Blood Bowl: Sisters of Shallya

When I was making an order from the excellent Eureka Games ages ago, I threw in a Shadowforge Nun Gridiron Team, mostly just for the heck of it, but also, when I was a kid, I did spend two years at a Catholic school still occasionally haunted by nuns. My current team is also made up of Shadowforge minis, and I like them. Now that there's suddenly a veritable horde of people around willing to at least try Blood Bowl, it turns out I have to paint yet another team! So nuns it is.

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The Sisters of Shallya were originally nuns tending the temple of Shallya in the Ostland town of Salkalten, but when their abbess received inspiration from Shallya herself, or possibly from attending a football game, the sisters took to Blood Bowl to help fund their temple. They wear their monastic habits in the colors of Ostland.

First up, we've got the two guards, who I'm fielding as blitzers. Because I think the blitzers might otherwise be difficult to tell apart from the line-nuns, I'm painting the base edges according to my positional color scheme; the blitzers therefore have light green bases.

And then the throwers; the one reading a book is easily my favorite model in this whole delightful range.

The catchers:

And the five line-nuns.

Finally, foreseeing that I might want to try a human team with an Ogre in the starting lineup, I got one from Impact Miniatures.

Here's the whole team!

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So, put these models together, and this is what you get:

1 Ogre: 140,000gp

2 blitzers: 180,000gp

2 throwers: 140,000gp

2 catchers: 140,000gp

5 linemen: 250,000gp

3 re-rolls: 150,000gp

That's straight up one million gold pieces with the models I have on hand, so I'm calling this a roster! They'll be in action soon.

The decline of Christianity in Finland

I was looking for a cute graph of the fall in church membership in Finland, to go with this tweet, and decided I had to make it myself. That led into a little bit of reading and organizing my thoughts, and I've collated the results here.

It was fully illegal to not be Christian in the Kingdom of Sweden. From 1634 onward, your choices were either to be Lutheran or leave the country. Some practical exceptions were made for Orthodox Karelians living in the eastern provinces, and I don't know to what extent individual people were persecuted, but basically the law said you belonged to the state church and that was that. They later allowed some other Christian denominations, mainly for foreigners: Swedish subjects weren't allowed to convert.

What got me reading was that I was curious as to what the status of Jews in Sweden was, and I learned that they were entirely prohibited from moving to most of the kingdom, including the Finnish provinces. In 1802 Sweden banned the immigration of Jews altogether, and although the law was soon repealed in Sweden, the Finnish provinces were lost to Russia in the war of 1808-09 and the law not only stayed on the books here, but was enforced until independence. I never knew that the Grand Duchy of Finland was so ferociously antisemitic. Jewish citizens only gained full civil rights in 1917.

So the religious situation in Finland at independence was basically that the law forced the entire population to be Lutheran. There was a small Orthodox minority, along with tiny Jewish and mostly Tatar Muslim communities, as well as some other, vanishingly small Christian churches. So officially, something like 98-99% of the population was Lutheran.

This only begins to change in 1923, when the first ever law on the freedom of religion is passed. Now, for the first time, it's possible to found new religious organizations and freely join or leave them, and even not belong to one at all. Full freedom of religion this ain't: the Lutheran and Orthodox state churches maintain their privileged positions, Christian churches get special tax exemptions, and the process for registering new religious denominations only recognizes religions that are Christian or broadly similar to Christianity. This is how the law still works: the Finnish wicca community, for instance, have been denied religious status because, among other reasons, they lack a holy book. This is a totally absurd criterion for a religion, but it's still the law.

The law came into force in 1924, so that was the first year Finnish citizens were allowed to leave the church. Since then, if I recall correctly, overall church membership has only gone down: there has never been a year in Finnish history since when the church had more members than in the previous year. Membership now stands at something like 68% and is continuing to fall.

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So what happened? Why is church membership collapsing?

A new religious freedom law was passed in 2003, which made leaving the church easier. Earlier, for instance when I quit the church, you had to actually go to a church office in person, fill out a form and talk to a priest, and if they couldn't talk you out of it, a month later your papers were transferred to the civil registry. The 2003 law made it possible to quit the church through a simple letter, which could be sent electronically. That same year, the Tampere "free-thinkers" atheist organization opened a website, eroakirkosta.fi, where you could input your personal details and they would take care of the process. As of this writing, they were coming up on 800 000 people having used the service, which you have to admit is a little bit impressive in a country of five million. But if you look at the overall graph, it's not like the trend started in 2003.

While the membership decline has been fairly steady, it's been given tremendous momentary boosts by both the church itself, of which more later, but also various public scandals involving religion. Several of those have involved Finnish Christian conservative politician Päivi Räsänen, a disgusting bigot who hates everyone different from her, and has consequently but presumably inadvertently done more to eradicate Christianity from Finland than anyone, up to and including the national hero who murdered a bishop with an axe. Whenever she shows her face on TV, there's a spike at eroakirkosta.fi. Lutherans sometimes complain about this, but the effect is real.

In my opinion, the fundamental reason behind the collapse of church membership is that the vast majority of people leaving the church were never Christians to begin with. We have no real information on how many people were actually Christian back when it was illegal not to be, because they didn't do a lot of polling back then, but also because the poll question would literally have been "do you confess to treason against God and your King".

What we do know is that in several surveys done by the church in the 21st century, the Finnish population divides into three approximately similarly sized groups. One is Christian and believes more or less what the church teaches; one believes in some kind of higher power or whatever, but not in the sense taught by the church; and one believes in nothing at all. So you could say that while some 70% of the population belongs to a Christian denomination, only about 30% say they're Christians. Suddenly the graph becomes a lot easier to understand, I think.

This also seems to be the mechanism behind the various Christian conservative-inspired brouhahas causing people to quit the church: if you don't actually believe in what the church teaches, and you see these odious bigots declaiming their hatred without any real pushback from the church, I think it's easy to see that this can lead quite a few people to ask themselves why, exactly, are they paying money to stay affiliated with this kind of activity.

As a point of interest, we have no compelling reasons to think that number of Christians was ever much higher. It may have been, but it may not have been; we have no direct way of knowing, but we can make some guesses. Until at least the 19th century, everyone in Finland had to pass an examination on the catechism to be confirmed into the church. It was never a particularly difficult examination, but in large parts of the country, people legitimately suffered with it and many were almost certainly being confirmed without passing it. This doesn't exactly make you think the average person was deeply devout.

Similarly, Finnish folk religion persisted well into the 20th century, and was only really wiped out by the elementary school system. While it incorporated lots of Christian language and ideas, it was still fundamentally a pagan belief system which the church tried to eradicate for centuries - in vain. Despite considerable efforts, the church also failed to impose Christian systems of gender and sexuality on the broader population; homophobia and strict bourgeois gender roles only became anything like universal in the 20th century through public education and conscription.

