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man with two butts
10 Apr 2025 11:50 amTwo days ago I dreamed "man with two butts" was a massive old meme that was so oversaturated that when someone started to say it it was like 🙄 "...Yeah yeah, the man with two butts was there."
10 Apr 2025
The Roots of Tolkien
10 Apr 2025 01:11 pmEven though I was already super into the medieval pastiche novels of my pal William Morris, a big part of my motivation for finishing The House of the Wolfings and reading The Roots of the Mountains was learning that these books were a major, perhaps the primary traceable literary influence on LOTR. I was suddenly curious! My reading in a brief web search promised that The Roots of the Mountains influenced:
✒️ The Dunedain as a proud wandering people descended from a great and noble culture in a more heroic past, dedicated to protecting the less warlike civilizations around them (inspired by the Sons of the Wolf in ROTM)
✒️ A culture with warrior women (the article that said he probably borrowed this is hilarious, given that the only culture with warrior women in Tolkien is actually a culture where the woman has to crossdress and sneak away to war; The Sons of the Wolf actually have warrior women)
✒️ The armies of orcs are said to be inspired by the "Huns" in ROTM, which, as I've mentioned in the past, are actually an army of demonic? monsters? apparently in spite of the name. (I still haven't reached their part in ROTM yet, but if it turns out that JRRT borrowed the idea and all his changes made it LESS racist that will be funny.)
✒️ Apparently the cross-cultural romances in general and the Aragorn-Arwen-Eowyn triangle in particular have clear antecedents in ROTM. I've seen the beginning of this already, but I'm assured that the novel contains five couples and am intrigued to find out where the others are going.
So far I've only read about 10% of The Roots of the Mountains, but I've already noticed that its gender politics (and its other politics) are more progressive than LOTR's (ROTM was published in 1889, LOTR 1954-55; Morris was born in 1834, Tolkien in 1892). Truly, as one of the websites I read said (paraphrasing), a chunk of LOTR is a reactionary Catholic reimagining of Morris's radically socialist fantasy.
This reminds me of how Morris & Co was also notably less sexist in the Victorian era than the supposedly progressive idealists at the Bauhaus in the 1920s-30s.
✒️ The Dunedain as a proud wandering people descended from a great and noble culture in a more heroic past, dedicated to protecting the less warlike civilizations around them (inspired by the Sons of the Wolf in ROTM)
✒️ A culture with warrior women (the article that said he probably borrowed this is hilarious, given that the only culture with warrior women in Tolkien is actually a culture where the woman has to crossdress and sneak away to war; The Sons of the Wolf actually have warrior women)
✒️ The armies of orcs are said to be inspired by the "Huns" in ROTM, which, as I've mentioned in the past, are actually an army of demonic? monsters? apparently in spite of the name. (I still haven't reached their part in ROTM yet, but if it turns out that JRRT borrowed the idea and all his changes made it LESS racist that will be funny.)
✒️ Apparently the cross-cultural romances in general and the Aragorn-Arwen-Eowyn triangle in particular have clear antecedents in ROTM. I've seen the beginning of this already, but I'm assured that the novel contains five couples and am intrigued to find out where the others are going.
So far I've only read about 10% of The Roots of the Mountains, but I've already noticed that its gender politics (and its other politics) are more progressive than LOTR's (ROTM was published in 1889, LOTR 1954-55; Morris was born in 1834, Tolkien in 1892). Truly, as one of the websites I read said (paraphrasing), a chunk of LOTR is a reactionary Catholic reimagining of Morris's radically socialist fantasy.
This reminds me of how Morris & Co was also notably less sexist in the Victorian era than the supposedly progressive idealists at the Bauhaus in the 1920s-30s.