J R R Tolkien was many things: Catholic, conservative, soldier, scholar, writer, illustrator, inventor of an entire genre of literature… but he was most certainly not “woke”.
No matter what abusers of his legacy might say. When the OneRing website tried to defend the obvious debacle that the Amazon Lord of the Rings TV show is shaping up to be, by claiming, I kid you not, that “Tolkien was woke”, the hoots of derision echoed across the land.
Hold my miruvor, says the Tolkien Society.
The Tolkien Society, a society of dedicated fans of the Lord of the Rings franchise and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien has a new competitor, The Society of Tolkien after they announced an ultra woke diversity seminar on July 3rd.
So what riveting offerings does a “Tolkien and diversity” seminar offer?
The seminar of “diversity and inclusion” is scheduled to have lectures like, “Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings,” “The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” “Tolkien’s Dwarf-Women and the ‘Feminine Lack,'” and “Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien.”
I’m not sure that the last one is even in English. It sounds more like the Black Speech of Mordor.
Many in the society felt alienated by the new push to impose the woke and social justice agendas and decided to push back by scheduling an alternative event on the same day. The alternative event focuses on a scholarly approach to Tolkien’s work. The schedule includes events such as “Solving Gollum’s Riddles: An Ode to Tolkien and Old English,” “Mapping Middle-earth,” and “Tolkien is Timeless, Tinseltown is Trite,” according to the Daily Wire.
The new Society of Tolkien said it will not accept lectures on “concepts not included in Tolkien’s writing.”
That would include transgenderism – even when Éowyn dresses as a man, she is never described as anything but female. In fact, she explicitly states that No living man am I! You look upon a woman. As for “the queer”: there is no such thing in Tolkien’s work. Any claims to the contrary have to seize upon the sparsest of breadcrumbs and a prurient, stunted modern lack of imagination, which cannot distinguish between philos and eros.
Keith Casey, the founder of the Society of Tolkien, describes himself as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup founder, parent, and a voracious reader of all things and confirmed to the Daily Wire that he started the event to push back against the “nonsense” of the Tolkien Society.
“For an organization ‘devoted to the study and promotion of the life and works of the author and academic J.R.R. Tolkien’ – I question how their own bizarre viewpoint, which reads like fan fiction, took center stage,” Casey told the conservative news website. “Tolkien’s works are wonderful and should be cherished and understood as he wrote them instead of twisted to fit current social fads.”
Casey admits he’s not an academic but says it shouldn’t stop him from protecting something he loves.
The Post-Millennial
Of course he’s not an academic: he’s far too sensible for that.
Only an “intellectual” could possibly believe in something so incomprehensibly ludicrous as “Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien”.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD