Evil, With Hobbits And Ring Wraiths

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, but it is not this day.” – Lord of the Rings

SCHIFF

After the police are defunded, we’ll only be able to afford cyborg hobbits.  That’s okay, I like Frobo Cop.

I’m probably in the minority on the following thought:  there is actual evil in the world.  The rule has been over the last century or so to try to play off evil as, well, things other than evil.

  • Psychological problems.
  • Different cultures.
  • Bad parents.
  • No parents.
  • Being my ex-wife.

But the reality is that these are just excuses, though I do know that mummys aren’t evil – they just have a bad wrap.

ORCU

I hear that Frodo is volunteering build houses in the Shire for Hobbitat for Humanity.

Thankfully, all I can remember of my younger life was (mostly) evil-free.  It was good.  Like many kids who read too much, a lot of my first experiences in life weren’t first hand – I was transported to the depths of the oceans and the poles of Earth and then to Mars and the Universe beyond by reading.  In fifth grade my teacher read The Hobbit to the class – spoiler alert, it was much shorter than the recent movie.  But then I was off to middle school.

I stumbled across Tolkien again.  He had written a series that had done a wonderful job of describing what True Evil® was:  The Lord of the Rings.  I still remember the chills that I got as 11 year-old me read The Lord of the Rings night after night in bed before I went to sleep.  Ma Wilder was especially disturbed, because she’d hear me saying things like, “Frodo” and “Mordor” and “Gandalf” at night.

Ma Wilder was concerned I was Tolkien in my sleep.

FRODOG

I know the puns are bad – but Bilbo gets mad when I try to kick the hobbit.

I had goosebumps reading about the ring wraiths and was transported into the story, hearing the hoof beat of their horses, feeling their evil presence as they searched for Frodo and the One Ring.  The Nazgûl (ring wraiths) were evil personified, so I’m willing to bet Tolkien knew a thing or two about True Evil™.

Tolkien had even planned a sequel, but couldn’t bring himself to write it, despite starting on it at least three times.  He described a bit about it in a letter to a friend after he had given up trying to write it:

“I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing.  Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature:  their quick satiety with good.  So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice, and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse.  I found even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage.  I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would have been just that.”

NAZGUL

A Nazgûl floats into a bar.  The barman says: ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve your kind in here.’ The Nazgûl replies: ‘That’s Wraithist.’

In his quote is what I think we’ve been seeing now.  The “quick satiety with good” is sometimes what drives us toward True Evil®, though in Paris in 1789 just like in Russia in 1917 it was the greed exploited by the communists to convince people that the terror and murders would be what led to a prosperous future.

In the last sixty days I’ve seen a lot of evil in the videos taken during the riots.  Murder rates are up in those cities.  Portland normally has 30 or so murders a year, but in the last two months there have been twenty.  That doesn’t make the news.

Why?

The riots are described as peaceful protests.  To mention that the lawlessness and rampant evil accompanying it has cost dozens of lives and since more black people have died as a result of the protests than the number of unarmed black people killed by cops last year.  They’ve resulted in half a billion dollars in damage to Minneapolis alone, but that doesn’t account for the lowered property values.  And what about all of the uprooted lives?

That sort of destruction, especially in the middle of an economic collapse is devastating.  Inciting and participating in this riots was a choice, and those who chose to riot were doing nothing short of evil, in service of that same evil force that had taken Moscow early in the twentieth century, though this time because times were good and they were bored.

HP

Hipsters burned their mouths because they ate Hot Pockets® before it was cool.

I’m quite certain that they think they’ll run the new organization, and their socialist dream job awaits.  This is the same sort of greed that, in The Lord of the Rings, destroyed men and turned them into ring wraiths.  From Tolkien’s Silmarillion:

Those who used the Nine Rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their downfall. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and of the domination of the One which was Sauron’s.

Evil is popular because the benefits it provides are often immediate and significant.  The rewards for being virtuous are sometimes never going to show up other than feeling good about yourself, at least in this life.

FOOTB

I’ve heard that hobbit flowers grow using Frodo-synthesis.