So we have no real reasons to believe Christianity was ever particularly popular or widespread in what later became Finland, in terms of things people actually believed in, whatever their nominal (compulsory) allegiance was. Again, I feel like this makes the decline in membership seem like a return to normality.

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Finally, there is a core reason for the collapse in church membership that it's considered taboo to really talk about. It's that what the church teaches is complete nonsense. The Bible is, in parts, an interesting collection of books with some historical value. As an actual guide to organizing your life or thinking about, well, anything germane to living in the 21st century, for the vast majority of us, it is useless. The Finnish Lutheran church officially expounds doctrines like the Trinity, which is pseusophilosophical garbage, and the resurrection, which is a very silly fairy tale. The question isn't really why people are leaving an organization that professes to believe in this blather, but rather why anyone would join it in the first place once they're no longer being forced to by state violence.

Education in what is now Finland was a church monopoly until the 1860s, and the modern school system was founded in the 1920s. I don't think it's a coincidence that as the quality of secular education improves, membership in organized superstition declines. Or in other words, when the church loses access to the coercive power of the state, and critical thinking skills become more widespread, church membership begins to collapse. Obviously it is a more complex social phenomenon or series of phenomena than just this, but if we're going to pretend that broadening access to high-quality education doesn't matter at all, well, that's a pretty big choice to make.

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So what will happen in the future? Who knows. A fellow theology freshman told me in 2012 that maybe god will send a new reformation to Finland. Who am I to argue?

Most commentators, even from the church, reckon that the membership decline will continue. If you think that the previously cited figure of 30-ish percent of the population being Christians will stay that way, then maybe church membership will drop to around that number.

A church with a membership around 30% will be quite a different organization from the state religious bureaucracy it is today. At that point, the church will probably no longer be able to discharge its remaining public functions, like burial services, and considerable state subsidies to a minority religion will hardly be a sustainable solution. As with schools, at some point in the not so distant future, the public sector will have to reclaim the rest of the public services the church has monopolized.

Even now, with a declining membership and massive pension burdens, the church is in a somewhat perilous financial position. They also have great swathes of real estate that may prove somewhat difficult to unload; who do you sell a cathedral to in Finland? The state already directly subsidizes the church to the tune of over a hundred million euros a year, not without controversy. There are those who think that the church is headed for financial collapse; I remember a panel at the faculty of theology where one provocative participant told the attending students that none of us would ever retire from the church, because it will have gone bankrupt by then. He may not be wrong.

The church may also collapse because there will no longer be any demand for it. So-called mainline protestantism has been in a global decline for quite a while, and the same seems to be happening in Finland. Roughly speaking, as more and more people are leaving organizes religion, the influence of the extremist bigots in churches is increasing. Maybe the most spectacular instance of this is the way white USian Protestants are rallying around, of all people, Dolan fucking Trump. The more influence these fanatics gain over their denominations, the more repulsive they will appear to the general population.

The strategy of the Finnish Lutheran church has been to sit on the fence as long as possible. They triggered one of the bigger waves in membership loss by their uncompromising opposition to women in the priesthood in the 1980s, and went on to resolve the issue in such a stupid way that clerical misogyny is rampant to this day. They're now doing a similar thing with same-sex marriage, which is accepted by the state and not the church, and the church's homophobic bigotry is one of the main reasons members are quitting. At the same time, the opposite side of the culture war professes to believe that the church has sold out to cultural Marxism or whatever they're calling it now, and bigots are also leaving the church.

It's easy, and not entirely wrong, to say that the church is choosing the worst possible alternative by equivocating. The truth may be that there's simply no position they can take without potentially catastrophic consequences. If the church came out in favor of gay marriage, against racism and inequality and so on, they would not only alienate quite a large portion of their members, but according to what we know about their opinions, most of their staff. Similarly, for the church to come down even more firmly on the right of the culture war would be a complete disaster for them in terms of not only popular support but potentially even their official position as a state church. So it's not at all clear that they can actually do any better.

The final dilemma for the church may be that there just isn't any real demand for a national mainline Lutheran denomination. When both the liberal and fundamentalist believers are minorities in a large church, they can coexist. It's the middle between them that's falling out of the church, and if this keeps up, it'll be just the extremes left. Who, at that point, is the former state church for?

Anyway this is all premised on current trends continuing, so if something new and unexpected happens, all bets are off.

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So this is the kind of thing that happens when I'm working and in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave where it's impossible to do anything except lie down in front of a powerful fan. I hope you've enjoyed these random thoughts on the Finnish state church and their membership problems.

Let's Read Tolkien 75: Mount Doom

Sam put his ragged orc-cloak under his master's head, and covered them both with the grey robe of Lórien; and as he did so his thoughts went out to that fair land, and to the Elves, and he hoped that the cloth woven by their hands might have some virtue to keep them hidden beyond all hope in this wilderness of fear.

Frodo and Sam are in the ashen waste of Mordor, and their next stop is the Mountain of Fire. As they recover from their forced march, Sam works out that their provisions will last to Mount Doom, but no further. They're on a one-way trip, but Sam decides that if that's the way it is, then that's what they'll do. Before his steely resolution to die in Mordor, Sam commits the most appalling example of wishful thinking in the entire damn book.

"I can't think somehow that Gandalf would have sent Mr. Frodo on this errand, if there hadn't a' been any hope of his ever coming back at all," he thinks to himself. Can we just take a moment to remember that the original cause of this whole mess, so to speak, was Gandalf's decision to send Bilbo on a ludicrous dragon-hunt that frankly had no actual chance whatsoever of succeeding, not least because it included a crossing of Mirkwood that would have ended in the entire travelling circus troupe starving to death in Wilderland. So I find it very difficult to share Sam's faith in Gandalf's notions of logistics.

As the two hobbits make their way toward the Mountain, the land around them is empty: Sauron has concentrated his forces against Aragorn's army, including all the Nazgûl, who might conceivably have detected the Ring-bearer. To lighten their load, Frodo and Sam dump all their orc-gear and most of their other equipment, including Sam's cooking gear. Frodo wears only his elven-cloak, belted with a piece of rope: a monastic, almost Christ-like outfit, continuing the ascetic theme of the previous chapter. They trudge toward the Mountain, and when Frodo becomes too exhausted to go on, Sam carries him on his back for a while.

Soon thereafter, they strike the road that leads from the Dark Tower to Sammath Naur, the Chambers of Fire inside Mount Doom. As they crawl up the mountain, Gollum attacks Frodo, who manages to fight him off. Sam stays behind to fend off Gollum, but can't bring himself to kill the creature. Gollum slinks off, and Sam follows Frodo into the Mountain.

