Why didn't they travel down the coast?

The reason he disliked Hitler was because Hitler used his own mythos about white men being better than everyone else and decided to use it to kill everyone else. The fact he got so emotionally disturbed over Hitler is in part due to the fact that he was only one step more racist than Tolkien. There's any number of racists today who take issue not with racism but with people being slightly more racist than they themselves are. Tolkien was a linguist, not a politically literate person. The man was a staunch Roman Catholic who believed in absolute monarchy, for fuck's sake. He re-wrote Celtic myths because he was sad that Christians destroyed all record of Britain's original Celtic myths, but in so doing, radically changed them and utterly Christianized them.

One of the most fascinating and debilitating aspects of the human mind is the inability to see people as anything other than angel or devil. Tolkien, like all people, did some shady shit, and also some shit that you can enjoy. You don't have to choose between burning his books or a campaign to get the pope to canonize him as a saint. And in so doing you are not only better at dealing with reality you are closer to accepting yourself as who you are.

Sure

Thats not what that means. It means shifty or evil. Noer-do-wells so to speak. Like "blackspeach" isnt nigger talk - its the language
of mordor

I don't really agree. I think they were doing what was best for the country by putting educated, skilled people in positions of power

>define apartheid, user
>"putting educated, skilled people in positions of power"
I blame the schools

because the country is doing so well now huh?

>who believed in absolute monarchy
source?

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>Tolkien
>being one step less racist than Hitler

And thats your opinion discarded.

Too salty

yeah when I want to cross the street I go all the way to the coast because only an idiot would walk a straight line to get where he's going

>tolkien is slightly less racist than hitler
T.morgoth

how is a book series about white aryan ubermensch who descend from angels whose kings have magic powers and must destroy "easterlings" and "southrons" and the literal monsters, zombies, and demon they allied with not the sort of thing Hitler dreamed of

I always liked to imagine that the official language of Sauron was ebonics.

>we wuz elves n' shiet

So anyway the sea road was even more dangerous than the route they took and it avoided all the friendly kingdoms they were expecting to get assistance from.

WWI kinda made Tolkien hate science and the post-Enlightenment world. Lots of people were fucked up by the first world war. The Dadaist movement became a thing because artist believed that the world didn't deserve any beauty. Literature and media took a turn towards the cynical and nihilistic (see the Loss Generation in American literature). Mussolini went from being a socialist to edgy /pol/tard after seeing all the bloodshed, came to see warfare as the ultimate expression of life and crafted a philosophy that sought to turn back the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and return to the glory days of ancient Rome. WWI, the flu, then the depression all fed into a reactionary backlash against the modern world and norms.

Well basically Eriador had no organized opposition besides Elrond in Imladris. Supposedly the Havens of Forlindon and Harlindon were mostly depopulated of the elves of Cirdan by that point, and south of Greyflood was just some savage man-races. Most of Eriador was depopulated by the collapse of Arnor and the whole region was basically Points of Light, emphasized in the description of Bree having less and less traffic along the east-west road and the north-south road basically falling into wilderness.

I've seen a lot of flip-flop on this topic. There's one quote attributed to him where he says that even prisoners should be treated humanely but in other writings he describes them as robots who simply mimic intelligent life.

>The Dadaist movement became a thing because artist believed that the world didn't deserve any beauty. Literature and media took a turn towards the cynical and nihilistic [...] Mussolini went from being a socialist to edgy /pol/tard after seeing all the bloodshed
Sounds like Veeky Forums's pre-digital forebears. Funny how after an unprecedented century of scientific progress and humanitarian atrocities we're still bitterly arguing the same old points. Even without the machine of war grinding up millions of souls, we're still able to kill the spirit of millions (billions?). Humanity Fuck Yeah.

>Why didn't they travel down the coast?

Read the fucking book, asshole.

It's explained during the Council of Elrond, part of which quotes. Gandalf then explains it again to Boromir after snow prevents them from crossing Caradhras and Moria becomes their only choice.

If assholes like you ever bothered to read the books, threads like these would never be posted.

Well if you read LoTR you see that basically the Orcs are only able to act as an intelligent civilization when they're being puppeted by Sauron's unconscious will. When they're independent they form small, brutish tribes that are less developed than Africans in the jungle, and presumably that intelligence is all that's left to them due to Melkor's corrupting of the sacred fire within their species.

Tolkien's issue was: Are the Orcs as a species irredeemably evil, or like all sentient species do they possess free will and the possibility of redemption? Towards the end of his life, as he was rewriting the Silmarillion, he leaned towards the latter, but he couldn't rewrite everything to accommodate that change and so he wavered on whether they were just soulless servitors or sentient beings.

>Hitler used his own mythos about white men being better than everyone else and decided to use it to kill everyone else
Dear fucking god, shut the fuck up if all you’re going to do is spew brainwashing propaganda.

