The Hobbit was specifically written to be read out loud, if I remember correctly.
Would you also suggest to the families in the 30s & 40s that listening to the popular radio shows while sitting in the living room could have been a better experience if they had just read the transcript, instead? Or that they should have been multitasking during the shows, else it was a waste of their time?
Some people just prefer to listen. I read well and I read quite quickly -- I don't know how many books I've physically read, but it's gotta be in the high hundreds at least -- but over the past ~10 years I've switched primarily to audiobooks. Rather than being something that I enjoy while I'm doing something else, I typically do something mindless with my hands (weave chainmail, cross stitch, sew) in order to give my full attention to the book.
hi loloquwowndueo, i was thinking the same thing, but then I thought why you would prefer reading a book while sitting instead of listening - is it about efficiency and that if you CAN read one should (you use the imperative) read?
I also have this view, but when I was young and an avid reader I also enjoyed radio stories immensely as my imagination was also activated. As in the past we were an species with a predominantly oral cultural transmission, arguably more 'embodied', there could be something to say for attending a theatre version in preference of a book. On the other hand, reading often is faster, but it's indirect, you translate the symbols into your imagination yourself, on the upside you perhaps train your mind more. So both have their advantages, one is not necessarily better. I notice I am often looking through a lense of efficiency and then make choices where I loose a certain experience - sitting in the dark listening to someone telling a story instead of reading can be equally wonderful.
Reading is faster - a reason not to do it! There’s a reason that rituals across time and space have had readings from time immemorial- and not just because of the cost of printing.
Especially with a work like LotR it can be very tempting to skim parts; the audiobook will just continue on, which can help you encounter passages you’d normally have skipped over.
Absolutely! I'd read LotR many times before I first read it aloud as a bedtime story season and was abashed to find how much I'd been skipping over, mostly parenthetical details of geography and world-building, while hastening in pursuit of the plot, like the holder of a big box of bonbons gorging target than savouring.
There is a Lord of the Rings MMO (like World of Warcraft) and a guy made a video recording a walk from the Shire to Mordor. Like you can just walk from the Shire to Mordor in the game. And it's almost 10 hours long in real world time to do that! But on top of that the whole journey is narrated by the Lord of the Rings audio book, with the relevant parts of the journey.
I recommend trying to visit the ArdaCraft minecraft server. They're trying to faithfully recreate the LotR world at 1:58 scale, and I've spent some time attempting to do the whole walk over some evenings the past few months. It's absolutely incredible the amount of love and detail has gone into crafting the world.
Oh man, something to watch and listen to in the evenings to come, thank you!
I don't have experience with the LotR Online outside of small clips here and there, but for the past 5 years or so I have been enjoying a bit more retro LotR "mmorpg", a free-to-play MUD that has been in development since 1991 or something: https://mume.org/
In MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth) getting from Bree to Mordor by walking won't take you 10 hours, but maybe 10 minutes at most. However, the trip and the destination will be full of dangers, whether it's from pve or pvp side of things.
As a side note, MUME is being developed by volunteers, and I believe the game itself is still ran on some Swiss University servers, where it all began, heh.
It is crazy to me how captivating and immersive text-based games can be. I've been exploring them for fun in recent years, the roots of modern mmorpgs. Fun to come across stuff you still have in modern games. :)
Even the LOTR adaptation is questionable. Gandalf kicking Pippin (the exact opposite of what happens in the book), the lack of the scouring of the Shire, and super-Legolas right out of a Marvel movie...
I have a lot of criticism for some of the plot changes that jackson made but I'll credit him for this: his films are the first dramatic sword & sorcery type movies that got the tone right and aren't cringe worthy. The previous attempts at LOTR are awful.
I wonder what Tolkien would say of so much of the symbolism from his novels being used to bootstrap a horrible dystopian control grid? Would he approve or disapprove? The way that orcs are dehumanized you have to wonder.