So here they finally are: Frodo and Sam have arrived at the Crack of Doom. Frodo, however, decides he's not going to destroy the Ring: he claims it for himself and puts it on. Sauron perceives this and gets a bit of a fright, and the Nazgûl are sent racing for the Mountain on their flying beasts. However, Gollum knocks Sam down and attacks Frodo. They struggle, and Gollum bites Frodo's ring-finger clean off, Ring and all. As he celebrates recovering his Precious, Gollum dances too close to the edge of the Crack, and falls in. The Ring is destroyed; Sam drags Frodo out as the Dark Tower falls and the Mountain begins to erupt.

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I feel like it's an incredibly appropriate coincidence that my post on this chapter falls on December! I'm also a little bit shocked that Frodo and Sam made it to the end of the main quest in the third chapter of the last book.

The theme of Frodo as a Christ-figure is very explicit here: he suffers as he bears the Ring, his cross, toward the final destination. Along the way, Sam carries him for a while, as Simon of Cyrene carried Christ's cross, but Frodo makes the last leg on his own. You can argue that Sam was Simon twice: first when he bore the Ring when Frodo was captured, then again when he bore Frodo.

When I talked about Tolkien and allegory earlier, I mentioned Eärendil as one of Tolkien's Christ-characters. Obviously Frodo is another, but as with Eärendil, Frodo is not Christ, but prefigures him. Like Christ, Frodo suffers on his way to Golgotha and there makes a sacrifice to save mankind, but there are key differences. Unlike Eärendil, Frodo does not bridge the gap between humanity and God, and most crucially, Frodo is not himself divine.

A long, long time ago, I wrote that the Christian heresy Tolkien was most concerned with was Pelagianism. Pelagianism, at least as understood by Tolkien, holds that the original sin did not irrevocably corrupt human nature, and therefore, people can resist sin. This theme comes to its conclusion when Frodo fails his mission. Letters, 191:

No, Frodo "failed". It is possible that once the ring was destroyed he had little recollection of the last scene. But one must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however "good"; and the Writer of the Story is not one of us.

Like I said earlier, if this was Harry Potter and the Ring of Power, none of this would be a problem: the Ring could be used at no risk, and even if it was somehow found to be dangerous, it could, in Shippey's words, be set aside - as the Deathly Hallows were in the miserable transphobe lady's books. In Tolkien's theology, the Ring is a Machine with a capital m (when not actually sin itself), and will therefore not only corrupt anyone using it, but cannot actually be defeated by human or hobbit agency. The original sin means that everyone, including Frodo, has fallen into sin, and therefore cannot, through their own will, triumph over it. So even though Frodo is a Christ-like figure who goes through an extensive ascesis, climbs the Mountain of Doom and is prepared to sacrifice everything to defeat evil, in the end he can't do it. If he could, Christ's sacrifice on the Cross, the event which Frodo's entire journey prefigures, would be meaningless: we wouldn't need him for anything, because we could simply decide to not sin. Because this would put us theology majors out of a job, it is unacceptable. Frodo's quest has to fail. Gollum has to be there to inadvertently finish the job.

Does that mean Frodo's suffering was in vain? Not really, because like Éowyn at the Pelennor, it's Frodo's efforts that make the eucatastrophe possible: if Frodo hadn't hauled the Ring all the way to the Mountain, Gollum couldn't have fallen into the volcano with it.

So was it divine intervention that pushed Gollum over the edge? And if it was, couldn't God then have come up with other interventions, like the one on Amon Hen, to get Frodo there? Is it vitally important for the future that Bilbo, or for that matter Frodo or Sam, didn't kill Gollum - or would god have stopped them, or come up with a different intervention in the Sammath Naur? This is the pointless philosophical hole theology digs itself into when you want both an omnipotent and benevolent god, and a meaningful role for human free will. For Tolkien, Frodo's choices and sacrifices did matter, even if in the end, he couldn't prevail.

But if you want to boil the whole Lord of the Rings down into one message, this is it: sin corrupts, and people can't defeat it on their own, without divine assistance.

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Next time: a party.

Let's Play Here I Stand - by email

I don't know why it took me so long to find out that GMT Games has done an epic board game on the Reformation, but now that I know about it, we're definitely playing Here I Stand. A monstrously complicated card-driven game with a 40-page rulebook and separate setup guide, Here I Stand has mechanics for everything from theological debates and French chateaus to Ottoman piracy and circumnavigating the world, not to mention a table where you roll to find out how Henry of Eight's love life is going, complete with an individual cardboard counter for each wife. At the end of the day, whoever has the most victory points wins.

Our bodies are not ready; they will not be ready; nonetheless we are doing this.

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After a succesful attempt at the Game of Thrones board game, we got most of the gang back together for a game of Here I Stand. We're uniquely qualified to play this. I'll be first in player order as the Ottomans; I've majored in Arabic and Islamic Studies in the past, and most importantly, I've read Mikael Hakim several times. Also, here's a picture of me at the Reformation Wall in Geneva.

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Vacation, day 3. The trip continues; until I get back online, enjoy this selfie I took with Oliver Cromwell at Geneva's absolutely ludicrous Reformation Wall.

A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on May 26, 2017 at 12:46am PDT

Perhaps even more impressively, we've arranged to have players with theology degrees represent both the Vatican and the Protestants, so I fully expect those theological debate mechanics to get a thorough working out. With three less theological but very competent board gamers representing France, England and the Hapsburgs, we are ready to Here I Stand.


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Our first attempt took eight grinding hours, during which we managed to play a grand total of three (3) turns.

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A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on Feb 22, 2020 at 1:49pm PST

For posterity, let it be recorded that the first card played in the first action phase was Shipbuilding, as the event. This actually turned out quite well for me, since Barbary Pirates came out fairly early, and the Hapsburgs invaded Algiers and I had to go through quite some trouble to drive their fleet back! Meanwhile, the other bastards played both Revolt in Egypt and War in Persia, so my armies disappeared off to fight these foreign wars very quickly; while I did knock out Hungary-Bohemia, I spent most of the game firmly on the back foot as I had very few cards or troops.

Meanwhile, the Reformation got off to a slowish start and the Diet of Worms ended in stalemate. Things looked bad for France when England declared war and invaded, with Hapsburg troops massing on the Spanish border, but the English army was outflanked and defeated, and the Hapsburgs not only made peace with the French but actually allied with them. The French built some chateaus and drove into Italy, which left them with the most victory points when we hit our time constraint during the third turn.

