SMDH seeing Great Man theory being parroted on Hexbear, the allied victory over Mordor had way more to do with the five previous centuries of political-economic development in Gondor and specifically in the fertile and populous region of Lebennin than it did with a single 50 year old nerd from the completely irrelevant North Kingdoms.
And not to burst your bubble here but Frodo Baggins, then in his 30s, was documented to be "companions" with hobbits as young as 18 and 11. Google the Baggin's Black Book if you don't belive belive me. But that is the kind of great man you are stanning.
Feels revisionist. Sauron has a racially diverse army and his main opponents are landed gentry and other petit bourgeois. Seems a little sus to me.
Also, Sauron drew fell creatures to his banner from crevices and pits across Middle Earth. This is clearly a sign of genuine organic support for his program. Can the conscripts of Gondor say the same about their love for the bitter, insane old tyrant Denethor? And what of Rohan? For every knight in splendid armor riding a massive warhorse there must be ten or twenty farmer families toiling in serfdom to support the class of warrior elites. Do these toilers get a say in their dynastic absolute monarchy? If Sauron can make yield the odious powers of Gondor and Rohan, while making thus precarious the feudalist world balance, long live the butcher Sauron. :bordiga-despair:
Strange dudes with beards distributing rings is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical magical ceremony.
also now I want to make The Boys crossover memes with Butcher as Sauron hunting the magical supes
I just want to point out that the only direct democracy in Middle Earth were the Ents.
how do you know sauron even exists? or ever existed? he could be like termagant, entirely made up by the western hegemony.
lol what no, they won purely, 120% because a volcano erupted at just the right time and destroyed the entire capital of their enemies. pure dumb fucking luck.
the rest of the book is nearly entirely made up hagiography to cement the soft coup of gondor by a vagrant and a vagrant with a beard.
elves dont exist. elrond is just a man. sauron is also just a man, if he exists at all. he probably doesnt, if he ever did.
The Red Book of Westmarch is, of course, not actually written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam. It is a much later concoction, and it's fundamental purpose is to sell a narrative legitimizing the Fairbairns of the Towers' status as one of the three paramount families of the Shire,without compromising the politically important narrative of their half-legendary progenitor, Samwise Gamgee as an ascended commoner.
To this end, it interweaves a complicated web of triple anachronism. On the one hand, it anachronistically projects the prosperity and easygoing lifestyle of the contemporary gentry onto the historic characters of Peregrin Took, Meriadoc Brandybuck, and Frodo Baggins, portraying the three of them (all, other records make clear, experienced tribal war-leaders skilled in guerrilla warfare well before their mercenary expedition to the south lands) as bumbling hedonists before they were "toughened up" by their travels. On the other hand, it conflates Frodo Baggins, a historic personage who willed his considerable fortune to Samwise Gamgee, who was probably his homosexual lover, with Frodo Nine-Fingers, generally thought to be a wholly mythic personage belonging to an entirely earlier era.
Thus, while "Merry" and "Pippin" grow into formidable leaders in the courts of Southern sovereigns, Frodo (the originator of the Gamgee fortune) is saving the world, and Samwise Gamgee is making it all possible.
(@Judge_Juche this was meant as a reply to you)
Lol, I'm wholeheartedly accepting this becuase it validates my prejudice against the hobbits, they simply should not have been in the book. You know what makes the Silmarillion better than LOTR, no hobbits in the First Age.
I would maybe also add that the only reason Tom Bombodil makes an unnecessary appearance is to legitimize their heretical worship of him, instead of the one god Eru.
you made a lot of weird stuff up, but anyway, i think the hobbits are in the book just for flavor, the main thrust is the legitimization of so-called aragorn.
i copied this from another site and i don't fully agree with this, i think the hobbit stuff was clearly added for reasons probably related to what this guy is talking about but definitely the main point is aragon.
and what do you mean by "so-called"? i've never seen it suggested that that wasn't his name, though certainly there's plenty of debate over his true status/lineage/whatever.
(also i meant to reply to @Judge_Juche, whose post was more closely related to mine)
oh yeah super likely that this vagrant who intends to steal a kingdom (having the current ruler and his heir assassinated under suspicious circumstances, etc) is called "revered king"
yeah right.
"aragorn" is to this dude as "god emperor" is to trump.
intends to steal a kingdom
i mean, he very much succeeded. and i don't know if his parents named him aragorn, but he certainly never went by anything else according to anything i've read on the subject
you cant have read much on the subject then. he went by various codenames like estel, strider and elessar.
yeah, but those were clearly temporary monikers, not actual names. i'm just saying it makes sense to call him what he probably would have been called by other people at the time.
first of all, if people called him anything "in his time", it was elessar, though this too was engineered propaganda.
[W]ord went through the City: 'The King is come again indeed.' And they named him Elfstone, because of the green stone that he wore, and so the name which it was foretold at his birth that he should bear was chosen for him by his own people.
(elessar means elfstone)
and aragorn was another one of these monikers. it's all false identities.
alright, sure. i feel kind of gross getting this close to defending a monarch, so it's definitely not worth going any farther here. i think it's a little ridiculous to put quotes around aragorn, but it's not a big deal.
I'm torn between enjoying the fantastic bit and going "ummmm akshually" about how Gondor is in a state of massive imperial decline.
Arwen is thousands of years older than Aragorn and kind of his aunt! Just like my
hentaianime!some weebs like that. ever heard of 'big mommy milkers' and 'ara ara'?
Elf mommy is tall but too ethereal. She doesn't even leave footprints in the snow. It wouldn't hurt when she stepped on you
she would need to stomp to make it work, but i think it's doable. and elvish ropes are something else, so that makes up for it a little
You don't even need a safe word. When you want to stop, the ropes just know.
proof? arwen's just elrond's daughter, a human woman. elves dont exist, even most children know this. go outside and touch grass.
come on, really? the historical record is clear that at the very least people at the time believed that rivendell was populated by elves, and the few surviving skeletons we can trace to its people are unique enough in uniform enough ways that it's at the very least possible they were elves. what, are you gonna tell me dwarves don't exist either? my roommate in my freshman year was from mickleburg and he was as dwarvish as they come.
and there's no evidence suggesting those family trees were tampered with, so we know for sure that if they weren't elves who were, if not immortal at least unusually long-lived, someone thought it was important for the people to believe they were.
there is no historical record beyond the obviously untrustworthy red book of westmarch. in translation, even!
they were just normal humans in rivendell, they pretended to be elves.
we have surviving artifacts from the time, including some texts i haven't seen anyone claim were faked. admittedly, i'm not an expert, and i know translation attempts aren't necessarily 100% accurate right now, but they seem to indicate that at the time the people of gondor believed rivendell was full of elves.
i looked up the skeleton stuff, and apparently some people who i repsect think it might be a hoax, so i'll drop that bit. i'm not personally convinced elves exist or anything, i just don't think it's as ridiculous as you seem to
wait, are you claiming that we don't have anything surviving from the time period? because if that's the level of crank you are i think we should just drop the conversation. we have weapons and tools, we have surviving architecture (including some remarkably intact buildings in rivendell), we have clothes, there are plenty of corpses buried from the time, at my local museum you can see some carvings from a local village meant to ward off "orcs" and "goblins" (which were almost certainly racial slurs from the time, but given their ubiquity in use i'm using them here).
the absolute delusion... pseudoscience at its finest.
where's this museum then, bielefeld?
i'm not telling you where i live, but i will point out that you can visit the rivendell site yourself if you really want to (and you have the time and the money). it isn't closed to the public, and they have plenty of cool stuff there. i went on a trip there with my school in my junior year of high school, and it was a really cool experience.
They did make a LOTR JRPG, it was called The Third Age and had mechanics ripped straight out of Final Fantasy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_Third_Age
Also a TTRPG using the Rollmaster system printed back in the 80s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_Role_Playing
this is closer to the truth, but not there yet.
what proof have we that sauron and his supposedly vast armies even existed? our "heroes" defeat a few bands of unfortunates from the east and south, but never actually confront this vast army. i say it never existed. there was never a concerted effort to wipe out gondor. there is no unified state or alliance in the east and south.
what are we left with then? what is the bottom line? a coup in gondor and a coincidental volcanic eruption (i will admit that this was lucky, or at least the propagandists made good use of it after the fact). that is all.
the rest was part of the plot to overthrow denethor, or was made up later.
i agree that the threat to gondor was vastly overstated, but sauron was definitely there. i think that part was all a justification to carry out pogroms in the east, mostly unrelated to the ongoing coup
possible, although it's also possible that everything in the east was directed by the chief conspirators, this gandalf and aragorn.
they even admit that they both spent time east (stirring up these armies, no doubt)
the pogroms i do not doubt, it's clear from the appendices what holocaust was unleashed on the people of the east and south after the war.
i think it could have served a dual purpose, the threat makes people more willing to accept the new king while also giving an excuse to rape, pillage, and enslave your way through the ranks of the eastern "orcs". you come into power, and then when you do so you have an easy way to enrich yourself and your new kingdom.
