I agree: it’s more reasonable to consider them as two poles of an English literary tradition, both espousing the cause of the “doughty Englishman” (also expressed by Shakespeare’s references to the commoners accompanying Henry V), but with Orwell despairing of their state. and Tolkien celebrating it.

Another contemporary whom I associate with that Weltanschauung is T. H. White, though his perspective, IMHO, is more High Tory.

> extreme personal poverty

Always by choice. He did live in poverty but his family was always there if he decided to call on them and his education and class position meant that there were crappy jobs available for the asking, like being a tutor.

From chapter 25 of Down and Out in Paris London:

As soon as we were inside the spike [homeless shelter] and had been lined up for the search, the Tramp Major called my name. He was a stiff, soldierly man of forty, not looking the bully he had been represented, but with an old soldier's gruffness. He said sharply:

'Which of you is Blank?' (I forget what name I had given.)

'Me, sir.'

'So you are a journalist?'

'Yes, sir,' I said, quaking. A few questions would betray the fact that I had been lying, which might mean prison. But the Tramp Major only looked me up and down and said:

'Then you are a gentleman?'

'I suppose so.'

He gave me another long look. 'Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor,' he said; 'bloody bad luck that is.' And thereafter he treated me with unfair favouritism, and even with a kind of deference. He did not search me, and in the bathroom he actually gave me a clean towel to myself -- an unheard-of luxury. So powerful is the word 'gentleman' in an old soldier's ear.

"> extreme personal poverty

Always by choice. "

Allmost no one chooses extreme personal poverty. But some like Orwell, choose their own (idealistic) way, over giving in to the other way, even if it means poverty.

I would argue, he would/could not have written 1984 or animal farm, if he would have choosen the shallow, but comfortable life, that his class would have allowed for.

You’re mistaken. Orwells choice to live as a homeless person was entirely about collecting material. He eventually wrote the book Down and Out in Paris and London based on his experiences.

I respect the man, I respect his work, I even respect that he did the research first hand instead of relying on second hand accounts. But at any point he wanted he could go to his home or to his friends and family, get a hot meal and a bath. That was not an option for actual homeless people.

When he was down and out in Paris, he could rely on his aunt for financial support. When he was down and out in London he could write to his parents for money. Which he actually did. And they sent him money.

> Allmost no one chooses extreme personal poverty.

So let’s be clear - he experienced poverty only so he could write a book, not because he was truly destitute. Almost no one chooses that, but he did.

Allright, if so I am misstaken. I guess I have to read a bit further on his personal life.

There wasn't really a "panopticon gaze of Big Brother" - only the Outer Party were heavily monitored as these were the only people who could be a threat to the Inner Party.

Edit: About ~13% of the population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oli...

Perhaps Orwell couldn't envision the technological capability that would allow monitoring of the entire population. Plus he hadn't seen the soft revolutions that occurred in the former Soviet Block, driven by masses of common people. In the 40's, with the exception of Germany and Italy, authoritarian regimes were seemingly invincible.

> There wasn't really a "panopticon gaze of Big Brother" - only the Outer Party were heavily monitored as these were the only people who could be a threat to the Inner Party.

Okay, it might not have been a total panopticon (my poor wording), but Big Brother seems not to have had the massive blind-spots that Sauron did.

In fiction, perhaps. But I think Tolkien was closer to the mark. In practice, it is very difficult to know everything, even if the information is available, because of the limitations on our attention and imagination. Tolkien clearly describes that as a limitation of Sauron, and I think it remains a limitation, even today, even when all the facts are available.

> He was a prolific writer on social and political issues, while Tolkien, bless him, was deep down the rabbit hole of Middle Earth (as demonstrated by his writings and letters).

Tolkien was a social/political writer and lord of the rings was a social/politic text. One of the central themes of LoTR revolved around the central social/political question of the fate of the british empire in the first half of the 20th century. Namely that as transportation improved, it wouldn't be just the colonizers striving outward, but the colonized striving in and overruning the idyllic and white shire. The ring stood for the british empire - something that was attained that conferred immense power to its holder but also corrupted the holder and drew "monsters" to the holder. It is no secret that tolkien based his "dark and swarthy" monsters on the colonized blacks, indians, chinese, etc. It could be read as a call to relinquish the "ring" ( aka british empire ) in order to save "the shire" lest it be overrun by blacks, indians, chinese, etc. It also touched upon nature, environment, religion, etc, but the central theme was the uncomfortable socio-political racial issues of the british empire. To say tolkien was only about Middle Earth is like saying Melville was only about whales. You are missing a lot if you think Tolkien and LoTR didn't delve into social and political issues. It was primarily about social and political issues of that day.