>South Africa today is the result of apartheid
Is it “say the opposite of the truth day” or something?

Name a creation myth that doesn't cast its people as sanctioned by the divine.

>Tolkein did some shady shit

[citation needed]

South Africa today is the result of *ending* apartheid.

>who believed in absolute monarchy
You say that as if it were a bad thing.

Aztecs believed Humans were made ugly and dumb, they were from beneath the ground like gobbos, but a wise shaman eventually showed them they wae and in some generations they went up to the surface becoming human looking

...

The funny thing is that he was a monarchist, an anarchist of sort, and a traditionalist catholic all at the same time. And people think Lovecraft was incoherent.

Nah, Mussolini while having those ideas about was was never "give me feudalism back". Futurism was instituzionalized even as an aesthetic of preference (oddly enough Germany had a preference for some kind of more direct crass neoclassicism, thanks to Hitler).
And, yes, muh roman empire was part of the whole package nontheless, right next to the revolutionary part of the thing. But in Italy we always (well, after the 1300s) took classical civilization as the enlightened and oddly enough "more modern" period, in contrast to the "dark ages". We never really went into a "medieval" fade up to... hell, probably up to after ww2, and even then, not really that profound. I dare to say we perceive romans are less clouded to superstions and divisions.
Kinda makes sense, I guess: our best centuries were roman and renassaince.

Consider that to an extent our city centers are still a mix of medieval and modern age architecture, or at least in our collective mind it's how we see Italy - but the middle ages are a) tinted by a bad reputation (especially when you don't particulary like the church, which is still to now pretty important) b) feature a divided, more dimunitive Italy, if that makes sense. We do (wrongly, in many ways) perceive renassaince differently, tough.

In all this fascism rightly (well, as much as fascism can be right) chose Rome as a national myth, but never went for a "literal" Rome, they weren't so stupid.

Pic related, Rome's uni now. Kinda makes you feel what they intended, I think. I actually like fascist architecture, but it went right up the road of stereotype soon.

Did the wise shaman happen to be aztec?

There was the corsairs, the bad Gondorian nation.
They are mentioned several times in the books, have you not read them?

Tolkien apologist detected

I still kinda giggle at Speer’s designs. A few look decent, but his redesigned Berlin is just silly, and as you said, crass.

Is the architecture of the Numenorean empire the equivalent of overblown fascist neoclassical design to Noldor architecture?

Because following the coast would be a longer route and also take them too close to Isengard. Basically if Saruman didn't intercept them, Sauron would have already smashed Minas Tirith by the time they got there.

>Tolkien, like all people, did some shady shit
You are human garbage.

How the fuck was Tolkien one step before fucking Hitler? He was utterly against anti-semitism, was against the apartheid in SA, was against the use of the Atom Bomb against the Japanese, etc. But no "hurr durr all conservatives are proto-hitler's", fuck off.

Everyone from the past is a racist nazi according to tumblr, redditors and american liberals.

Whilst there have certainly been some impressive projects done by fascist artists or architects, I agree that it went pretty stale quite quickly. I don't think you can necessarily start a true art movement through political enforcement. A lot of nazi art I've seen looked like pretty pale copies of greater sculptors for instance.

And don't get me started on people who worship the Wehrmacht aesthetics; they were dressed in stolen rags for most of the war. We're still falling for propaganda pictures 80 years later.

>The man was a staunch Roman Catholic who believed in absolute monarchy
Yes, and? How does that make him politically illiterate?

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it doesn't in itself. im not the guy you're responding to but i think he meant that being an anarchist mixed with the stuff you quoted can seem contradictory.
he thought power was dangerous and anyone that craved it was ultimatly setting himself up for coruption and having people in a democracy asking someone to have power over them by voting them into office wasn't dignified or something.

Gay Californian liberal here, and no. Its mostly /pol/aks trying to claim anything vaguely antique and European belongs to their dear ethnistate heritage crusader kings role playing, and touchy casuals that humor them.

To be fair that was Hitler's fault. Oddly enough Mussolini, who most surely didn't really give a fuck as long as he had a style that worked, made the artists go a least a little free.

Also the uniforms. My god. In general I find very diffcult to find decent army uniforms from that period in either side (perhaps just Italy and UK, really) . Not sure how the navies managed to get decent styllsts, in contrast.

Are those supposed to be the Grey Havens or Valinor?

Navies all had traditional ties to the fashion industry.

Really? Not being sarcastic

Now to be totally fair I don't think Galdor and Gandalf explain it that much. I mean, Cirdan's men wouldn't really be scared of some corsairs randomly scouting the mouth of Anduin, I'd guess? Also, it was winter already, but I think they could manage.

I think basically the problem would be the nazgul doing a Stuka on their asses. No places to hide.
Also, maybe Sauron would've been already up to Ithilien by then, so the route would've been fucked up.