Geekery

Six years ago, I was asked to bring my insights as both a social scientist and avid player of tabletop role playing games to a University of Calgary project that was researching the use of computer games as mental health and life skills interventions for children and youth living with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, autism and other neurological disabilities. At the time, they were considering expanding their study to examine in-person, tabletop games. After I did some initial work on the project interpersonal and academic politics caused the team and me to part ways. Now that I am out of the formal academy, it is one of the projects I am dusting off. This essay is the first step in doing that.

We live in a society that denies that etiquette is important, that we do not have hard and fast rules for communication and social organization. But this denial is just one reason our society’s system of etiquette is one of the most challenging ever to exist. Not only are our rules of interaction not codified or explicit; we deny they exist and instead ask people to act based on their innate talent and social intuition.

We are not exactly being dishonest when we emphasize the role of unconscious intuition in our systems of etiquette. Intuition and innate social talent are important because our etiquette is so faddish and requires a great deal of guesswork because no person can successfully amass all the necessary information to execute it correctly.

And with each passing year, etiquette grows more occult, more faddish, changes more rapidly. And we are not always conscious of the strategies we use to cope with the burden each of us bears in keeping up with all the new rules that we must learn to avoid offense, ostracism, professional demotion or even loss of work.

I think this helps to explain the continuing importance of the situation comedy in our cultural life. Beginning with Seinfeld and Friends, a long parade of both mainstream and off-beat sitcoms have functioned only secondarily as exercises in humour and primarily as etiquette pedagogy, constructing narratives around breaches of novel etiquette practices and their resolution. Curb Your Enthusiasm exists at the margins of this discourse because it routinely questions whether these etiquette fads are positive social developments, rather than treating them as inherently good, or amoral, like the weather.

This increasingly volatile and opaque direction our etiquette has taken since the end of the Second World War has had profoundly adverse effects on those with average or below average social intuition.

And they can be measured in what can only be described as the mass pathologization of fairly ordinary folks. Autism is now a spectrum inclusive of millions of people who are really just a bit obtuse and quirky, Asperger’s Syndrome now a disease; Tourette’s syndrome is increasingly expanding into a spectrum inclusive of all people who struggle with social restraint and conversational impulse control. We have also seen an expansion of mood disorder diagnoses as our faddish systems of etiquette make social situations both increasingly difficult to navigate and increasingly consequential. “Social anxiety” was once descriptive of an inappropriate fear of the consequences of mismanaging a social encounter; now it also describes accurate and reasonable fears.

To make matters worse, more and more jobs have come to include a sales or human interaction component. Corporations route hostile customer communication through telephones precisely because telephonic communication is more fraught, more arduous, more exhausting, more dependent on follow etiquette rules and keeping one’s cool in the face of provocation. That results in fewer product returns, fewer maintenance calls, fewer refunds and exchanges. And all sorts of jobs have had a sales component appended to them.

There have traditionally existed certain kinds of jobs set aside for people with significant social disabilities but these are increasingly under threat as “sales” becomes a duty incorporated into more and more jobs. Shelving jobs in retail space, for example, now almost always include a customer service component and usually a sales component too.

What this means is that an ever-increasing portion of the population is now understood to suffer from neurological disabilities affecting social interaction; and, at the same time, the need to mitigate or overcome these disabilities has never been greater.

For those of us who are just a little quirky and unintuitive but who are now understood to occupy the top of the Tourette spectrum or the autism spectrum, there are some proven strategies that have worked for us: we can often learn social competence and even develop a significant degree of intuition through practice in less hostile environments.

For me, that environment was Dungeons and Dragons. For those who have never played the game, each player (except one) plays a “character,” a fictional person both like and unlike them whom they operate in the game, whose intentions and speech they narrate. D&D is a cooperative game, which means that even if one’s character dies, one has not lost the game but instead must imagine a new character into being. Characters are described on “character sheets,” which list and quantify the character’s innate talents, learned skills and other proficiencies.

While physical combat in the game is resolved solely by rolling dice, the social interactions, both among player-characters (PCs) and with non-player characters (NPCs) (other people one encounters not represented by one of the players) are resolved by acting-out the social interactions and then rolling dice, based on the character’s in-game social apititudes, to determine how well-received these words have been.