> I like and admire both authors.

Both are great writers though Tolkien is a bit overrated. If you want to read a genuinely great book, read Moby Dick. When I was a teenager, I hated moby dick and loved LoTR. After all, who cares about baleen and whale anatomy? But as you grow older and wiser it flips. Moby Dick gains in esteem and LoTR reads like childish fantasy in comparison. It's like Star Wars and Dune. In 200 years, nobody is going to care about LoTR or Star Wars. People will still read Moby Dick and Dune.

> If you want to read a genuinely great book, read Moby Dick.

I am curious as to what are the universally agreed-upon criteria that denote a "genuinely great book". Please, do share them so I might eschew such lowly trash as The Lord of the Rings and never again waste my time on frivolous pursuits purely for the desire to — dare I say? — enjoy my free time.

When I rarely switch my GrapheneOS phone off airplane mode, I feel like Bilbo putting on the ring. The eye of Sauron is upon me.

Another theme that they share is the dangers of technology. The telescreens of 1984 and the palantíri of Lord of the Rings have a lot in common - both are subject to manipulation that can require a great deal of will to see through.

This is covered in the essay, as the author notes that both men are, if not techno-phobic, then certainly not techno-philic. It's not just the Palantiri either, it's also Sauruman. Treebeard explains to Merry and Pippin:

>"[Saruman] is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment" (Tolkien)

The phrase "a mind of metal and wheels" has always stuck with me as a pejorative; this is in contrast with modern phrases like, "He's a machine!" said in a positive way. The mind of metal and wheels is transactional, utilitarian, devoid of sentiment. It would be more like a natural process than a person, if not for ego.

For me 'a mind of metal and wheels' was more the desire for control, conformance, and imposed will, rather than the engagement and interaction-with required for working with natural processes, trees, flowers, etc - where you can't force things to happen a specific way, you have to work with them...

> The mind of metal and wheels is transactional, utilitarian, devoid of sentiment. It would be more like a natural process than a person

I basically like where you are going with this, but wonder why you then say that a transactional/utilitarian process is like a natural process?

Nature as Tolkien seemed to understand it would be anything but transactional and utilitarian.

>why you then say that a transactional/utilitarian process is like a natural process?

Because it's impersonal. There's no chooser, it's like the planets zooming around the sun. It is a clockwork that we can understand, but not affect. It doesn't know or care about us - we happen to live on one of the cogs, but the planetary machine would function smoothly with or without any life on the 3rd planet.

Capitalism is much like this. Institutions of a certain size can be like this. Being stuck in a machine is the context of "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg [0]. It is also the subtext of the remarkable "Blame!" anime, a drama that takes place among humans and robots that live as vermin in an automated city that takes little notice of them [1]. Or a more traditional treatment, with a very powerful Mech civilization dominating humans in Benford's Great Sky Rivier [2].

0 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

1 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6574146/

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sky_River_(novel)

Two literary giants standing on the shoulders of other giants looking far into the future and seeing how history might repeat itself over and over again.

The weaknesses of leaders are human weaknesses. Look at Putin.

Each pair of two random people will have things in common and points where they are different.

This article failed to make a point, to tell us why similarities and differences between the two might be interesting.

Update: I stand corrected, see comments below. He served with the communist POUM and sympathised with the anarchists.

> Orwell was serving with a Marxist militia in the fight against fascism, in Spain

Orwell actually fought on the side of the anarchists and their side was (later) betrayed by the communists as he mentions in the book: “Homage to Catalonia”

Some Quotes:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7293191-philosophically-com...

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7663572-the-fat-russian-age...

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7455290-it-is-impossible-to...

He sympathised with the anarchists, and in retrospect wished he'd joined them, but the group he joined -- POUM -- were Marxist rather than anarchist, though not Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist (what most people would probably mean by Communist). The group is sometimes described as Trotskyite, but I believe it had already broken with Trotsky by the time Orwell joined.

But its members were indeed the target of a purge by the Stalinists and their allies in the Republican government.

So Orwell was one of the few authors, possibly the only author, to have been shot by Fascists and nearly shot by Stalinists, which probably explains in part the burning distaste for both ideologies evident in 1984.

Don‘t know enough to tell, just (genuinely) asking:

Is it not possibly to join a group, but actually leaning a bit in (also or partially) another direction (knowing that with our human flaws not one direction might be the only possible solution, or a mix or balance might be necessary).