Tolkien’s orc dialogue in TLOTR is actually very humanised in some ways – the orcs moan about their bosses, complain about rival teams, are concerned about completing their tasks, being punished for failure, etc, etc. When they aren’t fighting, they come across as petty functionaries in a totalitarian state.
That's both a very good description of Tolkien's struggles with orcs, and a writing style that feels out of place in an encyclopedia. The Halls of Mandos are described as a halfway house.
> J. R. R. Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, created what he came to feel was a moral dilemma for himself with his supposedly evil Middle-earth peoples like Orcs [...] so killing them would be wrong without very good reason. Orcs serve as the principal forces of the enemy in The Lord of the Rings, where they are slaughtered in large numbers in the battles of [...]
Admitting that there's a very wide diversity of beliefs under the "Roman Catholic" banner - historic Roman Catholic armies have been eager participants in well-documented battles for the past 1,500 or so years. I'd assume that Tolkien would have had a wide variety of perfectly historic Roman Catholic arguments to chose from, to justify his fictional slaughter.
(If I recall, the orcs slaughtered in LoTR are pretty much all soldier or near-soldiers. Do orc women, children, or other non-combatants ever appear in the story?)
In many ways, that Wikipedia article feels like a Hays Code-era whitewashing of Roman Catholicism.
Your criticism of Catholicism is valid, but regardless: this dilemma of Tolkien is real, and well-documented (e.g. in his letters, etc).
He really did struggle with this, re: the origin of the Orcs, whether they had souls, whether it was ok to default to massacring them without second thought, etc. He never really resolved it.
Most Tolkien fan communities are aware of this dilemma, it's one of those well-known things, along with "did Balrogs have wings?", "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?" and "why did Sauron need to put his power within a ring, anyway?".
> "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?"
If the allies were counterfactually sensible enough to fly the ring to Mordor, Sauron could have been counterfactually sensible enough to station an Orc/Troll Battlegroup at the Sammath Naur, with a Nazgul combat air patrol.
Note I wasn't really trying to go into the argument, just pointing out these are well-known and very debated topics in Tolkien fandom.
My own opinion is that debating this is missing the point. Tolkien was about the hero's journey, which necessitates the hard path to victory. It's not at all about flying a modern superweapon into Mount Doom; that's too literal a reading.
If trying to rationalize things - I'd say Sauron knows that giant eagles are a thing, and able to serve as mounts. So to prevent Western aerial reconnaissance and insertion/extraction of observers/spies/special forces in Mordor, he's got to have some sort of aerial observer / aerial denial systems going. Which systems would make a "fly the Ring to the fire" gambit too risky.
(Vs. voice-of-canon Gandalf makes it clear that anyone seeking to destroy his Preciousss is simply beyond Sauron's Vile McEvil worldview.)
In fact, when Gandalf catches up with Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli in 'The White Rider' chapter, he explicitly tells them that Sauron has committed a major strategic blunder: attacking too early, as soon as he thought the Ring was in play. If he'd kept some forces back to guard Mt Doom, he'd have been alright. Especially because, as later becomes clear, Mt Doom isn't a normal volcano where you could just lob the Ring in from your low-flying eagle. The Cracks of Doom are in a chamber deep inside the mountain.
Yes - I am not saying that JRRT himself was anything less than saintly, or did not struggle with the issue.
My issue is with the Wikipedia article's heavy identification of JRRT's personal dilemma with the Roman Church and its doctrines. Historically, for that Church - one could just assume that the orcs were Protestants, so slaughtering them was perfectly okay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion
I find Tolkein's depictions on his original jacket covers of the Rings of Power and the one ring and the "all seeing eye" that accompanies them quite evocative:
As many of you no doubt know, some people (did you know even 3 days after Hiroshima?![1]) likened Tolkein's One Ring to the power of the atomic bomb developed in the same era: a technology molded by hidden genius, capable of unspeakable power so deadly it must actually /not/ be used, but instead, must be carefully guarded by a small band until it can be destroyed. So that true peace is possible again.
Tolkein of course denied this[2] .... and the timing wasn't right[3] and ... he wasn't a big fan of allegory[4], right?
