“From the very beginning, there were a lot of orcs on our side” – Weekend – Kommersant
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On September 21, 1937, John R. R. Tolkien’s fairy tale “The Hobbit” was published. The story, in which the hobbit Bilbo Baggins helps the dwarves defeat the dragon and takes possession of the Ring of Omnipotence, opened the world of Middle-earth to world culture and laid the foundation for the fantasy genre. For the 85th anniversary of The Hobbit, Tolkien’s letters and articles were reread to understand where the darkness comes from and how his legendarium has to do with our lives.
one
One of the secrets of pain is that for the sufferer it is a guarantee of good, the road up, albeit not an easy one. However, it remains “evil”, and the conscience of any person should be afraid to inflict it out of carelessness or excessively, not to mention that deliberately.
2
People are what they are, you can’t get away from it, and the only way out is to give up wars, and planning, and organizing, and creating new military units.
3
We are trying to defeat Sauron with the Ring. And we will even succeed (at least it looks like it). But as payback, we will breed new Saurons, and humans and elves will gradually turn into orcs. Not that in real life all this is as obvious as in a fictional story; and from the very beginning there were a lot of orcs on our side.
four
For most of my life I have studied German material (in the general sense of the word, including England and Scandinavia). There is much more power (and truth) in the “Germanic” ideal than it seems to ignorant people. As a student, I was terribly fond of it (while Hitler, one must think, painted pictures for himself and had never even heard of the German ideal) in defiance of the classical disciplines. To recognize true evil, one must first understand the good side of the phenomenon.
5
I would arrest anyone who uses the word “state”, and, giving them a chance to renounce their delusions, I would execute them if they continued to persist!
6
If we could go back to proper names, how useful it would be! Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and the process of government itself; capitalizing the word or using it in relation to living people should be declared an offense.
7
Man must study anything but man; and the most inappropriate occupation for anyone, even saints, is to dispose of other people.
eight
Here is the difference between literature and reality: anyone, once on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, in fact, would immediately want to be transported to any other corner of the world, except for the notorious Mordor.
9
If literature teaches us anything, it is this: there is in us a certain eternal component, free from worries and fear, which is able to look at those phenomena that in “life” we complacently call evil (no, not that we we underestimate them, they just do not violate our peace of mind).
ten
I believe that by the permission of the Lord, the whole human race (and each of its representatives separately) is free not to rise again, but to go to perdition and, in their fall, reach the most bitter bottom.
eleven
The struggle between light and darkness is just a special phase of history, perhaps one of the examples of its pattern, but not the pattern itself.
12
The true villain is a military aircraft. My feelings are more or less comparable to what Frodo would have experienced if he discovered that some hobbits were learning to fly on Nazgul birds “in the name of the liberation of the Shire.”
13
Human tyrants are rarely so vicious as to turn into the absolute embodiment of evil will. As far as I can tell, some appear to be, yet they have to govern subjects of which only a fraction are equally vicious, and many still need to be presented with “worthy motives,” real or fictitious. What we are seeing today.
fourteen
There are also conflicts over important concepts and ideas. In such cases, I am more concerned with the critical importance of being on the right side than I am concerned with identifying the mess of confused motives, personal goals, and individual actions (noble or low) in which the “right and wrong cause” of real human conflicts are usually entangled. .
fifteen
In my story, I don’t deal with Absolute Evil. I don’t even think that such a thing exists, because it is zero. In any case, I do not believe that any “reasonable being” is wholly and completely evil.
16
Sauron embodies the maximum possible approximation to an absolutely evil will. He walked the path of all tyrants: he started well, at least in that, wanting to arrange everything according to his own understanding, he nevertheless at first took into account the well-being (economic) of other inhabitants of the Earth. However, in pride and thirst for power, he went further than human tyrants, being immortal by origin.
17
If the “West” in desperation had withdrawn or hired hordes of orcs and ruthlessly ravaged the lands of other people as allies of Sauron or simply to prevent them from helping Sauron, the Cause of the West would still remain undeniably right.
eighteen
I don’t feel obligated to “fit” my story to formalized Christian theology, although I did try to make it consonant with Christian thought and faith, as evidenced by the text in Book Six, where Frodo says that Orcs were not originally evil.
19
Fantasy can be taken to extremes. She may not be perfect. It can be used for evil. It can even cloud the mind by which it is itself generated.
twenty
I believe that escapism is one of the main functions of a fairy tale, and since I approve of all its functions, I naturally disagree with the pitiful and contemptuous tone with which the word “escapism” is often pronounced: life beyond literary criticism gives no grounds for such a tone.
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