I’m at the IGSS Conference in Boulder, so this week is just a brief one. Most culture war content is dumb, but just for fun, let’s uncancel people!
J. R. R. Tolkien
The case against: a fantasist who retreated into an imaginary world in the face of British decline. The Lord of the Rings is very, very long and not necessarily very good. Also, aren’t Orcs a bit racist?
The defence: OK, LOTR is much too long. But The Hobbit is great — a short children’s book with a lovable central character and lots of funny, memorable set pieces — trolls in the forest, riddling with Gollum in the dark, spiders, Smaug’s den…. There’s a very nice podcast of the book, by the way. As for racism, I mean, the whole premise is there really are different humanoid races, so, I dunno, are sci-fi aliens also racist? Deep questions, people.
Also, look back at the start of the Hobbit. Bilbo Baggins is the archetype of the comfortable British homeowner, uninterested in the outside world. Then he’s visited by a group of refugees from the east. They love song and music and craftsmanship. They created wealth, but were expropriated and exiled by a ruthless, militarized society, run by an evil supreme ruler. Some were cruelly enslaved — “prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light”. When they first arrive, Bilbo is annoyed about the disruption, and he worries that their sheer numbers are going to overwhelm him. But later he learns more about them and joins their quest to regain their ancient homeland. Now, consider that Tolkien started the Hobbit in the 1930s. This raises a question: in media, Dwarves are often modelled as Scottish, like Gimli in the LOTR film; actually, why shouldn’t they be Jewish?
[Update. Joseph Newman points out that indeed, Tolkien explicitly based the dwarves on the Jews, including their language.]
Rudyard Kipling
The case against: do you like Kipling? No, I never kipple, because Kipling was a racist poet of imperialism who talked about “lesser breeds without the law” and “fuzzy-wuzzies”.
The defence: Kipling was of his time in lots of ways, but come on!
His most famous children’s books, the Jungle Books, feature an Indian hero.
One of his most famous poems is about strong men from different cultures meeting as equals:
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
Another of his most famous poems is written by a British Tommy to his Indian water-bearer, and explicitly ends “You’re a better man than I am”.
Another of his most famous books, Kim, features a culturally-mixed hero, white but adopted by an Indian mother (“he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song”) who learns wisdom both from his Tibetan Buddhist monk teacher and from his imperial secret service handlers.
The same theme pops up in “The Miracle of Purun Baghat”, a short story in the Jungle Book. A successful, Westernized and Westernizing civil servant in a small Indian princedom ends his career, becomes a Sannyasi and retreats to meditate in the forest. When a fire threatens the nearby village, it’s explicit that both sides of his cultural acquis are needed for him to save the day. His civil servant side lets him rush to organize the villagers, but his deep connection with the forest creatures as a Sannyasi is what warns him of the danger in the first place.
You can’t read Kipling without noticing his deep interest in and knowledge of Indian culture and language. This isn’t surprising: like Kim, he grew up in India mixing with native kids!Another novel, Captains Courageous, features a privileged young white Yankee who is rescued from drowning by an Atlantic fishing boat. Its crew is profoundly multi-culti: the captain Disko Troop; a Gaelic-speaking black cook from Cape Breton (“his English was not thick, but all clear-cut, as though it came from a phonograph”); a Portuguese; a Moravian preacher; a Boston Irishman; and the scarred Tom Platt, a veteran of the USS Ohio. Amongst these people, he checks his privilege, and learns true manhood.
It’s often said that the Great War changed English poetry forever by destroying the previous idealized view of battle. But have you read “Snarleyow” from Barrack-room Ballads (1892)? In a small imperial war, horse-drawn guns are being brought up when the driver’s favourite horse is hit. There’s no space to do anything about it, and no time to waste; they drag the huge gun over the corpse. Then the driver’s brother gets hit…. “So they took an' drove the limber straight across 'is back an' chest…. ” This was based on a real incident… “one wheel was juicy”.
Obviously Kipling was of his time and place, used language we’d never use today, and so on. Also I think there are legitimate more interesting criticisms. He was of his age also in a certain degree of brutalism and power-worship. I would say Kipling’s virtues and vices both stemmed from his background as a journalist. He was great at sympathising with people, and understanding how they ticked. But he was also too able to tickle and pander to their prejudices.
He’s the last great popular poet; after him, we had a century of footnote-mongering. He deserves better than being replaced by the irredeemably worthy Maya Angelou.
Francis Drake
The case against: an imperial adventurer and borderline pirate, he started his career under the notorious slaver John Hawkins.
The defence: Francis Drake was surprisingly woke! When class conflict broke out on his ship, he pleaded: “my masters, I must have it left, for I must have the gentlemen to haul and draw with the mariners, and the mariners with the gentlemen. What, let us show ourselves to be all of one company.” We’re all in this together, for real.
Later he allied with maroons (escaped slaves) to fight the Spanish in America. Here’s a nice anecdote: he has a company of Spaniards trapped, and he sends his African manservant to parley with them. A Spanish nobleman, enraged by this racial insult, runs the man through. Drake, seeing this, informs the Spanish that until the noble is tried for murder, there will be no more parley. He waits. It is very hot and dusty. The Spanish have no water. The sun hangs in the sky. After a few hours, they try the nobleman, and hang him. Drake, observing the gibbet, restarts the surrender negotiations.
BASED.
H. P. Lovecraft
The case against: he was a massive racist.
The defence: choose your battles. H. P. Lovecraft was a massive racist. He is also open to the fatal objection that his hugely overwrought prose about eldritch horrors just isn’t scary. Try M. R. James instead.
If you enjoyed this article, you might like my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon as a paperback/hardback/ebook, and you can read more about it here.
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My father considered puck of pooks hill and the hobbit required childhood books.
Burn the lot. My generation were reading harry potter to their babies in utero. She can go hang as well for now she’s cancelled and deboonked. I’m not bothered by any of it. We get cast-off books for my son from our wealthy creationist ungovernable Telegram-devout neighbours. The books explicitly do not cover evolution. I’m fine with that too. Fun, cheap, or free’s what I’m about. So I appreciate the light heartedness and affectionate nostalgia of this article. Triple barrelled telyn deires, juicy wheel included.
I've disliked Kipling ever since reading Stalky & Co. In one chapter, Stalky and his friends think it's a terrific jape to kill someone's pet cat so they can hide it under the floorboards of a rival boy's bedroom. Only a psychopath would think that's admirable behaviour. Apart from that, all of his books exude a certain smugness that I find off-putting.
As for Tolkien and Lovecraft - they haven't been cancelled. The fact that one can find many people online accusing them of racism doesn't seem to have negatively affected their popularity or status. Amazon recently spent $1,000,000,000 on a TV series associated with Tolkien, and Netflix just released a TV series (Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities) with two episodes that are adaptations of Lovecraft stories.