One To Rule Them All...
Nov. 1st, 2010 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
An excellent article comparing Wagner, Tolkien and the root cause of the wars...
Whole article: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Colhaze-Tolkein.html
"My Ring and Wagner’s were round, but there the resemblance ceases! scoffed Tolkien rather maliciously after his book had been published in the mid-fifties. Which is so transparent a denial that it seems almost laughable. Shaw’s aforementioned essay The Perfect Wagnerite, nearly of book-length, much acclaimed and widely read, must have been known in detail to Tolkien as well. Because his Ring and Wagner’s are identical in theme and essence, twins in fact if only in a different quality of clothing. Meaning that the former, compared to Wagner’s peerless magnum opus, is over-large and very entertaining, but not really a masterpiece of literature in the classical sense. Interesting might be that Tolkien uses words like Mordor or Sauron, clearly derived from the German Mord, or murder, and Sau, or sow. Though his claim that his own name derived from the German tollkuehn, meaning extremely foolhardy, seems unlikely since it doesn’t exist as a family name.
As to the deeper meaning in both cases, it is important to know that the one Ring of Power has no magical potentials as we understand them. It cannot destroy enemy armies simply by an order of its bearer. It cannot make you fly. It cannot stop the flow of time. It can’t even prevent you from getting wet if it rains. It can make you invisible, true, but that is just an illusion. And you’d still get wet in any case. So what is it really?
It really is only GOLD!
And isn’t that enough to rule the world?!
For many of those who had witnessed the last decades of the great European Empires, a reign of peace and general improvement that ended abruptly and horribly with World War One, the era afterwards must have seemed like the proverbial devaluation of all values. Because the bankers and Philistines, already so powerful in Wagner’s times, had by now metastasized out of all proportion. Germany, down on its knees, was hardest hit. During the ill-fated and debt-ridden Weimar Republic the country’s capital, Berlin, boasted 115 banking institutions of which 112 were Jewish-owned. The same ratio was true for innumerable cabarets and brothels where girls and boys as young as ten years old sold their famished bodies to the new caste of money acrobats. As to the banks, they used the country’s catastrophic finances to their advantage and tricked and forced the starving population out of their assets, be it shares, shops, houses, farmland, factories or newspapers, until half of Germany was in the hands of a very few. The same happened, though much less drastically, in much of the Western World and resulted finally in the cataclysmic Black Friday. An exercise, as the Orc-faced Robert Fuld of formerly Lehman Bros. has informed us so brazenly, where we ruin a national economy and pick up the bits and pieces for a song."
Whole article: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Colhaze-Tolkein.html
"My Ring and Wagner’s were round, but there the resemblance ceases! scoffed Tolkien rather maliciously after his book had been published in the mid-fifties. Which is so transparent a denial that it seems almost laughable. Shaw’s aforementioned essay The Perfect Wagnerite, nearly of book-length, much acclaimed and widely read, must have been known in detail to Tolkien as well. Because his Ring and Wagner’s are identical in theme and essence, twins in fact if only in a different quality of clothing. Meaning that the former, compared to Wagner’s peerless magnum opus, is over-large and very entertaining, but not really a masterpiece of literature in the classical sense. Interesting might be that Tolkien uses words like Mordor or Sauron, clearly derived from the German Mord, or murder, and Sau, or sow. Though his claim that his own name derived from the German tollkuehn, meaning extremely foolhardy, seems unlikely since it doesn’t exist as a family name.
As to the deeper meaning in both cases, it is important to know that the one Ring of Power has no magical potentials as we understand them. It cannot destroy enemy armies simply by an order of its bearer. It cannot make you fly. It cannot stop the flow of time. It can’t even prevent you from getting wet if it rains. It can make you invisible, true, but that is just an illusion. And you’d still get wet in any case. So what is it really?
It really is only GOLD!
And isn’t that enough to rule the world?!
For many of those who had witnessed the last decades of the great European Empires, a reign of peace and general improvement that ended abruptly and horribly with World War One, the era afterwards must have seemed like the proverbial devaluation of all values. Because the bankers and Philistines, already so powerful in Wagner’s times, had by now metastasized out of all proportion. Germany, down on its knees, was hardest hit. During the ill-fated and debt-ridden Weimar Republic the country’s capital, Berlin, boasted 115 banking institutions of which 112 were Jewish-owned. The same ratio was true for innumerable cabarets and brothels where girls and boys as young as ten years old sold their famished bodies to the new caste of money acrobats. As to the banks, they used the country’s catastrophic finances to their advantage and tricked and forced the starving population out of their assets, be it shares, shops, houses, farmland, factories or newspapers, until half of Germany was in the hands of a very few. The same happened, though much less drastically, in much of the Western World and resulted finally in the cataclysmic Black Friday. An exercise, as the Orc-faced Robert Fuld of formerly Lehman Bros. has informed us so brazenly, where we ruin a national economy and pick up the bits and pieces for a song."