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Old 13-03-2011, 05:26 AM   #2
Eagle of Fire
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Location: Valleyfield, Canada
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I think you misunderstand a lot of things.

You need to understand that Tolkien created Middle-Earth a looong while ago. He started not too long before the second world war.

I have seen one documentary once (a while ago, this is certainly not new) about a study of Tolkien work versus what happened to him. It made a clear parallel on how everything is nice and good at the beginning of the story while everything seems to go down the drain after a certain point.

In the documentary, they explain how Tolkien had no choice to participate in WWII... He lived directly in the path of the Hitlerian army during that war. During and after the war (when he got back to his little countryside like village), a lot of things changed. One of those things was "progress" and industrialization, something he loathed in comparison the the simple life he had before. You can make a direct parallel here with the sudden industrialization of Isengard by Saruman once he get "overwhelmed" by Sauron after looking into the cristal ball... That's exactly what happened to his quiet little village in the events of that war.

The fact that Tolkien picture a lot of segregation and racism in his works after this is another direct link of what he sees in real life. He took a lot of what he saw in real life and added it in his work to reflect it. Probably in an effort to make his work more realistic.

Other than that, like I said his work was completed a long time ago. This mean that any parallel with modern problems such as racism of black people can only be coincidences or because the base inspiration of Tolkien simply reflect the basic reasons why the aforementioned modern problem actually occur.

Frankly, making a parallel between black people and Orcs from Middle-Earth is ridiculous...
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