However, perhaps he foresaw, however unconsciously or through shadow knowledge shared by others or Bentham's Panopticon[5] or seen too by Orwell' 1985[6], the coming surveillance state.
After all, in the trenches of WW1 he took his place managing signals communications in a battalion[7] and when WW2 arrived was approached to be a cryptographer, (even taking four days of preparatory courses on the subject![8] Before getting turned down[9].).
Foresaw what and shared how you ask?
That other, subtler, great Tool of Power to come out of WW2 -- the use of, and covert exposure of, signals encryption.
Encryption exerts its power in a manner not unlike one of the key functions of the rings... Anyone bearing the One Ring or the nine, who then puts on the ring -- like using encryption -- instantly makes themselves "hidden" to the mortal fellows around you.
But tragically, the prolonged use and reliance upon such power deepens and ensures ever increasing temptations and corruptions.
And such ring (encryption) use -- most unintuitively and dangerously -- makes you more, not less visible to the maker of the rings.
(Just as cyphertext stands out in a sea of plaintext.[10] (See Tor today[11], or in WW2 the then-novel phenomena known as radar traceback.[13] Or the then-novel-but-even-more-covert encryption traffic analysis[14].)
Perhaps he saw. And knew.
...
And why too the numeric gap between 1 ring, 3 for elves, 7, and the 9? Nobody knows for sure[15].
Perhaps too some linguistic colleague had whispered to the maker-of-languages (languages as obscure at that time as those of the Apache Code Talkers[16] and similarly perhaps unappreciatedly utilitarian) that... we already had "5 Eyes"[17]??
Perhaps then Tolkein knew? And passed on the word, for those willing to hear...
Poor Tolkein, he became beloved by the very Morlocks[18], err, 'easily corruptible men of middle earth" he warned about.
...
[1...18] Out of time! References available upon request. Or web search... Don't get me started on how this all connects to the Eye of Providence[19] or the Eye of Horus[20]! ;)
> Tolkein of course denied this .... and the timing wasn't right
Just to expand on this, substantial portions of LOTR were written well before the atomic bomb became public knowledge, e.g. Tolkien had written first drafts of Book 4 (Frodo's journey to Mordor with Sam and Gollum) by 1944. In other words, it was already a fundamental plot point that the ring should not be used even as an ultimate weapon.
The depiction of war in LOTR is perhaps more closely associated with Tolkien's personal experiences in the war of 1914-18. The dead marshes in particular have similarities to the trenches of WW1
It's a fantasy novel written primarily for entertainment. It's hard enough to write dwarves and elves, orcs are a necessary plot device. If you want you can imagine them as pitiable creatures who have been deprived of free will and have no choice but to act the way they do and loath themselves for it.
> It's a fantasy novel written primarily for entertainment
On one hand, you're right.
On the other, it's unfair to Tolkien and to the scholars who study his work. He spent a lot of his life and effort towards developing this world, he deeply pondered the moral implications and theology of his world, and for all his denial of there being any analogies to the real world, you can see he considered them (he did describe modern men in the modern world as "Orc-ish", etc).
All of this to say we cannot just dismiss it as "it's a fantasy novel".
>>The way that orcs are dehumanized you have to wonder.
If anything, it's their portrayal in the Rings of Power that is idiotic(trying to humanize them) - they aren't human, they don't have families or friends or internal lives and psychological doubts going through their heads - they are meant to be a force("force" like in "force of nature") of evil, not a misunderstood and exploited race of intelligent beings.
For an actually interesting take on "hey what if the orcs are actually intelligent people" there is The Last Ringbearer by a Russian author, presenting LOTR from the perspective of Mordor(it's not a good book, but was an amusing read)
I will however agree with you that it's truly insane how we have a global survailence company that is used to spy on citizens and destroy democracies worldwide that is literally called Palantir. Like, no one working there is seeing it?
