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Thursday, April 5, 2012

Quote Analysis #2 - Machines of War

"Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them."


Frequently Tolkien is referred to as an ecologist and a lover of nature and this is a key example of his disdain for the industrial revolution. He frames the issue as a black and white situation. A natural tendency of readers is to relate with the protagonist and his difficulties and struggles, thus we begin to side with Bilbo in the majority of his experiences. So, when we are presented with the race of Goblins and Orcs, our first experience with them concerns violence, cruelty, and slavery. These attributes are typically considered negative ones for a race to magnify, at least for most well-balanced, non-psychotic individuals.

Thus, we immediately label Goblins as “Evil.” Because of this we regard machines and their creations as evil and repulsive, and progress for the sake of violence can be established as evil. This hardly surprises, however, when taken in the context of Tolkien’s experience in World War I – the first war in which machines of violence and war (the machine gun, mustard gas, and trench warfare). Tolkien would have experienced such violence firsthand and would grow to hate the “progress” that led to so many pointless deaths.

So, when we see Gandalf kill the Great Goblin, and Bilbo outsmart the rest, we see a victory of the natural world. These two characters come to represent what the world once was and as we reject the violence and destruction that can come through industry, we can return to that paradisiacal state.

-E

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