Evan points to the question of Tolkien's antifacism - which was certainly linked to his Catholicism - to refute my charge that Jackson's Rohirrim are "Aryan gods." I regret my crude phrasing. But it's still clear to me that Tolkien's particular structure of mourning for a Europe all but destroyed by the ravages of the Third Reich was contingent on a privileging of Europe and the European which necessitated the kinds of representations of "the non-European" which we find in the Lord of The Rings as well as the Silmarillion, which I haven't read since i was in eighth grade, and of which my memory has dimmed over the ensuing eight and a half years, (so i thank Evan for his excellent points about the lineage of the Rohirrim and the House of Éorl. Reading the books as a child, i remember my consternation at the lack of "normal people" anywhere in the human world. I think Evan's point that the Rohirrim to some extent constitute this population is important and compelling.) And if Tolkien's Rohirrim are not Aryanized, which i'll certainly concede, I'm not particularly certain that this means Jackson's aren't. The scene with Theoden in Jackson's Two Towers which i mentioned in my last post articulates a masculinist relations between war and the nation which is all too evocative of the language of the fascist imaginary.



As for Sam Gamgee, while the "thoroughly proletarian" comment was tongue in cheek, i do think Sam is, throughout the books, the voice of not only a pastoral wisdom inherited from his "Gaffer," but also a site at which Tolkien articulates a critique of modernity, war, and fascism from the viewpoint of a literal "little person." The transformation of middle earth, and the Scouring of the Shire corresponds to the violence and trauma wrought by the war and its aftermath on the lives of British workers as well as those on the Continent, and if Sam's voice is that of a rural farmer in a bucolic village, his "shock and awe" at the horrors he and Frodo encounter as they journey to the corrupt heart of that which was once Gondolin, beacon of civilization and artifice, (unless i'm totally mistaken, which is very possible,) might be read as chronicling the violence of these seismic shifts.