I've not seen Rings of Power and I don't plan to, but I'd just point out that the Silmarillion describes the origin of orcs as being an exploited race of intelligent beings, elves who were captured and tortured until their forms became what we know as orcs.
"... all those of the Quendi [elves] who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes."
Like the sibling comment remarks, Tolkien never fully embarked on this path.
He had a problem: as a Catholic [1], he thought every creature deserved pity and second chances (you can see this when Gandalf rebukes Frodo when he says "it's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum"). If the Orcs are really "fallen Elves", they deserve pity and maybe mercy; they are worthy of redemption. Yet Orcs in LotR are to be killed on sight; there's only one passage in all of LotR where the Hobbits reflect on the corpse of an Orc with any kind of attempt at insight.
For Orcs to be a thing to be destroyed without mercy, unworthy of redemption, they must have not be corrupted souls. Yet here Tolkien found another stumbling block: according to his Catholic-influenced vision, Evil cannot create, only corrupt and destroy. So Morgoth couldn't have created Orcs, he must have used existing souls as raw material.
Tolkien never resolved this conundrum.
----
[1] someone in another comment argued quite convincingly that Catholics at times had no trouble murdering other Christians over doctrinal affairs, so let's add a qualification here: "Tolkien's Catholic-influenced morality, which was his own nonetheless".
And as this wiki article posted in other comments very nicely explains, Tolkien never came to a good and final conclusion on how this all really worked, with different explanations in different works of his. The "they were just evil force that could be killed without remorse" theme is the dominant one, because it works in the context of the story and the worldbuilding that he did for it.
> we have a global survailence company that is used to spy on citizens and destroy democracies worldwide that is literally called Palantir. Like, no one working there is seeing it?
The Palantir are not evil creations in the book iirc. They were used by the great kings to see whatever they wished.
Heck, even in the book Aragorn uses the Palantir to make a critical decision turning the tide of battle.
In the book the Palantir are technically neutral devices for Seeing things, that, it turns out, are inherently prone to misuse and once used for Evil, are incredibly difficult to use in any other way.
A better metaphor (accidental or not) for surveillance technology I've never seen.
> once used for Evil, are incredibly difficult to use in any other way.
That’s not true. They were only dangerous to use as long as an insanely powerful immortal demon god had one. If you used a Palantir he would notice and draw your eye toward him. He could then make you see what he wanted you to see, unless you were strong enough to resist. He corrupted Saruman and Denethor merely by talking to them, showing them misleading things, and convincing them that he could not be defeated by any means. Kill Sauron and the Palantiri are safe to use again.
The tools are neutral. It is the users who are good or evil.
It’s the same with the Throne of Amon Hen, fwiw. It’s only dangerous to use because Sauron will notice that you’re using it.
Edit: it just occurred to me that the book describes a kind of filter bubble, too. The Palantir stones are inherently incapable of showing false data. But they became tuned over time to show highly editorialized video clips which supported a specific (Evil) narrative. That (IIRC) included future projections of possible outcomes.
Denethor (?) tried to use a Palantir for good, but went mad after viewing its selections for years.
To me it sounds more like he really wanted to give them some agency and the ability to speak, but then was unable to resolve the moral dilemma that came out of it - with different works suggesting different "solutions" to it. As the Wiki article points out, Tolkien was a devout Christian and part of his world view included beings which were wholy and irredimably evil while still able to speak and reason on some level. When you look at Christian iconography, you don't really have theologians saying "well when you have angels slaying demons, are the demons really evil or are they just misunderstood". That's your orcs. Since Tolkien really cared about world building he wanted to make it fit neatly in the myth of creation but as far as I can tell - he was never able to do it neatly.
> For an actually interesting take on "hey what if the orcs are actually intelligent people" there is The Last Ringbearer by a Russian author, presenting LOTR from the perspective of Mordor(it's not a good book, but was an amusing read)
I found The Last Ringbearer a book good! Of course it's not in the same league as LotR, it's not engaging in vast myth- and world-building, but it's a well-written, fun book that manages to be engaging. Even knowing it was an alternative take to LotR, I wanted to know what happened!
For everyone who has not read it, it's not simply a "let's retell LotR, only from the perspective of the Orcs". It's a brand new "adventure" so to speak, which shifts the point of view but also describes new events. It starts at the end of the War of the Ring, with Mordor defeated.
I mean, I really did actually enjoy reading it. But like with a lot of Russian literature - it does have a habit of spending several pages just monologuing here and there - but it is a "fun" read.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair (1878 - 1968)
"Because Pharaoh is paying daddy, and we need the money." - Unknown laborer at the Pyramid of Djoser, c. 2660 BC, explaining to his son why he's making a giant pile of rocks in the desert.
I mean, I did leave a role because the things we were doing clashed heavily with my principles (ad-tech adjacent). I had the luxury of doing so - an opportunity arose somewhere else, I could afford to make the move, etc.
But it's also hard for me to imagine someone that today, chooses to interview and take a job at Palantir, and not know what they're up to, who Thiel is and what he stands for.
Zip file with mp3 in it:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b2aPKgVVguOKMOOqWskaliOviYr...
Best enjoyed on a rainy afternoon in an armchair with a cup of tea.
Impressive, very nice. Let's see Paul Allen's recording.
Reserve audio versions for when you genuinely can’t look at the book because you’re doing something else.
Would you also suggest to the families in the 30s & 40s that listening to the popular radio shows while sitting in the living room could have been a better experience if they had just read the transcript, instead? Or that they should have been multitasking during the shows, else it was a waste of their time?
My memory works much better when I hear something than if I read it, when it comes to non technical stuff.
For me, that's exactly the sort of "something else" I interpreted the previous comment to refer to.
Especially with a work like LotR it can be very tempting to skim parts; the audiobook will just continue on, which can help you encounter passages you’d normally have skipped over.
There is a Lord of the Rings MMO (like World of Warcraft) and a guy made a video recording a walk from the Shire to Mordor. Like you can just walk from the Shire to Mordor in the game. And it's almost 10 hours long in real world time to do that! But on top of that the whole journey is narrated by the Lord of the Rings audio book, with the relevant parts of the journey.
https://youtu.be/LYipECdYpXc
Incredibly relaxing
I don't have experience with the LotR Online outside of small clips here and there, but for the past 5 years or so I have been enjoying a bit more retro LotR "mmorpg", a free-to-play MUD that has been in development since 1991 or something: https://mume.org/
In MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth) getting from Bree to Mordor by walking won't take you 10 hours, but maybe 10 minutes at most. However, the trip and the destination will be full of dangers, whether it's from pve or pvp side of things.
As a side note, MUME is being developed by volunteers, and I believe the game itself is still ran on some Swiss University servers, where it all began, heh.
It was simply magical and I have many good memories venturing through middle-earth and meeting fellow chars.
Do you happen to know where does the narration by Andy Serkis come from? Is it a game? An audiobook?
Christopher Lee reading the Children of Hurin is also fantastic.
I think he’d have serious issues with things but not necessarily what everyone picks up on.
Orcs aren't human, though. If anything, they were deelfized
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma
Admitting that there's a very wide diversity of beliefs under the "Roman Catholic" banner - historic Roman Catholic armies have been eager participants in well-documented battles for the past 1,500 or so years. I'd assume that Tolkien would have had a wide variety of perfectly historic Roman Catholic arguments to chose from, to justify his fictional slaughter.
(If I recall, the orcs slaughtered in LoTR are pretty much all soldier or near-soldiers. Do orc women, children, or other non-combatants ever appear in the story?)
In many ways, that Wikipedia article feels like a Hays Code-era whitewashing of Roman Catholicism.
He really did struggle with this, re: the origin of the Orcs, whether they had souls, whether it was ok to default to massacring them without second thought, etc. He never really resolved it.
Most Tolkien fan communities are aware of this dilemma, it's one of those well-known things, along with "did Balrogs have wings?", "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?" and "why did Sauron need to put his power within a ring, anyway?".
