#that's not to say book!frodo is inherently superior i love them both with my entire heart 🥺 i just have an enormous fascination with | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lesbiansforboromir · 2 years

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so i've seen a lot of people here on tumblr say that Elves are a inherently morally superior race, what do you think about that? it doesn't ring quite right with me but i don't know what would *disclaim* it, idk. sorry

BRO.... LISTEN... it's one of my most hated aspects of fandom. Like this whole 'elven society is a utopia, not like those dirty humans and all their dumb shit' is.. on SO many levels both canonically wrong and also thoroughly playing into the incredibly warped (and racist!) morality system in lotr.

So, the book AND the film (though the film seems content to completely paint elves as perfect and is likely the most to blame for this idea) describe elves as good, blessed, wise etc etc. Many characters, when experiencing elves, feel like they’re in a trance of their beauty and are amazed and dazzled by their presence. But! Elves in Middle Earth have... essentially the same moral record as humans do! They infight, they make mistakes, they do callous things ect. Gildor abandons Frodo to his road despite him knowing more than enough to understand he is in mortal danger. Haldir singles out Gimli as the only untrusted one in the fellowship and threatens to kill him if he tries to leave, despite Gimli being entirely courteous. Galadriel and Celeborn essentially usurped the ruling of Lorinand, changing it’s name and changing the languages spoken there to suit their perceptions and desires. And this is not to mention everything that happened in the First Age. Elves are in no way perfect creatures! But, they are somewhat treated that way so, why?

Well it is this concept of racial divinity, or as I like to say 'the elves are biologically catholic'. Because the place you have to put yourself in is one of good = 'faithful', ie in a religious sense. The morality Tolkien is talking about is catholic morality, which is where we get 'Denethor was prideful because he thought he could see into the future (ie looked at the situation and made a rational calculation) and also suicide is prideful, you're taking away gods hand in your fate' and also 'don't have sex except for when you want children and are in love' and also 'everyone has their place and their appointed task and it is for the good of everyone that they play this task' I could go on but you get the idea.

Basically, the morality Tolkien is talking about is not what we would now consider to be the height of morality, unless you do believe in this sort of thing. So it is better described as Catholicism than morality, hence, Elves (who have biological imperatives that enforce, for example, sex only for procreation and are married the moment they have sex etc) are biologically catholic. And everything they do is blessed, unless! An elf is ‘corrupted’. There is actually a section in NoME which says that elves are monogamous, have sex only with love and children in mind ect UNLESS they are ‘corrupted’. This was where my joke ‘only evil elves can have gay sex’ comes from. So you can see how this version of morality is already pretty uncomfortable to play into right?

But this is also seen in the concepts of 'Men of darkness' vs 'Middle men' vs 'high men'. These are not moral designations, in middle earth you are born into them and you cannot change to which you belong, but they have intensely moral implications. (Whole societies are implied to gradually be able to change their designation over time, but one individual cannot and these changes must happen in the presence or absence of ‘holiness’. So Gondor ‘became like middle men of the twilight’ without the presence of divinely ordained kings and then became ‘high’ again once Aragorn became king.)

The men of darkness are polygamist for a start, they ‘worship sauron’ and are forever classed as evil, Aragorn ‘subjugates the south’ which we are all supposed to agree is a good idea. Faramir says that middle men are too enamoured with battle, noble in their own way but not high minded. 'Righteous Pagan' is the term often thrown around, especially by catholic tolkien scholars. And the High Men come from Numenor, build great empires, are the cleverest and most advanced and live the longest. But! Numenoreans are in no way morally superior, they had a slave trade, they deforested Middle Earth, they colonised middle earth after Numenor’s destruction. The thing that sets them apart is that they are ‘faithful’, for a long time they had great friendship with the elves and they all believed in Eru’s divine right as the one true god over all creation. They also lived closer to ‘heaven’, so much so that they could see Tol Eressea from Numenor some days.

I could get into all the complex narratives surrounding righteousness and the dethroning of god and uncorrupted vs corrupted earth etc and how that is related in Numenor’s rise and fall, but we don’t need to go into that for now. The point is believing in and being faithful to ‘god’ (eru) is good and not believing in him is a corruption and makes you bad. But elves are essentially born with the inherent knowledge that Eru exists, many of them have met his servants and seen his work on the world and they all know he IS the ‘one true god’. Whether or not they agree with his servants is neither here nor there, Feanor made his oath TO Eru, as if he believed the Valar were separate from him. An elf is corrupted if they defy Eru’s will, but that is rare and never comes alongside the idea that Eru doesn’t exist or is in some way an imposter to the throne of Arda. Elves are biologically catholic! And that means they are good, regardless of their actual actions.

This is most blatantly expressed in one of Tolkien’s letters (letter 183 if you’re curious), which states; In The Lord of the Rings the conflict is not basically about 'freedom', though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honour. The Eldar and the Númenóreans believed in The One, the true God, and held worship of any other person an abomination. Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants;† if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world. So even if in desperation 'the West' had bred or hired hordes of orcs and had cruelly ravaged the lands of other Men as allies of Sauron, or merely to prevent them from aiding him, their Cause would have remained indefeasibly right.

So, in essentials, Elves and Numenoreans could be entirely cruel and brutal, but so long as they are still fighting for Eru’s divine right, it would all still be ‘in the right’. Which is why, in the story, we have this seeming contradiction of Elves being revered as perfect, whilst displaying a great deal of imperfect behaviours. It’s because morality is not what is being discussed (ie kindness to others, not tolerating unjust violence, respect for all and such) it is divine perfection. Elven society is necessarily homophobic, it is misogynistic, it is racist, it is everything a human society can be and more, especially because these views are so baked into their culture that they appear to be biologically and spiritually enforced. And it definitely is spiritually enforced too! Finwe needs to request Manwe’s permission to wed again, which pretty much confirms that these aspects are divinely demanded.

Now, of course, fandom can do what they like in terms of changing and ignoring these aspects to suit the natural wish for the main supposedly ‘good’ characters to actually be good as we understand it. But simply deciding that the elves are biologically ‘moral’ instead of biologically ‘catholic’ is doing nothing to subvert these issues and is in fact playing directly into very racist ideas whilst sweeping their roots within the text under the rug entirely. You cannot BE biologically moral, one race cannot be more inherently moral than another race and humans are not all stupid, cruel and inferior as a rule. I hope it’s clear why deciding that a race can be morally superior over another is racist ideology, especially when that supposedly morally superior race is also ‘the most beautiful’ in the eyes of a white writer.

#erran vs tolkien #chats

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