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Based on our initial attempt, I only really have three criticisms of Here I Stand. One is that the board can get very cluttered at times; to the extent that it can genuinely get confusing trying to figure out what is where, especially looking down the length of the board. The other is that the rules really can be absolutely bewildering at times, especially when trying to look something up in mid-game - which, quite frankly, is something that's going to be happening a lot. It's been said that none of the individual rules in Here I Stand are particularly complicated, and I sort of accept that. But the problem is the sheer volume of rules, which makes it really difficult to get a handle on all of them. So to put it mildly, a generous amount of time needs to be allocated to poring over the rulebook in-game.

This really exacerbates the third and biggest problem: it can be a long time between player turns. When the Protestant player slaps down A Mighty Fortress and starts making his six reformation attempts in Germany, requiring us to dig out the rulebook and figure out exactly how many dice he's rolling and who wins ties where, and you're a player with no direct stake in any of this - how do you not tune out? It can also be mildly frustrating when players are getting very different amounts of cards; I spent something like half of turn three just hanging around, watching the Hapsburgs demolish my position in Hungary, since I started with three cards and he had seven or eight.

The sheer complexity of the rules can make it very difficult to get invested in the game, and the amount of downtime between turns can make it very difficult to stay invested. Despite this, I found Here I Stand to be an absolutely fascinating experience; I can easily understand how someone else might find it to be anything but.

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Having said this, I feel that Here I Stand is an absolutely extraordinary game, and I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to play it. Our original plan was to dedicate a summer weekend to playing it properly, but then, of course, the coronavirus happened. We've quarantined ourselves and cancelled all our gaming activities for the spring; in practical terms, you could say we're stuck here in our apartment and there's not a lot we can do about it.

So instead of a weekend of Here I Stand, we're going to be responsible citizens and play out this reformation the old-fashioned way: by email. With the help of my partner, I will be maintaining the physical board in our living room, and everyone will be e-mailing in their moves. Here it is, by the way:

Both the rulebook and scenario book are available for download on the GMT Games website. We'll be playing the long campaign, obviously. I'll be doing regular updates on this blag and my social medias as well; because there will be a full written record of every move, I can post a play-by-play account here. I'm going to shoot for one post per turn, but we'll see how it goes.

Finally, I thought I'd say a couple of words about each faction and their starting position in the game, so that if anyone wants to follow along they'll have some idea where everyone's starting from. Every faction also has a home card (the Papacy has two), which is never discarded and always returns to that player's hand.


The Ottomans

Fresh from the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottomans are ruled by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and start the game at war with the minor power Hungary-Bohemia. Historically, this was when the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna but eventually had to withdraw. The Ottomans are the only power that can build corsairs and gain victory points through piracy.

The Ottoman home card is Janissaries. Named after the slave soldier corps that came to dominate the Ottoman military, the card can be played for five command points, or used to generate troops or affect a combat.

The Hapsburgs

The mightiest power in Europe, Emperor Charles V rules modern-day Spain, the Netherlands, southern Italy, Austria and Germany. They're still embroiled in the Italian Wars with France, which started in the previous century, and so start the game at war with France. As ruler of Germany, the Emperor also gets involved in the religious struggle, and with a conquistador already underway, they also have a headstart to the New World. There's no areas of the game where the Hapsburgs aren't involved.

The Hapsburg home card is Holy Roman Emperor. The card represents Charles V charging around his widely dispersed empire, and can be used to move him about and conduct operations, making sure the Emperor is always in the thick of it.

England

English policy on the eve of the Reformation is concerned with exactly one thing: producing a lawful heir for Henry VIII. There's a pregnancy table for his wives and everything. Also, as the game goes on, the English Reformation starts, and everything generally gets more complicated. The English are secure on their island, but have to reach out in order to win.

The English home card is Six Wives of Henry VIII, which can be used to declare war on England's traditional enemies (i.e. everyone) or pursue Henry's quest for a male heir.

France

The French start the game under the rule of Francis I, a great patron of the French Renaissance. The French are trying to conquer Italy, but can also gain victory points by building chateaus and, of course, colonizing the New World.

The French home card is Patron of the Arts, which is good for either 5 command points or building a chateau.

The Papacy

The Medici pope Leo X is going to have his papacy blighted by that dude from Germany. The Vatican holds very little territory and is at war with the French over North Italy, and needs to divide their attention between preserving their holdings and fighting the German heresy. They can gain victory points by building St. Peter's Basilica, which is what exacerbated the heresy in the first place, and have the theologically delightful action Burn Books for 2 CP.

Uniquely, the Papacy has two home cards: Papal Bull and Leipzig Debate.

These let the Pope excommunicate Christian rulers and call theological debates to try to quash the rising Protestant heresy.

The Protestants

Speaking of heresy, here's the last of the six factions in impulse order. Until the Schmalkaldic League event happens, the Protestants play very differently from the other factions: with no military or controlled territory, they focus on converting spaces on the map to Protestantism.

The Protestant home card is Here I Stand, which lets them insert Martin Luther into debates or find cards in the discard pile so they can get their various conversion events into play.

The battle between the Protestants and the Catholics is tracked on the Religious Struggle Card:

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So, the game has been set up, the e-mail thread has been started: for the next who knows how many months, we are Here I Stand. You can read what happened on the first turn here!

Christianity, the body and neoliberal individualism

There's a huge industry dedicated to making people feel bad about their bodies and then selling them a product, whether cosmetics, clothes, superfoods, a fitness regime, whatever, that will make their supposedly hideous and ugly body more like the photoshopped perfection in these companies' ads. This kind of business model is rightly condemned, but its roots are rarely looked at. The fact is, if you traveled back in time to before this body-shaming nonsense was big business and wanted to found an industry based on tricking people into hating themselves, you would have found the perfect blueprint for your hateful con in the nearest church.

