People are reporting back this evening, and reports are positive, with the slight caveat that “everyone was crying at the end”. I am not allowed to see Return of the King until Christmas so I’m avoiding reading or thinking too much about it.

However a few people are taking this renewed interest to decode the subtexts and politics of Tolkien’s work.

To The Victors Go the Book Contracts

David Brin (in the fine tradition of his politicized readings of Star Wars) has written J.R.R. Tolkien — enemy of progress: > May I offer a final little mind-stretching exercise? Let’s start by remembering that history is written by the victors…Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.

So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?

Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy — this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron’s army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.

Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, “Oh, goody, let’s go serve an evil Dark Lord”?

Or might they instead have thought they were the “good guys,” with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?

The Ring of Free Trade

Another amusing explication is this short remix of Fellowship, spookily interpreted into a treatise on corporate globalization. (by passionbomb) I have to say I never though of Black Blockers as marching rank and file, but if dwarves had survived the ending of the Third Age you know they’d be the backbone of Labor, and Noam has never looked so good.