JRR Tolkien's Men of Middle Earth | Details

Posted on 2021-02-15

Another language rant

Whether intentional or not, JRR Tolkien used the assumption that "men" means all humans to add a twist to the battle between Éowyn (and Merry) and the Witch-King. The fight itself pays homage to the battle where Beowulf and Wiglaf fight the dragon. In both cases, just when our main protagonist needs an ounce of extra edge over the evil foe, the sidekick, to wacks them from behind.

Side note, Tolkien loved Beowulf. He also reuses an earlier part of the story with the dragon for the Hobbit. Bilbo gets to play the hoard burglar who wakes the wyrm. In Beowulf, that takes place in exposition, but Tolkien must have known what he was borrowing, like he did everything else.

Other side note. When I heard a contemporary commentary about "Men of Middle Earth" and repeatedly call the humans "men" it drives me a little nuts. This isn't some Twilight Zone episode where the main folks in the story turn out to be monsters or androids. We can just safely assume those beings are human.

So was it clever? I assume enough folks when they read "No living man may hinder me" assumed the Witch-King invincible. From here we can venture deeper into pop culture at the "shock" of Samus Aran removing her helmet or back to Macbeth "none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth". Macduff is just an earlier iteration of the same punch line, or in his case probably a stab or a slash. Obviously Tolkien must have known about Willy Shaxpier, and I think it also apparent that most folks agree that in English the word "man" means male human. Otherwise these plays on words, the jokes, are no big deal. So now we've achieved this dual meaning for the word, where many folks are apparently surprised by something we should have already known.

To a lesser detriment of social interaction, I could also see how these equivocations could apply to other words such as day (for the Earch-cycle), day for the daylight hours, and night for the non-daylight hours. Such a punchline along with exclusionary social practices escapes me, but leave it to some comedian to come up with one the day before I post this.

In the past I have suggested we deprecate almost all instances of the word "man" from English when used to mean a person, folk, actor, etc. Let woman, human, man as well as gender-indicators (do we have a word for it?) such as "fireman" (I think the comic books will have a ways to go on this too, but we can Wiglaf them in the foot later) go down into the history books and stay there along with Shuckspeer and the Canterbury Tales. We'll figure it out when we re-read them.

Okay maybe I lied. The other side note is definitely the main reason for this rant. I haven't even discussed any of the possible harm. Tolkien must have known about women's suffrage. He wasn't an idiot and he definitely got out. I don't believe in an in-universe reason. Remove the joke and the dual meaning and there's really no other reason than bad habits.