Yes, I believe True Evil® exists.  The joy for me is, knowing that True Evil™ exists, I am also sure that True Good© exists, too, even though destroying the One Ring turned Frodo into a hobbitual drinker.  I’ll turn it back over to Tolkien for one final quote:

“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”

Oh, sure, Tolkien can write.  But can he meme?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

39 thoughts on “Evil, With Hobbits And Ring Wraiths”

  1. I have come to a place where I see times of peace and prosperity as aberrations in what is otherwise an endless struggle against barbarism and savagery. Across the whole of humanity, people of good will and vision for the future are too scarce and those who eat the seed corn now rather than conserving it for the next season are too many. Barbarism is winning once again and those of us holding back the horde are dying out. This fall from peace and prosperity is going to be unlike anything we have seen for over a thousand years.

    1. That is why this summer almost all of my garden production is going to seed. I feel the future is bleak and hungry, I know my garden and the expansion I am creating will be fruitful, and I will have more mouths to feed come next year.

      That, and the build-up of arms, ammunition and tools to keep the growing tribe fed as well.

      1. Exactly. More and more of my focus is on the next few years instead of getting too caught up in the here and now. I can’t do much about what is going on. I can’t stop cities from replacing their police with social workers or stopping Communists from tearing down statues. There is nothing I can do to stop Biden from being elected. What I can do is watch the signs and prepare for the near-term future.

    2. I have come to a place where I see times of peace and prosperity as aberrations in what is otherwise an endless struggle against barbarism and savagery.

      That is exactly what it has always been for most people every-where and -when. And yet for those of us blessed with la dolce vita it always comes as a surprise. I think a part of every person knows we were meant for something different.

  2. I have never read any Tolkien. I was always too busy learning my ABCs – Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. Between them, those guys wrote hundreds of books – and then there was Heinlein, and Niven, and Pournelle, and Blish, and Gibson, and Stephenson, and Vinge, and Bear, and Bova, and Benford , and Ballard, and Gerrold….and many many more. Tolekin wasn’t on the science fiction shelf at the public library.

    For my education on evil, I read about Nazis and Communists in Reader’s Digest. My grandfather gave me his complete set of back issues from about 1958 to 1966 when I was around ten years old. I read every single one from cover to cover. I still vividly remember the article on Treblinka, and the one on the Red nuke on New York, and the story of the young pretty victorious Soviet teacher who got her assigned American kids to cut up their class American flag so every kid could have a piece of of it to keep and then threw the empty wood flagpole out the window into the play yard.

    I was always too busy touring the universe through science fiction and being scared of The Bomb that I just never got around to reading a fantasy story about a magic ring.

    Guess I’ve still got time to start it now…

        1. …and he also gave me his old Saturday Evening Post magazines, too, which apparently is where I learned about the evils of Treblinka instead of from RD. Very heavy stuff for a preteen.

          Um, I may have had more than learning about evil on my mind when I read Part Two….

          https://www.ebay.com/i/133471968144?chn=ps

          Thanks, Grandpa. I miss you.

    2. Tolkien saw Evil face to face during WW-1, and did a lot of research on the Middle Ages (of violence and warfare). He poured both into his “fantasy”.

    3. You might find Sarah Hoyt’s ‘Darkship Thieves’ story arc of interest. (3 novels plus shorts in the same ficton) One of the motifs is the carrying by USAians of fragments of the US flag. often stained with blood. Moving, patriotic Space Opera from a transplant to America. Prolific as all hell (Check out her daily-save-Sundays blog at https://accordingtohoyt.com/), plus regular writing at PJ media, and 3-5 novels in various genres per year.

    5. One thing about LOTR – it’s the genesis of all modern sword and sorcery (Okay, with some Robert E. Howard). It’s so very deeply embedded in our culture, you’ll read it and just see the source of all of those echoes that are our culture.

    6. “For my education on evil, I read about Nazis and Communists in Reader’s Digest.”

      Ever wonder if perhaps there’s a little propaganda masquerading as fact when it comes to WWII Germany?

      If you want to keep thinking that WWII was cut and dry. Good V Evil. That the “Good” guys won I suggest not researching things. There’s a very good reason those that returned were reluctant to talk about the War.

  3. Well, John, you did it again….. another pun-ishing life lesson laced with your special sauce!!!

    Kudos, mega Kudos !!

  4. J.R.R. was way ahead of his time. For example, he anticipated Local Area Networks and Tolkien Rings.

    Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were pipe-smoking buddies. C.S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters where he discussed the three biggest lies: There is no God. There is no D(evil) and the biggest one….There will always be another tomorrow

    1. (Groans, looking for an Internet pun.)

      I read The Screwtape Letters in June of 95. Good stuff, and good points.

