NP Tolkien Picks Up A Few More Bits Of Cultural Baggage

[Dave Monroe]

Not that I want to bejbor this, but ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
>
> It's the mark of "Saruman the White", like a cattle
> brand.

The smoking gun here?  "Like a cattle brand."  No, 
the White Hand of Orthanc, indeed, though I don't
recall it being deployed, as a mark, a brand, in quite
the same way in the novels ...

http://www.theonering.net/movie/char/saruman.html

http://www.lord-of-the-rings.org/books/saruman.html

http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/w/whitehand.html

Just which finger is "pointing," however, well ...

> The orcs are specially-bred, less "a race" than a
> sort of cloned species.

A "swarthy" race, species, whatever.  And I'd noticed
the same thing, both this year's bioengineered armies
apparently Maori.  No, these choices, Tolkien's,
Jackson's, Lucas's (whose reproduction of receieved
adventure literature racisms was unmistakable in The
Phantom Menace) are significant, albeit not, I'm
certain, malicious.  Just unthinking, both in the
sense of "unconscious" and "uncritical," is all ...

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