Only partially related: I am for example part of several groups (ok, admittely not as deep Orwell in this example) just so I can understand better all sides of a topic. To better understand a side and interact with the people of that group, I sometimes do not contradict everything I don’t agree with, but try to ask the right questions at the right moment. It sometimes feel a better use of time for both sides.

Social groups? Sure. Armed rebel groups in the middle of an insurgency? Disloyalty is .. less tolerated.

To be picky, these weren't armed rebel groups (at least not until the May Days). They were armed groups defending the legitimate government of Spain from a full-on mutiny and attempted coup by the armed forces and associated right-wing groups.

It was the middle of an insurgency, but these groups were fighting to suppress it, not support it.

oh thanks! it was about being an active part of an armed rebel group? I see. I should have read better what it ws about.

Pay attention :)

Orwell was in a roughly similar role to one of the idealistic Westerners going to fight in Ukraine today, except the anti-Fascist side was much more politically fragmented, less well armed, and ultimately lost, leaving Spain as officially Fascist until 1977.

If i remember correctly, Orwell joined POUM just because they were sending people to the front lines while the communist party was not at the time he arrived to Barcelona (don´t remember the details, maybe they were recruiting for defending Barcelona or their militia had already departed), not out of ideology.

After some digging around on Wikipedia's page and in my copy of Homage to Catalonia, it appears that:

* Once he'd decided to go to Spain to fight, he approached the British Communist Party, who suggested he join the International Brigades, but he was unwilling to do that without seeing the situation in Spain for himself first.

* He had friends in the Independent Labour Party, who gave him a letter of introduction for the ILP's man in Barcelona. Once there, he joined the POUM militia, because the POUM were affiliated with the ILP.

* While on leave in Barcelona, he decided to leave the POUM, which was stationed on the comparatively quiet Aragon front, for the chance of fighting on the Madrid front. He would have preferred to join the Anarchists, but was unlikely to be sent to Madrid with them, so applied to join the Communist International Column instead. However, the May Days intervened, sparking the breakdown in relations between the Republican government and Communists on one hand, and the Anarchists, POUM, and other left-wing groups not aligned with Moscow on the other: so he returned to the Aragon front with the POUM until being shot and invalided out, and then fleeing Spain altogether just ahead of a Stalinist purge.

So it would appear that the political differences between the various groups on the Republican side weren't, at least at first, that important to Orwell: making common cause against the Fascists was the priority.

> So Orwell was one of the few authors, possibly the only author, to have been shot by Fascists and nearly shot by Stalinists

That seems like a quite weird take, I would expect there would be more examples that are at least similar?

When coercion itself is viewed as the core problem, both ideologies are as repugnant as they come. This is what I’ve taken from Orwell’s writing.

Sort of. He (and POUM) were more anarchist than Marxist. And found themselves under fire but the actual Marxists nearly as much as by Franco's forces.

I thought POUM were communists, just not the Stalinist version of communism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POUM

> detest French cooking

> Tolkien bemoaned “the medieval take-over of the English language by Norman French”.

Unsure of Orwell's feelings, but Humphrey Carpenter wrote that Tolkien suffered from Gallophobia (the root is Gaul), a hatred of all things French.

Hence Bilbo living at Bag End instead of a cul-de-sac!

They might have different ideas, but they're still the product of the same time and culture. They're bound to have similar world views.

> "genuine belief in equality and democracy"

Wtf? LOTR is deeply authoritarian. Sam is constantly praised for his subservience to his master. Rulers are only proper rulers if they come from the correct bloodline - the bloodline of other rulers before them.

I love Tolkien for basically inventing the fantasy genre. But please don't try to paint him as some kind of admirable political thinker.

Haha that’s so true. I always loved the way they send it up in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.

There’s more than a few current “leaders” that could learn from it:

King Arthur: I am your king.

Peasant Woman: Well, I didn't vote for you.

King Arthur: You don't vote for kings.

Peasant Woman: Well, how'd you become king, then?

[Angelic music plays... ]

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.

Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Arthur: Be quiet!

Dennis the Peasant: You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

> Tolkien [...] published The Hobbit – a quaint novel for children with dwarfish miners [...]

It is certainly a minor point, but Tolkien was adamant about using "dwarves" instead of "dwarfs" and "dwarvish" instead of "dwarfish" whenever writing about Durin's folk. I find this especially important considering the author of this article later writes:

> Orwell’s brand of democratic Socialism (he always capitalised the “s”) [...]

If the author is willing to capitalize "Socialism" because of Orwell's preference, then I think it is not unreasonable to ask that they also use the adjective "dwarvish" when referring to the dwarves of Tolkien's writings.