Christianity was born some time in the first century CE as an offshoot of Judaism in Roman-occupied Hellenic Palestine; to make a long story short, it largely consisted of taking a series of Judaic theological ideas and combining them with Greek philosophy and a lively expectation of the end of the world. The Greek philosopher who had the biggest impact on Christian thought was undoubtedly Plato: the dualism and juxtaposition of mind/soul and body in Phaedo became central to Christian theology. In Plato's concept of the universe, the world of ideas was the home of pure truth, while the material world was nothing but a reflection of it. The body, being of the material world, was imperfect and acted as a brake on the higher ambitions of the immaterial soul. Thus Socrates, according to Phaedo according to Plato:

We have found, they will say, a path of speculation which seems to bring us and the argument to the conclusion that while we are in the body, and while the soul is mingled with this mass of evil, our desire will not be satisfied, and our desire is of the truth. For the body is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food; and also is liable to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after truth: and by filling us so full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies, and idols, and every sort of folly, prevents our ever having, as people say, so much as a thought. For whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? For wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body; and in consequence of all these things the time which ought to be given to philosophy is lost. Moreover, if there is time and an inclination toward philosophy, yet the body introduces a turmoil and confusion and fear into the course of speculation, and hinders us from seeing the truth: and all experience shows that if we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body, and the soul in herself must behold all things in themselves: then I suppose that we shall attain that which we desire, and of which we say that we are lovers, and that is wisdom, not while we live, but after death, as the argument shows; for if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things seems to follow-either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, after death. For then, and not till then, the soul will be in herself alone and without the body.
- Phaedo, trans. by Benjamin Jowett

Christianity eagerly took up this vilification of the body, and created a reinterpretation of the paradise story of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, where in addition to being the grounds for humanity's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the episode of the fruit also came to symbolize an original sin, the Fall, which doomed us all to the imperfection of the material world.

Whereas with Plato, the body interfered with the philosopher's quest for truth, in Christian thought the body came to symbolize original sin and acted as a barrier between humanity and God. The body was sinful, and therefore shameful, and had to be disciplined. Thus the apostle Paul:

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
- 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, New International Version

Later, the writers of what became the canonical gospels had Jesus propound an even more unrealistic and hateful version of the same doctrine:

If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.
- Matt. 18:8-9, New International Version

It's interesting to note that these teachings never seem to have been taken literally in the early church. When enemies of the third-century theologian Origen wanted to bring hin into disrepute, they spread an apparently false rumor that he had taken the Gospel of Matthew literally and castrated himself - because apparently actually doing what Jesus purportedly commanded would have been universally condemned.

This makes sense if you consider what the purpose of teachings like these are. If you can get people to literally hate their own body, and feel ashamed of their normal everyday life, they'll be permanently unhappy. In Paul's metaphor, the race only ends when you die. This is where the priest comes in. The clergy appoint themselves referees in this ghastly parade of self-flagellation; they can tell the suffering faithful that they're mortifying their bodies enough, or shame them for doing too little. Because ordinary life is a constant progression of sins that are impossible to avoid, a good Christian must necessarily be constantly ashamed and guilty. This gives the priest tremendous power over his congregation; exactly like a cult leader over their cultists, only we don't call them cults any more when they get big enough. So these entirely unhinged commandments to mutilate your own body were never meant to be taken seriously: they're there to give priests power over anyone who makes the mistake of believing in them.

This idea of the filthy, sinful body that needs to be constantly disciplined has since jumped from Christian theology to the weight-loss and beauty industries, where it thrives like it once did in churches. For both Christianity and Weight Watchers, cultivating a mind-body dualism where the body is the repulsive enemy of the mind has been excellent business, because it creates a demand for their services in people whose bodies would have been just fine had they not been taught to loathe them. Then again, at least the beauty industry only wants to sell you stuff you don't need; Christianity has done far worse.

The other prominent descendant of the early church and its hatred of the body is neoliberal individualism. In the logic of contemporary politics, unemployment is always the fault of the person without a job. They just need to try harder. In a neoliberal society, each and every citizen needs to heroically strive forward every day of their lives in order to be eligible for full membership in society. All distinctions of privilege are elided; if you were born poor, you should have worked harder. Those of us who are felt by our ruling elites to not be working hard enough are subjected to a constant stream of patronizing advice on how to get ahead, and it's hardly a coincidence that most of it focuses on disciplining the body. People who have never had to add up the cost of their groceries on their way to the checkout will give sermons on how to eat econonically. Tabloids run by millionaires will stoke rage over excessive "benefits" going to undesirables who will supposedly spend the money on extravagances rather than living frugally like the deserving poor should. If only all these lazy wasters would discipline themselves, the refrain always goes, they wouldn't be so poor. Obviously this political system has complex roots, but it's very difficult to not see more than a hint of the Christian idea of unending self-flagellation to prove one's worth. We even treat mental health problems as symptoms of individual weakness that should be adressed through discipline. The net effect is the same as in Christian theology: you are flawed, you are to blame, you must discipline yourself.

It's worth remembering that whatever cruel and hypocritical scam the advertisers come up with next to shame you into buying their products, or whenever a politician stands up to pour scorn on the lazy and idle parasites of society, they're doing nothing that wasn't pioneered two millenia ago by the apostle Paul and the evangelists.

Let's Read Tolkien 33: The Council of Elrond

Next day Frodo woke early, feeling refreshed and well.

For the second chapter in a row, we begin with Frodo waking up in Rivendell. He goes for a walk, but doesn't get far until he runs into Bilbo and Gandalf, who escort him to a porch of Elrond's hall, where a council is assembling. Elrond is presiding, and presents Frodo. Glorfindel, Glóin and Strider Frodo recognizes, and he's now introduced to Glóin's son Gimli. Among the elves present are Erestor, chief counsellor of Elrond, and Galdor from the Grey Havens west of the Shire, as well as Legolas from the Woodland Realm. Finally, Boromir is introduced as "a man from the South".

We're only given a selection from what gets debated at the council, but it's still quite a lot. First up is Glóin, who fills us in on how the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain have been doing since Bilbo left for home. For whatever reason, despite the recovery of Erebor, the dwarves became unhappy and started raving about Moria. We don't actually really learn what or where Moria is, exactly, except that it's some great undertaking of their fathers. "Too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear," Glóin says, but the fear remains nameless. Eventually - thirty years ago - Balin left for Moria, taking many other dwarves, including Ori and Óin, with him. At first, they had word of him at the Lonely Mountain, but then Moria was quiet.

Balin's fate, however, isn't the only thing bothering Glóin. A year ago, Dáin - still King under the Mountain - received a messenger from Mordor, asking after a hobbit thief and a ring he stole from Sauron. He promises that should the dwarves find this ring, "but a trifle that Sauron fancies", he will return three of the rings of the dwarves to them. If not, there will be war. So Glóin has been sent, to warn Bilbo and seek the wisdom of Elrond.

This Elrond promises Glóin he shall receive. The concerns of the dwarves - and the trifle that Sauron fancies - are all one and the same problem. Elrond then launches on his own exposition, telling the history of Sauron and the Ring: how the Elven-smiths of Eregion befriended Sauron, who wasn't yet blatantly obviously evil, and the Rings were forged; chief among them the One Ring, made in secret by Sauron to rule the others. Númenor fell, but the Kings of Men came from there to Middle-earth, and together with the elves fought Sauron. There's a digression when Elrond reminiscences on "the splendour of their banners", startling Frodo, who needs to have it explained to him that Elrond is like really old.