D&D is also soothing because it is full of measures of status. Characters gain “levels,” commensurate with their powers in the game and as they experience more success, there are steady incremental rewards. Furthermore, characters specialize into classes, with warriors wielding swords, clerics healing wounds, warlocks incinerating foes with eldritch blasts. Having clearly quantified hierarchical ranks with transparent criteria for attaining them and areas of specialization allowing everyone to be the master of something is not just soothing.

D&D creates a social microuniverse that is fairer, more transparent, better quantified, more clearly ordered than the chaos of modern social interaction. Furthermore, the game makes that micro-universe just consequential enough. Screwing up at D&D is still a screw-up. Your character may even die but none of those consequences leave the table.

My childhood D&D table, like so many others, consisted of a bunch mildly autistic kids practicing social interaction governed by a stable set of rulebooks, hour after hour after hour, week in, week out. It worked. And it continues to work.

It should not surprise us, then, that when Canada and the US unexpectedly invaded Afghanistan in 2001, many of us were hit up with a subcultural “support the troops” request: with the new edition of D&D (third) coming out, could we spare our first and second edition rulebooks and scenario packs for the troops? Because of course D&D players are well-represented in the military; because, in a way, the military is a gigantic tabletop RPG that never ends. As you gain levels, you get access to cooler and cooler, more expensive weapons, just like in D&D and there are even names for the different class levels like “admiral,” just like those tables in Gary Gygax’s original Player’s Handbook.

More than any D&D group or military battalion, the organization that truly epitomizes this kind of intervention is MENSA. A superficial observation of any MENSA chapter board tells us that MENSA is not an elite organization for the super-intelligent; it is a self-help group for people with Asperger syndrome. In fact, I learned recently from a former MENSA director, that their conventions include a set of coloured badges to indicate each delegate’s level of tactile defensiveness (coded as receptivity to hugs), one of the most common Asperger’s comorbidities.

But what would happen to MENSA, to your average D&D group, if they understood themselves to be self-help groups for the disabled? What would happen if MENSA activists began to explain their struggles to get into romantic relationships as arising from their status as disabled people and not because they are “too smart”?

I would argue that a great paradox of autism and Tourette’s self-help projects is that they use the lack of social intuition of participants to conceal the true function and purpose of the group. Essentially, we are coping with our disabilities better and working more industriously on them because we have hidden from ourselves the fact that we are disabled.

It has saddened me, the past decade, to watch similar movements, like Deaf Culture and Mad Pride, wither when the positive effects of transforming one’s disability into something other are so clearly evident in my corner of the world.

Because it is my view that ordinary, decent people would rather be a screw-up than a cripple any day of the week. I have a couple of friends whose lives are severely circumscribed by neurological disability whom I watch make that choice week-in, week-out, even though it brings shame and a sense of failure because that all those screw-ups are a lighter burden than a permanent, crippling brain defect.

Ordinary, decent people want to be heroes; they want to focus on helping others, not asking for help for themselves; they want to feel like their unique ideas and perspectives come from a rare intellectual talent, not brain damage.

The white failures of Trumpism, who blame affirmative action, reverse racism and the International Zionist conspiracy for their lack of a mate or a job are of a piece with the progressive failures furiously pathologizing their personalities and appropriating minority sexual and racial identities to explain their failure. What both groups need is more D&D. It is not natural or healthy to build one’s identity around victimhood or disability, even—nay—especially  when one is genuinely disabled or genuinely a victim.

In other blog posts on this issue, I have emphasized neurodiversity themes and talked about how many disabilities, like restless leg syndrome, produce personal ill health and population-level good health. But that is a well-ploughed furrow these days.

So in this piece I am making a case that is supplementary: if we want to actually benefit from the neurological diversity of our population and unlock the potential within the human race, we need to begin de-pathologizing our quirks and others’ quirks. And, in my view, a key early step in that must be to resist more strongly efforts to change and complicate our systems of etiquette, investing that energy not in making new social rules but in more transparently explaining and documenting those we already have.

Because not everyone is lucky to have grown up at a D&D table.

This blog post is dedicated to Jens Haeusser, Kenneth Lieblich, Michael Airton, Oscar Bot, Steve Lyons, Tara Fraser, Philip Bot and Terrence Willey, the best damn D&D group a guy could have.

In 2009, I wrote an article on the representation of Mormon cosmology in the Ronald Moore re-make of the Battlestar Galactica TV series. I never got around to writing a second version of this article incorporating the revisions that were recommended to me in workshops and conferences in 2009 and 2010, nor a version incorporating the second half of the final season of the series. I doubt that I will now.

