The problem with JRR Tolkien

JRR Tolkien created a magical world in which he superimposed the medieval sagas onto a vision of British prehistory, in order to create a kind of cultural mythology for the British people, somewhat along the lines of what Wagner did for Germany in the Ring Cycle of Operas. However, was this necessarily a very good thing? I'm not sure if Tolkien's brains got a bit addled by his experiences in WWI, but, this was fairly common, and he might be a pretty good example of this. Tolkien creates an intensely racist, militarist, nationalist world in the distant prehistorical past, at a time when there simply weren't enough people in the world for this to even be possible. There were no cities, there were no armies, there was no war, in distant prehistory. Human beings, or even near human beings like Neanderthals got along with each other very well indeed, it is a myth now disproven that Neanderthals were wiped out by modern men, or even outcompeted by them, they were overspecialized and were destroyed by climate change, they were almost all gone already by the time modern man arrived on the scene, and they interbred and were cherished by modern men, while they still survived. Tolkien's fantasies are actually poisonous, racist, militarist fantasies that project the sicknesses of the twentieth century mind onto the idyllic pacifism of deep prehistory, as Wagner's operatic fantasies projected Nazism onto the Ring of the Nibelungen, which is precisely what Adolf Hitler saw in them. The sick, predatory capitalism of the twentieth century spawned two world wars, and created these psychological diseases of paranoid racism and militarism. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens when rats are crowded into a cage. They prey upon their own. #tolkien #archaeology #anthropology #pacifism #history #philosophyofhistory #fantasy #lordoftherings #medievalsagas #medievalhistory #britishhistory #militarism #racism #prehistory #sociology #psychology #psychoanalysis #neanderthals #homosapiens #capitalism #wwi #wwii #overpopulation