Elrond was the herald of Gil-galad, the Elven-king, and fought with him when both the kings of men and elves, Gil-galad and Elendil, died. They defeated Sauron, however, and Isildur, Elendil's son, took the Ring from him with his father's broken sword. Only Isildur, Elrond and Círdan of the Havens were there, and Isildur refused to destroy the Ring, claiming it as weregild for his father. Eventually Isildur died, betrayed by the Ring which was then named Isildur's Bane, but the shards of his sword were brought to the North.

Although the Free Peoples won the war, Sauron was not destroyed, and the winners were weakened. Many had died, and the elves began to be estranged from men. While the southern realm of Gondor built great fortresses to keep watch on Mordor, the men of the North dwindled. In our first encounter with Tolkien's pseudo-Howardian racial doctrines, the pure blood of Númenor weakened, and the northern realms fell into ruin. Gondor also declined, and the watch on Mordor was neglected.

Boromir protests at this, and I certainly don't blame him: I wouldn't sit around quietly listening to some asshole complain about how the blood of my people has declined through racial mixing either. He counters racism with racism: maybe their blood isn't what it used to be, but "by our valour the wild folk of the East are still restrained". Thank you, Boromir. He talks about the war between Gondor and Mordor, the latter now bolstered by the Easterlings and the people of Harad, as well as a terrifying black horseman that scares the shit out of everyone. He gets in a complaint that the people Gondor protects aren't very grateful, and then explains why he's there: to get Elrond to interpret his dream. Both Boromir and his brother had a dream that told them to seek out Imladris, that is Rivendell, and the Sword that Was Broken; there will also be a Halfling, and Isildur's Bane.

The dream-interpretation, of course, is right at hand: Strider throws down his broken sword, and gets his official introduction from Elrond as that dude who creeps on my daughter Aragorn son of Arathorn, the heir of Isildur and Elendil, chief of the Dúnedain of the North. Finally, Frodo reluctantly brings forth the Ring. Boromir doubts Aragorn, but Bilbo spits some rhyme at him, and now it's Aragorn's turn to speechify.

Aragorn talks about how the Rangers of the North keep people safe, also for little or no thanks. Attention readers, it has been one (1) chapter since anyone was fat-shamed.

"Strider" I am to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly.

Attention readers, it has now been zero (0) chapters since anyone was fat-shamed. Aragorn and Boromir are effectively having a really weird passive-aggressive victimization contest, where they're both making a whole production of their selfless secret sacrifices that no-one appreciates and that Aragorn claims they don't complain about while complaining about them. Eventually, he gets to the point, which is that he so is dead butch, and will come to Gondor to prove it.

Boromir, reasonably, wants to know how anyone knows that Frodo's ring is, in fact, Isildur's Bane, and how it ended up with a hobbit. This is Bilbo's cue, and he tells his story, complete with an acknowledgement that he lied to Glóin about it earlier. Frodo is up next, and after he's finished, Galdor of the Havens has several questions. Where was Gandalf? Where's Saruman? And how does anyone actually know that Frodo's ring is the One Ring? To answer all this, Elrond finally calls on Gandalf himself to speak.

For starters, Gandalf starts filling us in on recent events. We now learn that Gandalf's visit to the dungeons of the Necromancer, briefly mentioned in the Hobbit, revealed that the Necromancer was in fact Sauron. The White Council - that is, Elrond, Gandalf and their buddies - drove him out, only to see him establish himself in Mordor. Saruman, briefly mentioned in Chapter 2 as Gandalf's boss, advised everyone to not mind Sauron, and even when they learned he was seeking the One Ring, Saruman assured everyone it can't be found: having fallen into the river, it'll have ended up in the Sea.

Gandalf didn't trust him. He wanted to know how the Ring ended up with Gollum, but Gollum was nowhere to be found. While Aragorn started searching for Gollum, Gandalf traveled to Gondor, and in the archives of Minas Tirith he found a scroll where Isildur described the ring he took off the defeated Sauron. The Ring was still hot, and the writing on it could be read, so Isildur transcribed it. Meanwhile, Aragorn had found Gollum. Gandalf learned that Gollum had lived many lifespans of his kind already, and crucially, had found the Ring in the Great River, near the Gladden Fields where Isildur fell. Finally, Gandalf recites the phrase he read off the Ring in Bag End in Chapter 2, which is the same as recorded by Isildur.

So Bilbo's and Frodo's ring is definitely the One Ring. What's more, Gollum had also visited Mordor, so Sauron knew as well, and must by now know that it's in Rivendell. Boromir asks what became of Gollum, and Legolas speaks up to report that he's escaped from the Woodland Realm where he was being held.

After a brief complaint from Glóin, who also once escaped from the Woodland Realm, Gandalf answers Galdor's other questions, and tells the story of his encounter with Saruman. In June, Gandalf had met his co-wizard, Radagast the Brown, who told him that the Nazgûl - the Ring-wraiths - were on the move, looking for a place called the Shire. But Radagast also passed on a message from Saruman, offering his help; and so Gandalf leaves a letter with Barliman Butterbur at Bree and heads off to Saruman's digs: the tower of Orthanc in Isengard, way at the southern end of the Misty Mountains.

At Orthanc, Saruman gives Gandalf a speech on how they should either ally with Sauron or take the Ring for themselves, so they could rule over Middle-earth as benign dictators for the greater good of everyone. When Gandalf refuses, Saruman imprisons him on the pinnacle of Orthanc until he reveals the location of the Ring. With the help of the Great Eagles, Gandalf manages to escape to Rohan, where the king tells him to take a horse and leave, so Gandalf takes his best horse and heads for the Shire. He gets into a fight with the Nazgûl at Weathertop, which Frodo and co. saw in the distance in Chapter 11, and manages to draw off some of them on his way to Rivendell.

Finally, with the whole story told, the council needs to decide what to do with the Ring. Elrond leads with the summing-up, and the first suggestion, by Erestor, to send the Ring to Bombadil, is sensibly dismissed. Glorfindel suggests throwing it into the ocean, which Gandalf rejects:

There are many things in the deep waters; and seas and lands may change. And it is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one.

Going through their options, the council decide that the Ring can neither be hidden or sent away. Elrond speaks the last remaining option: sending the Ring to the Fire where it was made.

At this Boromir speaks up, wanting to know why they can't use the Ring themselves. Elrond explains that it was made by Sauron and is evil; anyone who uses it to vanquish Sauron will simply become another Sauron in his place. Boromir isn't convinced. Still, the question of who will take the Ring hangs in the air. Bilbo volunteers, but is gently refused.

Finally, Frodo speaks up, and offers to bear the Ring to Mordor.