Anyway, with today’s celebration of the tenth anniversary of the series premiere, it seems a good time to revisit the article and pass it on to fans who may have missed it the first time around. So, without further ado, here it is: Battlestar Galactica and Mormon Theology

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The first time I quit politics, I gave a concession speech crediting my seven-year career as leader of the BC Green Party to the British science fiction series Dr. Who for “teaching me that a tall, eccentric, clumsy, curly-haired man can, indeed, save the universe.” My valedictory remarks ended with a quotation from the Doctor’s first farewell, in 1964, to his young, female companion/assistant, a traditional feature of the show by the time of its cancellation in 1989.

Although, the first of these companions had been the Doctor’s granddaughter, the young, shapely, wide-eyed female companion became the most predictable feature of the cast. Indeed, out of the original series’ 667 episodes, 647 feature such a character. While Dr. Who companions were generally portrayed as assisting the Doctor, it was only at the apex of second-wave feminism (1977-82) that their role does not consist substantially of screaming, being injured, getting captured, being rescued and asking questions in a way that enables the main character to demonstrate his superior knowledge.

Although there is an argument to be made that Dr. Who companions did more good than harm when it comes to widening the range of possible female roles on television, I don’t think much of it. After all The Avengers premiered in 1961 and, by the year before Dr. Who began, already featured witty, assertive, female action stars. But, as with my views on racism in J R R Tolkien, the idea that a work of literature beloved by self-identified geeks be flawed, even chauvinistic, and yet still do and say worthy and important things, is unlikely to find unanimous acceptance.

And that is a shame because Dr. Who does have a lot of important things to tell us about gender and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was, after all, the crew at Queer as Folk who successfully revived the series in 2004, because the original series could be easily read as having a queer subtext, a subtext that almost spilled over into simple text in the years 1970-74.

When Jon Pertwee played the title character, he portrayed him as a dandyish man with a slight lisp and an over-coiffed silver perm, dressed flamboyantly in a cape, powder-blue frilly shirt and velvet smoking jacket, a man with refined tastes who imported gorgonzola cheese from Italy when exiled to London. And just in case anyone missed what the Doctor was in those years, William Hartnell reprised his original role in the tenth anniversary episode, pronouncing of his two successors, “so, you’re my replacements, a dandy and a clown!”

The “galactic hobo” portrayal of the Doctor, first by Patrick Troughton (1966-69) and then by Tom Baker (1974-81) was more typical of the original series, and one for which it is better-remembered. However, it is worth noting that an explicitly dandyish hero was played by Peter Davison (1981-84), featuring two young male companions, for the first time since the 1960s, something that would have simply been too queer for Pertwee’s already sexually problematic portrayal.

Still, one would be hard-pressed to find any portrayal of the Doctor in the original series that could be considered conventionally manly. Neither Troughton’s and Baker’s hobos, Pertwee’s and Davison’s dandies nor Hartnell’s and McCoy’s curmudgeonly know-it-alls were heroic in a conventionally masculine sense. They eschewed physical violence, favouring more ambiguously-gendered forms of aggression, relying on deception, self-control, trickery, superior knowledge and manipulating their enemies, almost none of which showed a trace of athleticism.

Sure, there were some ways the Doctor’s body was capable of feats impossible for ordinary humans but those feats were devoid of athleticism; he could hold his breath for minutes at a time, practice obscure martial arts without breaking a sweat and cheat death by “regenerating” into another body. But when it came to feats like mountain-climbing, the show went so far as to lampoon its title character’s lack of athleticism, having him retrieve from his pocket, the self-help book Everest in Easy Stages and, upon discovering it to be written mostly in Tibetan, Teach Yourself Tibetan.

This kind of masculine heroism, centred in superior knowledge, self-control and cleverness had once been the ideal form of “manliness” in the English-speaking world, as compellingly argued by Gail Bederman in Manliness and Civilization. Back when colonizing and “civilizing” the “darker races” was the job, the manly hero of Rudyard Kipling’s world was not unlike the Doctor. The Englishman or American who carried the “white man’s burden,” had to, by necessity, distinguish his manliness from the “primitive masculinity” he allegedly opposed. Indeed, societies whose theories of masculinity were most congruent with this exaltation of restraint, were those most lightly colonized by the English and Americans, the Kingdom of Hawaii and India’s Hindu principalities outside the formal British Raj.
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But, the nineteenth-century drew to a close, concern over declining birth rates or “race suicide” and the rise of Tarzan comics made effete young men like Teddy Roosevelt re-make their refined manliness into a less restrained, more violent masculinity.