For those interested in the subject, the latest Dave Eggers novel (_The Every_) is a really entertaining take on it. Starts out as amusing Silicon Valley satire about the absurdity of the tech giants, and gets very 1984 by the end.

To put it short, Orwell described a society where Sauron had won.

Some would argue, that he wasn't wrong...

1984 was meant as a warning, but used as a manual.

I think it can also be seen as a survival manual for someone who finds themself inside such a system already.

Not a very effective survival manual - by the end of the book Winston Smith has been broken and will soon be executed.

"survival manual" is perhaps not quite the right phrase...but watching someone else's failed attempts at a task can be very instructive.

The atmosphere I remember from 1984 was one of futility. The state had locked down sufficiently that individual rebellion of any sort was infeasible. Am I misremembering?

That's what I remember. The state itself has the rebellion, such as it is, totally under control, like everything else.

Perhaps 1984 was itself written by the Thought Police to demonstrate the futility of rebelling against Big Brother....

A cautionary tale.

Yeah, but Big Brother loves him!

Always has done, always will.

I consider it a memetic inoculation - certain things, like newspeak and erasing the past, just stand out as warning signs when one has read 1984 when otherwise one just thinks, "that's kinda weird".

Matrix too.

Yes.

1984 and Brave New World - written by old Etonians and Oxbridge students (Blair and Huxley) - were imaginative works that were about setting goals for the ruling elite. A visionary guide for the governance administrators and an (unheeded) warning for the rest of us.

It (and Animal Farm) were depictions of Stalinism from the inside - historical fiction rather than science fiction.

Not really? 1984 was more written in reaction to the british intelligence appartus harassing him rather than Stalin, Orwell was quite a devout communist and that brought down the hammer of the british intelligence organisations on him, trying to censor him and make his life difficult. It isn't really a historical fiction of stalinism and more of living as a communist under the red scare in the western world.

While it's true that British intelligence were interested in him, he handed them a list voluntarily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list

He was a democratic socialist, which put him strongly against actually existing capital-C Communism which was totalitarian and Stalinist. The "memory hole" bit is clearly based on how Trotsky was edited out of the official history, for example. This article cites opposition to Lysenkoism as a direct influence, as well: https://lithub.com/orwells-notes-on-1984-mapping-the-inspira...

Voluntarily handing over lists didn't seem to change much. And I don't believe one part of the story aligning with Trotsky quite erases that this story much more closely aligns with the treatment of Orwell at the hands of british authorities rather than Stalin's communism.

For the "democratic socialist" part I would point out that Orwell sympathized with Anarchists in the Spanish revolution at minimum.

> Orwell was quite a devout communist

I don't think that's true in his post-Spain days, depending I guess on how you define "devout communist". I would say he was a devout socialist and an ardent anti-communist after Spain.

I am having no luck finding it, but one quote that has stuck with me is where he talks about how if the anti-Fascist forces in Spain won they would obviously establish a totalitarian state which would only be "good" by comparison with the Fascist alternative and would be terrible in any sort of objective sense.

Do we know what were Tolkiens thoughts on Empire, and its champions like Churchill? Who did Tolkien most likely vote for? Conservatives?

“I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust…” - Tolkien - Letter 100

"For I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!))." - Tolkien - Letter 50

Tolkien hated anything based upon coercion or domination. Whether it was machines that tore up the land and forests or people that forced others into subservience.

As he developed more and more into an anarchist throughout his life, I suppose he was not a fan of Empire. But he was a stout catholic and somewhat conservative.

I think both fit very well within the trope that Leo Marx when talking about American literature called the Machine in the Garden[1] myth. It's a sort of story in which authors long for pastoral, naturalistic settings that are small scale and untouched by machinery, and so forth.

This is both found in Orwell's democratic Socialism as well as in Tokien's idealized Christian community that is Hobbingen. Orwell of course literally attacks Stalinism and I always interpreted Tolkien's work as doing the same thing, not entirely sure how else to interpret Saruman industrializing the Shire, even though he of course always denied these parallels.

Personally I never really could stand this kind of literature for a lot of the reasons Asimov talks about in his review of 1984[2]. It's parochial, technophobic, stereotypically English with its snobbish attitude towards literature, ink quills, pipes and so on and paranoid about anything that seems like popular mass culture or too large or organized in scal or in any other way related to modernity.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden

[2]http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

It is worth being said that Isaac Asimov was a very passionate reader of Lord of the Rings and similarly Asimov's science-fiction works were one of the very few modern works Tolkien enjoyed reading in his old age.

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