If the allies were counterfactually sensible enough to fly the ring to Mordor, Sauron could have been counterfactually sensible enough to station an Orc/Troll Battlegroup at the Sammath Naur, with a Nazgul combat air patrol.
My own opinion is that debating this is missing the point. Tolkien was about the hero's journey, which necessitates the hard path to victory. It's not at all about flying a modern superweapon into Mount Doom; that's too literal a reading.
(Vs. voice-of-canon Gandalf makes it clear that anyone seeking to destroy his Preciousss is simply beyond Sauron's Vile McEvil worldview.)
In fact, when Gandalf catches up with Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli in 'The White Rider' chapter, he explicitly tells them that Sauron has committed a major strategic blunder: attacking too early, as soon as he thought the Ring was in play. If he'd kept some forces back to guard Mt Doom, he'd have been alright. Especially because, as later becomes clear, Mt Doom isn't a normal volcano where you could just lob the Ring in from your low-flying eagle. The Cracks of Doom are in a chamber deep inside the mountain.
My issue is with the Wikipedia article's heavy identification of JRRT's personal dilemma with the Roman Church and its doctrines. Historically, for that Church - one could just assume that the orcs were Protestants, so slaughtering them was perfectly okay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion
https://imgur.com/CZSNpiS
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/The_Fellowshi...
Tolkein of course denied this[2] .... and the timing wasn't right[3] and ... he wasn't a big fan of allegory[4], right?
However, perhaps he foresaw, however unconsciously or through shadow knowledge shared by others or Bentham's Panopticon[5] or seen too by Orwell' 1985[6], the coming surveillance state.
After all, in the trenches of WW1 he took his place managing signals communications in a battalion[7] and when WW2 arrived was approached to be a cryptographer, (even taking four days of preparatory courses on the subject![8] Before getting turned down[9].).
Foresaw what and shared how you ask?
That other, subtler, great Tool of Power to come out of WW2 -- the use of, and covert exposure of, signals encryption.
Encryption exerts its power in a manner not unlike one of the key functions of the rings... Anyone bearing the One Ring or the nine, who then puts on the ring -- like using encryption -- instantly makes themselves "hidden" to the mortal fellows around you.
But tragically, the prolonged use and reliance upon such power deepens and ensures ever increasing temptations and corruptions.
And such ring (encryption) use -- most unintuitively and dangerously -- makes you more, not less visible to the maker of the rings.
(Just as cyphertext stands out in a sea of plaintext.[10] (See Tor today[11], or in WW2 the then-novel phenomena known as radar traceback.[13] Or the then-novel-but-even-more-covert encryption traffic analysis[14].)
Perhaps he saw. And knew.
...
And why too the numeric gap between 1 ring, 3 for elves, 7, and the 9? Nobody knows for sure[15].
Perhaps too some linguistic colleague had whispered to the maker-of-languages (languages as obscure at that time as those of the Apache Code Talkers[16] and similarly perhaps unappreciatedly utilitarian) that... we already had "5 Eyes"[17]??
Perhaps then Tolkein knew? And passed on the word, for those willing to hear...
Poor Tolkein, he became beloved by the very Morlocks[18], err, 'easily corruptible men of middle earth" he warned about.
...
[1...18] Out of time! References available upon request. Or web search... Don't get me started on how this all connects to the Eye of Providence[19] or the Eye of Horus[20]! ;)
Just to expand on this, substantial portions of LOTR were written well before the atomic bomb became public knowledge, e.g. Tolkien had written first drafts of Book 4 (Frodo's journey to Mordor with Sam and Gollum) by 1944. In other words, it was already a fundamental plot point that the ring should not be used even as an ultimate weapon.
The depiction of war in LOTR is perhaps more closely associated with Tolkien's personal experiences in the war of 1914-18. The dead marshes in particular have similarities to the trenches of WW1
On one hand, you're right.