**

I said last time that there was lots of exposition coming, and I meant it. This chapter is practically entirely made up of reported speech, at best I think third-order: Gandalf says Radagast told him that Saruman had said something. The second chapters of books in the Lord of the Rings tend to be heavy on exposition, and this is the heaviest of them all: led by Elrond, several characters go over what is, essentially, the whole story of the One Ring and Sauron's attempts to recover it. It sets the entire novel in context and places it firmly in Tolkien's mythos; after the Council, we know pretty much all the major players in the story and their histories, and crucially, what the Ring is and why it needs to be destroyed. In that sense, this is one of the most crucial chapters in the whole of the Lord of the Rings. And as such, there's a lot to get through here.

**

The first speaker, Glóin, is concerned that unless they help Sauron find the Ring, he'll attack them:

If we make no answer, the Enemy may move Men of his rule to assail King Brand, and Dáin also.

He's right, too: the first time I played War of the Ring, I invaded not only Dale but the Woodland Realm as well with my Easterlings. To unconscionably jump ahead of our chronology, Appendix B of the Lord of the Rings tells us that Sauron did this as well, and took Dale, but committed the rookie mistake of settling down to besiege Erebor rather than driving on into the Woodland Realm, which tends to be an easier two victory points and also frees the forces at Dol Guldur to focus on Lórien.

To return to the narrative, the reason Balin goes to Moria is "a shadow of disquiet" that falls on the dwarves. Unfortunately, as discussed previously, it's very possible that this is another one of Tolkien's meditations on Jewishness, which he claims dwarves are allegories things that aren't allegories but are exactly like them for. But the shadow also recalls (precalls?) some incidents in the Silmarillion where Morgoth was talented at sowing discord at a distance, and Glóin's admission that Balin went looking for a ring connects this escapade directly with the broader matters of the Council.

Starting with Glóin is a good choice, because whatever Tolkien's notions of Jewishness, he writes dwarves well, and Glóin serves to connect the council to the events of the Hobbit, letting us orient ourselves.

**

The history of the Ring introduces us to the notion at the heart of Tolkien's racism, and perhaps also his classism: blood. Throughout, Tolkien treats heredity as defining, explaining both individual character traits and collective behaviour with blood. We'll have more direct examples of this later on, but suffice to say that it's a recurring theme.

The waning of the blood of Númenor is where the blood trope meets an even more central concern of Tolkien's: decline. If I had to pick one theme that suffuses the Lord of the Rings, I'd say it's decline and loss. The fall of empires has been an European obsession since, well, a good part of the ancestors of modern Europeans found themselves among the ruins of Roman, Egyptian and other ancient empires. Thence the precursor trope in so much speculative fiction, then; an ongoing concern in the West at least since Gibbon, taken up by fascists with Spengler and still parroted on both ends of the political spectrum today. Intriguingly, as
an article in Foreign Policy last year pointed out, apocalyptic fiction isn't particularly popular in China, but we still love it. Tolkien's account of the waning of Gondor strikes a decidedly Spenglerian note, so much so that this is certainly where Tolkien comes closest to anything actually resembling fascism. Gondor declining because "the blood of the Númenorans became mingled with that of lesser men" could be straight out of a fever dream of Eurabia, or indeed Mein Kampf.

Tolkien, however, is not consistent with this. It's worth noting that both of his major protagonists are of "mixed blood"; in Chapter One we were treated to an extended bar-room discussion of Frodo's dubious parentage ("Baggins is his name, but he's more than half a Brandybuck, they say"), echoing the first chapter of the Hobbit, where Bilbo was defined through the conflict between his stolidly respectable Baggins heritage and his adventurous Took blood. Elrond is famed for his legendary wisdom - and his sobriquet is "Half-elven". What's more, the "pure blood of Númenor" is the result of intermingling three different races: elves, humans and through Lúthien's mother Melian, angels. In the central romance of Tolkien's legendarium, a half-elf, half-angel woman is wooed by a human man, and later two of their distant descendants, an elf-woman and a man of Númenoran descent, repeat the process. So while Tolkien framed the story of Gondor as a Spenglerian parable of racial decline, there's simply no way to read his work as a polemic against racial mixing. If anything, Elrond's speech on Gondor is an anomaly. Certainly Tolkien never suggests trying to arrest decline by safeguarding racial purity or any such properly fascist notion. Maybe Elrond is a Nazi?

Robert E. Howard conceived of his fictional world as a constant struggle between different races, intermittently rising toward civilization or collapsing into barbarism.

These stone age kingdoms clashed, and in a series of bloody wars, the outnumbered Atlanteans were hurled back into a state of savagery, and the evolution of the Picts was halted. Five hundred years after the Cataclysm the barbaric kingdoms have vanished. It is now a nation of savages - the Picts - carrying on continual warfare with tribes of savages - the Atlanteans.
- Robert E. Howard: The Hyborian Age, in Howard: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, Ballantine Books, 2003; p. 382

Howard's notions recall those of H.P. Blavatsky and her "root-races", as do several of his "races" and locales, like Lemuria and so on. Tolkien's ideas are very different, because they're rooted in Christianity. Christian time proceeds from creation to apocalypse, and it gets worse as the end gets nearer. This is also the nature of the decline in the Lord of the Rings: through the Fall, mankind (as it surely was to Tolkien!) has become estranged from God, and the rift will only be healed at the end of time. Until then, things are just going to keep on getting worse. So the decline of Gondor, say, couldn't have been averted with laws against mixing blood or anything like that, because no Machine can counteract the Fall. One of the strongest themes in the Lord of the Rings is that nothing will ever be the same: loss is irrevocable. The good old days are gone and will not return. So for Gondor, so for all mankind. This, rather than racial purity, is what the theme of decline is based on.

**

In the tale of Isildur, the Ring is perhaps more clearly than ever sin, and a commentary on pre-Christian Germanic society. Isildur's actions in Mordor are straight out of a Norse saga: he claims the One Ring as weregild, literally man-money, for his father and brother. In Germanic customary law, practiced in Scandinavia, Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere, everyone had a price, and the penalty for injuring or killing a person was financial restitution, either to them or their kin. Isildur's claim seems to be in accordance with at least the spirit of this idea: the Ring is literally compensation for his dead kinsfolk. However, Isildur fails to realize that the Ring is cursed.