Yet, in the English tradition, the ideal of the dandy hero did not die such a quick death, in part because of conscription. There was not just a cultural need to see the continuation of the dandy hero ideal into the twentieth century, but a politicized national interest. Characters like Biggles, the under-aged gentleman-hero of the RAF occupied a contradictory and frequently-lampooned role in British pop culture, increasingly incongruent with the appetite- driven, violent masculinity of the likes of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, the heroes who epitomized twentieth-century manliness.

What allowed Biggles to survive through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, as the Second World War, and attendant conscription, receded from the public mind was the fact that, in the Biggles comics, the war never really ended. Because he was defending the home front, the women and children of England, his masculinity, while quirky, could remain undisputed. Wartime masculinity was more capacious and diverse because it could be clearly unified around the defense of England’s territory and non-combatants against the forces of autocracy or fascism. There was a teleology to masculinity: it was the nature that existed in men that motivated and enabled them to defend the non-combatants at home. If they could not be masculine by virtue of their nature, dandies could be so by what they accomplished: the defense of the home front.

And so we come full circle to Doctor Who, the show that captured a nation’s imagination in 1964 by creating a space-age monster that perfectly symbolized totalitarianism: the Daleks, from whom the Doctor is forced to defend his granddaughter Susan and her teacher, Barbara Wright. Fundamentally, Doctor Who kept the ideal of the dandy hero alive in the same way Biggles did, by demonstrating his masculinity teleologically (by succeeding in his defense of women and children) and relationally (because this could be enacted through his observed protector relationship to a woman and/or child). Because a dandy was no longer intrinsically manly, his masculinity (and hence heroism – this is a patriarchy, after all) had to be telegraphed in this way. The dandy-hero defended the home front (i.e. women, girls and boys) from the totalitarian forces of continental Eurasia (Daleks, Cybermen, Autons, Sontarans, Rutans, Axons, etc.) The asexual relationship between the Doctor and the endless parade of pornographic archetype companions (leather-clad savage, stewardess, micro-skirted professor, ditzy secretary, etc.) served to underline their minority relative to the centuries-old Time Lord and, hence, his role as their protector.

As time wore on and we became a people whose contemporary political and cultural struggles came to revolve more around Stonewall and less around the Holocaust, the queer reading of Doctor Who became a more obvious one. And, for more and more viewers, it became a proto-Will and Grace. The companions came to stand in less for the women and children of wartime England and more as the beard or “fag hag” of the gay, male hero, the asexuality of the relationship conditioned less by the woman’s putative minority and more by the man’s queerness.

But this transition ultimately deprived the show of its underlying dramatic tension. As the memory of fascism receded, audience members were not on the edge of their seats, nor, as many fans remember their younger selves, peering out from behind the sofa, to see if fascism incarnate would succeed in its evil design and land on England’s metaphorical shores. The show, by the 1980s, had become a parody of itself (a parody that I personally loved!), with a cult following of gay men, sexually inept geeks and hard-core sci-fi aficionados.

Without the women of the home front to protect, there could be no compelling dandy hero and hence, no mainstream audience.

It is with this understanding that I will visit how it is that the tension and drama that old Doctor Who gradually lost have somehow been restored in the new series, how a dandy hero, who is queerer than ever, is once again a compelling television character. In the second half, I will suggest that this is, once again, centred in relational gender dynamics and our perceptions of the most sinister threats to the virtue and safety of women and children in Anglo society.

JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth is generally understood to have been substantially inspired by the author’s long career as a medievalist at Oxford University and was explicit about the ways in which he borrowed heavily from medieval names, myths and historical figures. Aragorn, as imperial restorer, was Charlemagne; “Mardil the Steward,” founder of the lineage of Denethor, clearly referenced the emperor’s grandfather, Charles Martel. Sometimes, Tolkien seemed almost over-the-top in the relish with which he made his world an idealized, enchanted recapitulation of European history, as with his description of the siege of Gondor being all but directly lifted from Edward Gibbon’s narration of the siege of Byzantium in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, right down to the feared siege engine and its projectiles.

