@jbouie I'm afraid I find the argument here pretty profoundly unconvincing. The argument is explicitly about the legendarium as a whole - not an author-is-dead analysis of a book in particular - but doesn't take into account the Silmarillion, which is at variance with these points.
@jbouie "Elves are wholly and always good" is simply not a sustainable position in the broader legendarium, neither is the supposition that human culture in Middle Earth derives from the Elves, nor the three-part division of peoples Mills presents, which is just simply wrong.
@jbouie The orcs are, we are told, corrupted Elves, so if we're making baskets, there's the 'Elves and Orcs' basket. Hobbits and Men are kindred peoples - the second-born of Eru - so that's our second basket. And then the dwarves are a third basket, the ents a fourth.
@jbouie As Treebeard notes in his listing of peoples, the Ents, far from being peripheral as Mills would have it, are more of a 'major' people than the Hobbits as far as the great and wise of Middle Earth are concerned. They - and their corrupted version (trolls) - cannot be left out.
@jbouie And the placement of men and hobbits in the 'middle' beneath Elves is also directly at variance with the explicit structure of the legendarium - it is men, not Elves, who are the favored of Iluvatar, gifted with true free choice and mortality (Tolkien regards both as gifts).
@jbouie Tolkien has his troublesome bits, to be sure - as you would expect any author from his context to have. But I don't think this essay identifies, explains or understands them well.
It's interesting, but to me, at least, fundamentally unpersuasive.
It's interesting, but to me, at least, fundamentally unpersuasive.
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