  5. A lot of young adults have been seemingly infected by a mind virus. They were mostly normal roughly three months ago, but something happened to morph them from normal kids into raving lunatics. And there is no grippingly charismatic BLM leader, so what is it?

    Maybe it is evil. Or maybe they always craved belonging to something where they felt useful, maybe there was a void behind the normalcy. Perhaps it’s the thrill of disappearing into the mob. Some say they are just LARPers, but it sure looks like a mind virus to me.

    2. It does. And the flaunting of norms and responsibility is part of it. Working hard pays off later, maybe. Looting pays off now – always.

  6. Pingback: 4 August 2020: The black pill is despair. - Dark Brightness

  7. I’ve just finished reading “How the Irish Saved Civilization”, about how St. Patrick founded a series of monasteries in the Irish wilderness where they collected and copied every scrap of Greek and Roman literature they could salvage as Roman rule, and literacy in general, retreated from Europe. Eventually, they somehow became so successful and rich that they presented tempting prizes for Viking raids. In particular, the author mentions Vikings ruining books by tearing off their jewel-encrusted covers. “Jeweled covers”?! Since when did a Bible, for example, become any more spiritually valuable by encasing it in jewels and/or precious metals?

    Whether or not the Irish (and English) monks could have reached some peaceful coexistence with the Vikings, if they hadn’t had their hoards of metal and jewels among the ancient books, we’ll never know, but there’s a lesson there for all of us. Don’t get so rich that you attract greedy raiders! (And don’t think that you’ll be too remote or obscure to be discovered, either.)

    2. And, the big revelation – you can’t ruin a book by removing the precious cover – the good stuff is still there.

  8. Not to get to woo-woo, but there is an aspect to all of this that is a bit obscure. I will be brief.
    There is a researcher at Laurentian University (in Sudbury, ON) named Michael Persinger. He has shown in repeated experiments that altering the magnetic field strength around someone’s brain in various locations can cause any number of odd effects. He has observed people going into past-life regression (spontaneously), recounting ‘memories’ of alien abduction, discovering the ability to smell colours… and also noted enormous differences in their judgement and ability to reason.
    We know that the mag field around the planet is decaying; it does this on a cyclical basis. It is also tied to solar output etc. The point is that, if this is in fact how it works, then the overall sanity of the population at large could be in jeopardy. As an analogy, the person who has access to the launch codes for a WMD won’t lose the ability to use those codes, but the criteria under which he would use them might change.
    We call this ‘the insanity’ and we have been observing its onset for two decades. Things seem to be getting really crazy…. because they are.
    Something to consider.

    1. I hadn’t heard that theory, though I had heard about the experiments with EM fields and the brain. Creepy.

      But it is undeniable that things are going crazy – faster every week.

      1. JOHN- Yes, this is our thinking. Way back in the mists of history, when the run-up to 2012 was really gathering momentum, there was a whole gamut of opinion regarding what was about to happen. I am certain you recall.
        Nevertheless, inspire of all the prophecy and legend and dire forecasts, nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not a sausage. No end of the world, no rise of Cthulhu, no armies of undead. Nothing.
        Or did it?
        The prophecy said that the world would change, not end. Did it change? We think it did. Since then, things have become so wildly out of control that we are sure that something, at least, has changed.
        Opinions differ as to the nature of that something. The fact is, though, that this is a very different place from that which we knew in, say, 2010.
        And it just keeps getting stranger.
        And the beat goes on.
        And the tides return.
        And the world defies reason, with vigorous attention.

  9. Only reason Trump won ? One word … Hillary was soooo reviled and hated by many !

    Only way Biden will win ? The hatred of the Orange Shit Gibbon runs very , very deeply.

  10. Only reason Trump won ? One word … Hillary was soooo reviled and hated by many !

    Only way Biden will win ? The hatred of the Orange Shit Gibbon runs very , very deeply.

  11. A quick satiety with good is not accurate. If the people of Gondor merely luxuriate in their hard-won peace, justice, and prosperity for too long a time, those skilled in the arts of war will die of old age. Then how will they protect themselves when the orcs return?

    An enduring society must not only deal with hoodlums, it requires them. Homegrown will suffice if no others are available. Hormesis is a salutary phenomenon as long as the host is not overwhelmed by a sudden dose much larger than its recent experience.

  12. Pingback: Friday Books, Because I Said So – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Comments are closed.