Especially central to Tolkien’s medieval source material is the Carolingian dynasty, the first Holy Roman Emperors and attempted restorers of ancient Rome. The choice by Martel, steward to the Merovingian Emperors, to depose their lineage and substitute his own, is one that Tolkien judges harshly and credits as a key factor in the downfall of the West. He expresses this criticism in Mardil the Steward making the opposite choice when the line of Gondor’s kings failed, instead founding the line of ruling stewards who governed in anticipation of the return of the true king. Because Tolkien’s references are made to isolated moments and individuals, his uncharacteristic direct admission that Aragorn, whose line descends from the true kings and not the stewards, is analogous to Charlemagne—both being imperial restorers—is unproblematic. His judgement of the partition of the Holy Roman Empire in the Treaty of Verdun (843) is similarly heavy-handed, with Arnor (corresponding to the HRE, as distinct from Gondor, which represents the Byzantine Empire) being fatefully partitioned into the three kingdoms of Rhudaur (corresponding to the Kingdom of Louis the German), Arthedain (the kingdom of Charles the Bald) and Cardolan (the kingdom of Lothar); this partitioning, Tolkien states, resulted in the dissolution of Arnor into “petty realms and lordships,” in the precise words Gibbon uses to narrate their ultimate fate.

It is surprising, then, that so little attention has been directed to other Carolingian sources in deciphering the rich and complex world of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. In the case of the four ages of the world, with which I deal here, the lacuna may be credited, at least in part, to the existence of ready-made four- and five- age schemas in a variety of mythologies with which Tolkien was acquainted, such as in Hesiod’s Works and Days.

This was my view until I encountered an apocryphal document known as the Vision of Charlemagne. As historian Paul Dutton notes, even more than other medieval European societies, subjects of the Carolingian Empire tended to articulate social and political criticism in a fraught political environment by recounting real and alleged dreams. So it was that in approximately 870, an unknown individual, likely seeking to curry favour with the oldest and most stable of the Carolingian monarchs, Louis the German, penned an account of a lost document, allegedly written by the emperor Charlemagne himself, sometime between 806 and 813. In the Vision, the emperor is presented with a sword with an inscription organizing present and future events into four periods: 1. RAHT, 2. RADOLEIBA, 3. NASG and 4. ENTI. Situating Charlemagne in the first period when “there is abundance of material success,” these periods or ages are then described as follows:

“RAHT, that is, abundance of all things… RADOLEIBA… will be fulfilled in the times of my sons [when] there will no longer be such a great abundance… and certain peoples, now subdued, will break away… When… those sons have died and their sons have begun… to govern, NASG will exist, which was inscribed in the third place. For the sake of filthy lucre, they will… oppress travelers and pilgrims… have no sense of modesty… collect riches with great disorder and dishonour… But what was written at the point of the sword, ENTI, that is the end, can be understood in two ways. Either it signifies the end of the world or the end of our line.”

The similarity of the word “nasg” to Tolkien’s cognate for the rings of power “nazg,” (“ash nazg,” meaning the one ring, “nazgul” meaning the ring wraiths, etc.), grows only more striking to the observer the greater one’s prior efforts to locate this word or anything like it elsewhere. It appears that “nasg” was a term made by the anonymous ninth-century author that languished in obscuring for more than a thousand years before being picked up by Tolkien, the prodigious reader of medieval Germanic texts in their original language. As far as I can tell, it just doesn’t show up anywhere else.

Then, of course, is the simple fact that the first three ages bear such a striking resemblance to the Tolkien schema, especially as it relates to the elves, with the world growing less abundant and more depleted with each age, with both the land and people growing both less fecund and less virtuous with each passing epoch. The little-narrated second age of Middle Earth fits especially easily with the literal sons of First Age elvish heroes, such as Elros, founding new kingdoms in a still-bountiful but declining world, in which human kingdoms gradually break away from the elves and their exalted human allies. The third age, specifically described as the age of the rings of power by Tolkien, is one of accelerated decline as avarice, pettiness and vanity drive the free peoples of Middle Earth to ruin. The triumph of evil in Tolkien’s age of Nazg or the Carolingian age of NASG is one made possible by greed and divisiveness, traits the rings fashioned by the Dark Lord Sauron were designed to amplify in those who wore them.

