MisbehavingMaiar: Tumblr Archive

axforthefrozensea:

[Not going to lie but it took a lot of strength of character to put this image and not just a massive one of Kili…I’ve been having some pretty strong dwarf feels over the last few days, thus this post]

So my earlier post on the similarities between Jewish and Dwarvish song as presented in The Hobbit was part of MORE THOUGHTS that I had regarding the way Dwarves presented in The Hobbit movie versus the book.

It’s no secret that Tolkien imagined the Dwarves as his Jews of Middle Earth (the article linked to that last sentence is really excellent and awesome and worth all the reads). And there’s no hiding the fact that this in the book is really, really problematic. A complete cataloguing of it is more than I have time for now, but my personal favorite?

“Dwarves are not heroes, but a calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much.” 

Thanks Tolkien, I’ll keep that in mind.

(Side Note: I’d like to point out that I do not think Tolkien was an anti-Semite. There’s this letter, which I think more than makes the point.  But I think that most of his work prior to the LotR triology represent rather unfortunate notions of how race works. I think he realized this, in light of the way the sort of racial classification that he proscribed to was subsequently used in Nazi rhetoric, which is why LotR, completed post-WWII, contains strong elements of interracial cooperation and showing how dwarves aren’t all that bad and can be best buds with elves after all, IMHOP). 

Most complaints about The Hobbit trilogy somehow come down to the fact that Jackson has taken a relatively short children’s book, and blown it way out of proportion. That he has made a Lonely Mountain out of a Hobbit Hole, so to speak. There’s no arguing that the movies are something totally different from the book in tone, actualization, and from original authorial intent…

But what I propose is that a departure of this sort is not only okay in this instance, but maybe the only course of action. I speak specifically of the way that the Dwarves were originally written that in the shadow of the behemoth that was the LotR movies, and the way that they represent entirely different ways of imagining racial divide. LotR presented people as acting within and against the ‘traits’ of their community, showing individual of other nations as both distinct from one another and capable of cooperation. Had The Hobbit been a truly faithful adaptation, it would have seemed shallow and backwards, with values and character drawings that as connected as some people feel to them in the book, would have come off on screen as uncomfortable and stereotyping and out of touch with modernity, reality, and the rest of the Middle Earth movie canon.

Instead, the movie built on this notion that Tolkien ended on, this idea of race as a framework for group behavior, with individuals capable of acting contrary to perceived traits,  to construct a striking and powerfully executed retelling of the quest for the Lonely Mountain with Dwarves that I can totally get behind and identify with. 

Rather than portraying them as interchangable, as Tolkien all but does, Peter Jackson has made these dwarves distinct from one another in age, appearance, and personality. He has given them identities beyond that of their race. He gives them lines and subplots (imagine that!), and reasons to care about their fate going into the Battle of the Five Armies. 

While  the dwarves are still going after the Lonely Mountain with the aim of reclaiming the treasure from Smaug, the first two movies at least present the quest as not so much a factor of coming into gold (as the book does strongly) but as the reclaiming of a homeland, which has all sorts of really powerful and moving implications for the Jewish analog. The Song of the Lonely Mountain is no longer just a cute poem about their quest, but an example of memory  and legend preserved powerfully in song, a prayer of sorts for the realization of the dream of home. 

Quite simply, while still keeping what I would argue is a very strong Jewishness to the Dwaves of Thorin and Company, the movie rectifies the book’s unsavory undertones by instead making compelling versions of the book’s one dimmensional dwarves. They are still recognizably Tolkien’s, complete with their curses in Khuzdul and beards. Dragon sickness is still a thing, and will still quite obviously plague Thorin come There and Back Again, but by making the Dwarves more than just a foil for Bilbo’s uncontaminated goodness, and giving the Dwarves a more worthy cause to fight for, he has made the Dwarves the sort of Jews I wish I saw more often in media and Literature. 

Literary anti-Semitism and negative Jewish stereotyping is as common as conjunctions (trust me, I’m an English major) and unavoidable if you want to read any major non-Jewish author from before WWII (the great exception being the George Eliot). In adapting them for the screen, the easiest course of action is to sanitize a narrative. It takes an uncommonly good screenwriter to keep the racial element intact while rectifying the mistakes of the author. The Hobbit is an example of such screenwriting. 

[bold by me]  This is the heart and soul of my attachment to the movies– this is what I came and stayed for, despite the unpalatable filler. This is where I felt like the adaptations were genuinely better than the books; where as a modern reader and artist we have the luxury of taking all of Tolkien’s works in perspective and using the extended lore he gave us to flesh out his earliest work. 

No discussion of the Hobbit is complete without a frank handling of its anti-semitic themes (and OP’s summary of Tolkien’s evolving ideology is on point there). That’s why I flinch a little bit when people compare the books to the movie with their only criticism being that the movies weren’t exactly like the book. 
Because SOME of the ways they departed from the book were absolutely necessary, and even a brilliant use of the extended canon that comes from LotR, the Silmarillion, and the H.o.M.E.! 

I just wish that that content– the content I actually care about very deeply– hadn’t been drowned to death in canned dialogue and hours long fight scenes that looked like they were choreographed entirely in post editing. Someone on the team obviously cared about the dwarves and was being very sensitive about their presentation, and it’s a shame that that work got rather thoroughly buried by Hollywood action movie tropes. But it was there, and the moments that came out of the films that expanded on Dwarven culture and personalities really made my heart and imagination soar, and for that I am grateful.