Now, cursed rings are nothing new to the sagas; in the Völsunga saga, arguably one of the most significant inspirations for Tolkien's Middle-earth stories, the famous story of the weregild of Otr is directly connected to the cursed ring Andvaranaut. I don't think we'd be wrong, however, to read a more significant commentary into Isildur's failure, because the One Ring is more than a cursed ring of the sagas: it's a Machine, i.e. it is sin. Remember that unlike Andvaranaut, there's no specific curse on the One Ring. It's an instrument of domination that grants power according to the measure of its wielder. In a saga, it might have been a powerful and valuable artifact. Its curse is that it's been designed to oppose God; in mortal hands, it circumvents death, which is, after all, the original sin. The reason Isildur makes the mistake of claiming the Ring is, arguably, that his Germanic system of weregilds and honor lacks the concepts necessary to understand and deal with sin. Because of this omission, all his pagan valor is for naught, and his claim of weregild is really nothing more than Gollum's absurd story of his birthday-present: a self-justification for succumbing to temptation.

**

Gandalf's conversation with Saruman deserves attention as one of the few passages in the Lord of the Rings where Tolkien is explicitly political. Here's Saruman:

The Younger Days are beginning. The time of the elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which We must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.

Reading this, it's difficult to avoid the impression that Michael Moorcock and the critics who follow him can't tell the difference between Gandalf and Saruman. Here's what Moorcock has to say of the works of Tolkien and other "enlightened Tories" in Epic Pooh:

They don't ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what's best for us.

There is simply no way to square this claim with the conversation between Gandalf and Saruman in this chapter. Saruman offers exactly what Moorcock claims Tolkien does: a world of law and order, presided over by powerful white men who know best. Somehow Moorcock must have missed the part where Gandalf unambiguously refuses to have any part in this whatsoever.

I recently happened upon Erin Horáková's wonderful Kirk Drift, where she argues that our idea of what Jim Kirk from the original Star Trek was like has been completely distorted, to the point where the popular notion of original series Kirk has practically nothing in common with how the character was portrayed. I strongly believe a similar argument needs to be made about Lord of the Rings; as with Horáková and Star Trek, not to immunize it from criticism, but rather to criticize the work itself, not the strange notion of it floating around in our popular culture. Tolkien has come to stand in for reactionary, patriarchal, racist fantasy in a way far beyond any examples of these tendencies found in his actual texts. To paraphrase Horáková, the Lord of the Rings has been colonised by a fascist reading by several mechanisms of mismemory. Saruman has become Gandalf.

The way popular notions of Tolkien manage to make Gandalf into the fascist of the piece and claim that good and evil are indistinguishable in the books is, simply put, a completely monstrous distortion of the original. This is especially bizarre in an era when the suave fascist demagogue Tolkien portrays Saruman as has made a comeback into Western politics that would have seemed unthinkable a little over a decade ago. Can many of us read Saruman's speech to Gandalf and not recognize the brutal fascism it conceals inside its rhetorical flourishes? It's among us now, as it was before Tolkien when he wrote this chapter. We may not agree that a privileged Catholic monarchism is the way to defeat the Sarumans of our time - I certainly do not! - but to lump Tolkien among them is completely, willfully ignorant. He was undoubtedly a reactionary conservative, his remarks on Jewishness alone make it clear he was a racist and an anti-Semite, and, well, he managed to write an entire novel without a single female character. But he was also strongly antifascist.

I'm inclined to speculate that one reason this has happened is that turning Tolkien into this fascist ghoul has been terribly handy for both sides of the culture wars. Left-wing reception of Tolkien has, to my knowledge, been consistently hostile, not least because of how useful a strawman the "arch-conservative" reading of Lord of the Rings is. There's a strange tendency in fantasy to self-advertise by insisting that one's fantasy offering isn't like "other fantasy" - not that it's ever clear what that "other fantasy" actually is. A fascist caricature of Tolkien is very handy for this.

Similarly, many on the extreme right have found inspiration and encouragement in a work that seems to be directly opposed to their worldview. As I'm writing this, the leadership of Finland's far-right racist party is being contested by two fascists, one an atheist at that, both of whom are avowed fans of Tolkien - and we find them competing for the position of Saruman. The caricature Tolkien's fascism must, to them, be an endorsement.

In my mind, one fundamental reason for this is the neglect and misunderstanding of Tolkien's theology. To read fascist values of obedience, authority and racist cruelty into Tolkien, one has to be almost wilfully blind to the theological underpinnings of his work. Even neglecting them, though, leaves large parts of the Lord of the Rings completely irreconcilable with the popular authoritarian caricature of Tolkien. Foremost among them is Gandalf's debate with Saruman in this chapter, which should make very clear that virtue is most definitely not found in submitting to the authority of white men in grey clothes. Saruman's language, ordering things "for that good which only the Wise can see", "deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order", is the language of 20th century totalitarianism, and it remains the language of 21st century authoritarians. Throw in a crack about unrestrained immigration and it could be a Theresa May speech. Tolkien firmly rejects it. Any critique that misses this is not a critique of Tolkien.

**

Finally, the council figures out what to do to the Ring. This is also a key part of the politics and ethics of the Lord of the Rings. Foremost, of course, is the idea that evil needs to be faced here and now, not postponed, ignored or hidden away. But most crucially, evil can't be fought with evil. This is why it's so preposterous to claim that the Lord of the Rings preaches submission to authority, or that it's a clash of "100% good" with "100% evil". If either of these were the case, the Council of Elrond would be a very simple affair: simply give the Ring to Gandalf and he'll destroy the Dark Lord, and everything will be fine. If this was Harry Potter and the Ring of Power, say, there'd be no trouble at all. But it isn't. In Tolkien's theology, the Ring is a Machine: an object fundamentally opposed to God. Not even the best of the good in the world can use it; as I argued in Chapter 2, that would be heresy. Power, especially the power of the Enemy, corrupts. No-one, not even the men who know what's best for us, can be trusted with it. If there's one theme at the very heart of the Lord of the Rings, this is it.

**

Whew! That was some heavy exposition. Tolkien gets us through it, though, I think because the structure of the chapter is succesful. We start with Glóin, who takes a fairly small perspective that also ties into the Hobbit, giving us an easy start and broaching the subject of the Ring. Elrond can then give his talk on the history of the Ring, already foreshadowed earlier, and introduce both Aragorn and Boromir, as well as Gondor and the heirs of Isildur. With the scene now quite thoroughly set, Gandalf wraps up the exposition by linking it to the previous events of the book, and carrying the narrative to where we are now. So while this really is a huge amount of information, it works because the speeches lead into each other logically. There are also some good stylistic touches, like the subtly different ways the main participants speak, and the interjections, like Bilbo's poem, break up the exposition and make the whole sequence seem more alive.

Once the stories are all told, the council deliberates on what to do, setting down the key moral of the whole novel: ends do not justify means, and power corrupts. Finally, the chapter ends with Frodo taking on the mission of destroying the Ring. So we've now set up the entire rest of the book!

**

Next time: hiking and snow.