In the third age, the power of evil does not wax so much as the power of good wanes until there is a final crisis that threatens to plunge the whole world into a final darkness, from which it will never emerge. The division of the realms of Elendil, the human High King of the second age and Gil-galad, the elvish High King into separate, smaller kingdoms marks the beginning the third age, a fate wrought when Elendil’s son Isildur chose not to destroy Sauron’s one ring but instead to take it for himself and make it an heirloom of his kingdom. This similarly parallels the Vision which dates nasg to the Treaty of Verdun, when the Carolingian realm was divided and “Lothar, Pepin and Louis began to extend nasg for themselves throughout the neglected kingdom.” Indeed, this theme of neglect and disuse suffuses Tolkien’s writings about the failures of the Third Age as cities like Fornost, Annúminas and Osigiliath fall into ruin.
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But it is actually the point of divergence between Vision and Lord of the Rings that makes it a key to understanding the fundamental themes in LOTR and more than just an antiquarian curiosity, allowing us greater clarity on Tolkien’s larger project as both medievalist and novelist. Ultimately, the question LOTR, as distinct from the Hobbit or Silmarillion, asks is “what if people had risen to the occasion instead?” Gondor’s ruling stewards, the line of Mardil, are his answer to this question as it relates to the Carolingian dynasty using their power as Mayors of the Palace, to usurp the Frankish throne. What, he asks, would have happened if they had awaited the return of the true Merovingian king? Similarly, he asks, what if the Germanic peoples had heeded the pleas of the last Byzantine Emperor and their ancient alliance and ridden south to break the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, as the Rohirrim did during the Siege of Gondor? Not all of these hypothetical questions make us comfortable; Tolkien also asks how much better Europe would have been ruled if the great ancient houses had remained racially pure and not allowed their lineages to be “mingled with the blood of lesser men”? Indeed, what if all the white-skinned peoples of Europe had united to defend Constantinople against the dark-skinned Saharan Africans (the thinly-disguised Haradrim) and the Turkish Seljuks of Rum (the equally obvious people of Rhûn)?

But whatever late Victorian racism Tolkien mobilized in his writing, ultimately, Lord of the Rings is a fairly direct commentary on his view of the importance of hope and selflessness at key turning points history. Writing in the first half of the twentieth century, when structuralist historiographies were on the rise, whether through Marxism, Malthusianism, Whiggism or Social Darwinism, not just in universities but in popular consciousness, Tolkien used his trilogy to say what he could not as a scholar of medieval history: that evil triumphs not because of immutable structural factors but because people lose hope. In one of his few forays the politics of his day, the foreword to the 1954 edition of LOTR pushes back against claims that his novels allegorized the Second World War, remarking that if they did, the Council of Elrond would certainly have chosen to use Sauron’s ring of power, the axiomatically evil “one ring” to defeat him.

In recent years, these seemingly conservative views, at least as they pertain to the history of the Carolingian Empire have been borne-out. It appears that the belief that their empire would fall, termed “consciousness of decline” became a powerful force, independent of material factors that produced fragmentation and collapse in early medieval France. Just as Denethor, the penultimate ruling steward loses hope and commits suicide, nearly causeing Gondor to fall, because he cannot imagine that the Rohirrim really are riding to the rescue to break the siege, it appears that the pessimism in Vision was part of the set of social forces that really did make “enti” come to pass, just as the document foretold. And so, when we read Tolkien’s appendices to Return of the King in which he narrates the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, we encounter a curious alternate early modernity, a hyper-monarchical, harmonious, pastoral, literate, anti-industrial pseudo-Europe, one too humble and virtuous to defy the will of God and permit anyone but the elect to take ship and sail across the ocean to the unknown sacred lands of the West.

As Tolkien says in his abbreviated synopsis or recapitulation of LOTR in the final chapter of the Silmarillion, it is the character of Gandalf who is explicitly revealed to be the true hero of the Third Age. As the author’s Christ-figure, a hypostatic being who is resurrected halfway through the story, he is revealed to be this hero because his power, assisted by Narya, one of the three unsullied rings of power, is to kindle hope in the hearts of mortals, causing ordinary people to undertake world-changing acts of extraordinary bravery. This bravery, he suggests, is anchored in humility because, in the words of Gandalf, “help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter,” as pointed a response as any to the historical determinists who surrounded him.

Much as I love his books and have a special place in my heart for them, I don’t find Tolkien’s particular alternate utopia compelling or his racism easy to tolerate, despite it being unexceptional bordering on unavoidable in his time. Nevertheless, I think there is real value in ignoring his obfuscations and denials that his books were as precisely referential as they clearly are and, instead, engaging thematically with Lord of the Rings by looking at times past and present and asking “what if people rose to the occasion and acted with unexpected hope and courage even in the face of long-foretold and certain doom?”

Stuart Parker isn’t just a failed politician and seasonally employed academic; he remains a committed geek too.