On the other, it's unfair to Tolkien and to the scholars who study his work. He spent a lot of his life and effort towards developing this world, he deeply pondered the moral implications and theology of his world, and for all his denial of there being any analogies to the real world, you can see he considered them (he did describe modern men in the modern world as "Orc-ish", etc).
All of this to say we cannot just dismiss it as "it's a fantasy novel".
If anything, it's their portrayal in the Rings of Power that is idiotic(trying to humanize them) - they aren't human, they don't have families or friends or internal lives and psychological doubts going through their heads - they are meant to be a force("force" like in "force of nature") of evil, not a misunderstood and exploited race of intelligent beings.
For an actually interesting take on "hey what if the orcs are actually intelligent people" there is The Last Ringbearer by a Russian author, presenting LOTR from the perspective of Mordor(it's not a good book, but was an amusing read)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
I will however agree with you that it's truly insane how we have a global survailence company that is used to spy on citizens and destroy democracies worldwide that is literally called Palantir. Like, no one working there is seeing it?
"... all those of the Quendi [elves] who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes."
He had a problem: as a Catholic [1], he thought every creature deserved pity and second chances (you can see this when Gandalf rebukes Frodo when he says "it's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum"). If the Orcs are really "fallen Elves", they deserve pity and maybe mercy; they are worthy of redemption. Yet Orcs in LotR are to be killed on sight; there's only one passage in all of LotR where the Hobbits reflect on the corpse of an Orc with any kind of attempt at insight.
For Orcs to be a thing to be destroyed without mercy, unworthy of redemption, they must have not be corrupted souls. Yet here Tolkien found another stumbling block: according to his Catholic-influenced vision, Evil cannot create, only corrupt and destroy. So Morgoth couldn't have created Orcs, he must have used existing souls as raw material.
Tolkien never resolved this conundrum.
----
[1] someone in another comment argued quite convincingly that Catholics at times had no trouble murdering other Christians over doctrinal affairs, so let's add a qualification here: "Tolkien's Catholic-influenced morality, which was his own nonetheless".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma
The Palantir are not evil creations in the book iirc. They were used by the great kings to see whatever they wished.
Heck, even in the book Aragorn uses the Palantir to make a critical decision turning the tide of battle.
A better metaphor (accidental or not) for surveillance technology I've never seen.
That’s not true. They were only dangerous to use as long as an insanely powerful immortal demon god had one. If you used a Palantir he would notice and draw your eye toward him. He could then make you see what he wanted you to see, unless you were strong enough to resist. He corrupted Saruman and Denethor merely by talking to them, showing them misleading things, and convincing them that he could not be defeated by any means. Kill Sauron and the Palantiri are safe to use again.
The tools are neutral. It is the users who are good or evil.
It’s the same with the Throne of Amon Hen, fwiw. It’s only dangerous to use because Sauron will notice that you’re using it.
"We are easily corrupted"
[1] https://www.westword.com/opinion/opinion-palantir-technologi...
[2] https://www.pogo.org/investigates/stephen-miller-conflicts-o...
Denethor (?) tried to use a Palantir for good, but went mad after viewing its selections for years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma
Back in my day, LotR names were used for cool metal bands like Gorgoroth, Amon Amarth, Cirith Ungol, Carach Angren, Burzum, etc.
I found The Last Ringbearer a book good! Of course it's not in the same league as LotR, it's not engaging in vast myth- and world-building, but it's a well-written, fun book that manages to be engaging. Even knowing it was an alternative take to LotR, I wanted to know what happened!
For everyone who has not read it, it's not simply a "let's retell LotR, only from the perspective of the Orcs". It's a brand new "adventure" so to speak, which shifts the point of view but also describes new events. It starts at the end of the War of the Ring, with Mordor defeated.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair (1878 - 1968)
"Because Pharaoh is paying daddy, and we need the money." - Unknown laborer at the Pyramid of Djoser, c. 2660 BC, explaining to his son why he's making a giant pile of rocks in the desert.
But it's also hard for me to imagine someone that today, chooses to interview and take a job at Palantir, and not know what they're up to, who Thiel is and what he stands for.