#sweet sad sunset-chasing blorbos

[eri-pl]

of Men again

AKA "Gold, East, Easterlings, humans in general and other evil-coded stuff" AKA "no, Morgoth, your trademarks are invalid" AKA "reclaiming the symbolics" AKA "another post on reading Tolkien in Christian context"

And by "Christian context" I mean less the values and more the "Silm is a fantasy prequel-fanfic for the Bible, especially the New Testament" (which is at least in some points of Tolkien's life, how he wrote it)

And as all fanfic authors, GMs and generally people working creatively in a preestablished world, especially one with some preestablished future, there's no fun like foreshadowing. Seriously. Adding foreshadowing to everything is the best creative fun. OK, I'm biased. Anyway

So, what do we have in the Silm? West is Valinor, East is the evil guys. Also, dark-skinned guys are generally in majority (I know Bór exists) evil (which is racist, but we'll make it less-racist in a moment) and serve Morgoth. He just goes and claims stuff as his own, and the Valar hold on to what is left.

hmm... I wanted to add silver/gold and moon/sun divides here, but they get complicated and aren't a good example, even if I instinctively map them to the West/East divide. I think it's just me in this case.

What do we have in the Bible? Where do the main event happens? East. To this day, churches face east, because east is the holy-ish direction. Also, symbolically, sunrise is a big thing.

That's a good metaphor for the elf-human difference. Elves are chasing the sunset, so that the last rays fade slower and last so very long. Humans cannot chase. The night falls upon them, but then the sun rises anew (spoiler: it doesn't set after that). But first the night must fall. And it is sad and scary and all that.

West-facing Elves versus East-facing Men.

So, back to the main event. Easterlings... well, the Jews aren't very pale-skinned or grey-eyed or beardless. To put it mildly. So it's kinda "Tolkien is racist in places", but maybe also kinda "Tolkien goes for maximum contrast and Morgoth getting defeated from the center of the lands he'd claimed as his own" maybe. a bit.

Like maybe in his mind putting so many evil Easterlings into the story still balanced well, because hey, later they got Jesus and all His early blorbos followers? Or maybe I shouldn't go guessing what was Jirt thinking.

Anyway, if you look at Silm as a Bible fanfic, some things suddenly jump into places.

I'm not saying it's the only way to look at it, I recently listed 2 or 3 (if we count Arthurian myth as separate) other angles. Silm is multidimensional, various parts of the story make sense when looking from various angles, that's why it's so incoherent at times.