Jews/Tolkien Redux

Other Writers on the Jews and Tolkien:

We discussed this issue a few days ago. The main thing seemed to me that the Jews aren't really bothered by "medieval" swords' having been borne against their ancestors, but rather by what their ancestors did with swords during Israel's heroic age. After the Holocaust, their own heroic tradition must seem alien and alienating; whereas Tolkien's tradition, because it was the root of Just War theory and the idea that heroes should protect noncombatants, would only make more sense after World War One and Two.

A few more writers have considered the question since, and some of them (not really Wonkette) have serious thoughts about the issue.

Gene Expression challenges the assertion that Jews don't write fantasy:

Is Christianity fundamentally more comfortable with the pagan than Judaism, as the author above asserts? I doubt it. The basics of Northern fantasy draw from a rich peasant cultural folk tradition which the Christian church ignored at best, and attempted to suppress at worst. The tradition was most robust in the regions which were Christianized last, so that relatively thick cultural memory remained from which to draw during the 19th century Romantic revival of national traditions. It is notable that Ireland in particular in the British Isles preserved its own mythic tradition; I chalk this up to the indigenous origins of Christianization, so that the culture-bearers of the past were not superseded by missionaries who dismissed the indigenous stories as being part & parcel of the pagan intellectual edifice. Tolkien was in part trying to create an Anglo-Saxon mythic cycle from fragments such as Beowulf and Scandinavian analogs. The Irish have no need of reconstruction. Culturally the Jews are very distant from their peasant origins, and naturally much more detached from their pagan past than Northern Europeans. For the past 1,000 years Ashkenazi Jews have been an urban minority, as insulated from the world of faerie as Christian priests. No wonder that Jewish authors, such as Neil Gaiman, draw upon Northern motifs. How popular is urban fantasy as a distinct genre anyway?

Russ Douthat of the New York Times asks why Jews would want a Jewish Tolkien at all.

But once you add up these insights, they jostle uneasily with Weingrad’s professed desire for a Jewish Tolkien, or a Jewish Lewis. What he seems to have demonstrated is that modern fantasy depends on Christianity, or at least a Christian-pagan synthesis of some kind, for its forms, conventions, and traditions. This suggests that you could write a novel that embodies a kind of Jewish critique of fantasy — in much the same way that China Miéville’s novels are a kind of Marxist critique of Tolkien, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Mists of Avalon” was a feminist critique of Arthurian-based fantasy, Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is an atheist’s critique of C.S. Lewis, and so on. (And indeed, Weingrad’s essay reads Lev Grossman’s new novel “The Magicians” as a kind of crypto-Jewish critique of Narnia and/or Harry Potter.) But the genre itself will remain irreducably Christian, and a truly Judaic fantasy would have to belong to, or invent, a different genre altogether.

Those two posts seem to run straight at each other! So-called "urban fantasy" is a new idea, actually; we used to call that genre "horror," because it was meant to be horrible. Lately it has become fashionable not to dread vampires, but to envy them. The werewolf was supposed to be a symbol of what it would be like for man to lose his humanity, and be turned back into a beast without reason or self-control. It has been converted, lately, a symbol of what it might mean for a man to be more in harmony with nature. Today we are asked to imagine the joy of running down a deer under a full moon, and drinking its blood.

(Mark will thank me for not quoting Chesterton here, on nature religions: "A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull's blood, as did Julian the Apostate.")

That's fantasy, perhaps, but it's not heroic fantasy. It is the notion of heroism that bothers. It is interesting that so many would rather be monsters than dare be heroes. That says much about how difficult it is to be a hero, and how very difficult to believe in one.

It is harder, I think, for some people to believe in heroes than vampires. That is true even though they might meet a hero in the street, while vampires do not exist.