Julie Beck writes in The Atlantic that though science and fantasy seem to be polar opposites, a Venn diagram of “scientists” and “Lord of the Rings fans” have a large overlap which could (lovingly!) be labeled “nerds.” Several animal species have been named after characters from the books including wasps, crocodiles, and even a dinosaur named after Sauron, “Given Tolkien’s passion for nomenclature, his coinage, over decades, of enormous numbers of euphonious names—not to mention scientists’ fondness for Tolkien—it is perhaps inevitable that Tolkien has been accorded formal taxonomic commemoration like no other author,” writes Henry Gee. Other disciplines aren’t left out of the fun—there’s a geologically interesting region in Australia called the “Mordor Alkaline Igneous Complex,” a pair of asteroids named “Tolkien” and “Bilbo,” and a crater on Mercury also named “Tolkien.”
“It has been documented that Middle-Earth caught the attention of students and practitioners of science from the early days of Tolkien fandom. For example, in the 1960s, the Tolkien Society members were said to mainly consist of ‘students, teachers, scientists, or psychologists,’” writes Kristine Larsen, an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University, in her paper “SAURON, Mount Doom, and Elvish Moths: The Influence of Tolkien on Modern Science.” “When you have scientists who are fans of pop culture, they’re going to see the science in it,” says Larson. “It’s just such an intricate universe. It’s so geeky. You can delve into it. There’s the languages of it, the geography of it, and the lineages. It’s very detail oriented, and scientists in general like things that have depth and detail.” Larson has also written papers on using Tolkien as a teaching tool, and discusses with her astronomy students, for example, the likelihood that the heavenly body Borgil, which appears in the first book of the trilogy, can be identified as the star Aldebaran. “I use this as a hook to get students interested in science,” says Larson. “I’m also interested in recovering all the science that Tolkien quietly wove into Middle Earth because there’s science in there that the casual reader has not recognized."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Archon V2.0 on Monday May 04 2015, @07:43PM
And there's an episode of "The Real Ghostbusters" where the gibberish spell the villain casts quite clearly contains the One Ring's inscription in Black Speech.
Everyone likes to make references and injokes to stuff they enjoyed. I'm not saying there's not value in pointing out the overlap between two groups, but "X often likes Y" seems to be of limited notability without generalizing to either "not-X often doesn't like Y" or "X almost without exception likes Y". Because without reaching a more profound level of connection, you're the guy trying to sell Martha Stewart furry porn. ( https://xkcd.com/1138/ [xkcd.com] )
And what's with the "science and fantasy seem to be polar opposites"? So do science and film noir detectives. What a person enjoys in their downtime and what they do for a living need not be identical; in fact they often aren't. People who start doing their hobby as a job generally stop doing it as a hobby and take up something different.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday May 05 2015, @02:40AM
Yea their hobby shouldn't be their day job, but the point was why LOTR as oppose to say bushcrafting or knitting? What's so specific about LOTR?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @07:45PM
It is also a religious text. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision." But he didn't want to beat you over the head with it, like C.S. Lewis did with Narnia (aslan is god, etc). So that made it a lot more palatable to general audiences.
Seems like nowadays the religious can't help but make faith-based books/movies/music where they put preaching ahead of artistic vision. They should realize the best way to promote the ideals of your religion isn't to evangelize, but to live them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by vux984 on Monday May 04 2015, @09:08PM
Tolkien was a devout catholic; and catholic themes and symbols are certainly present in the text; as any author puts themselves into their work. Tolkien's words in that letter to me do not say what you've interpreted, but rather merely that the themes and symbols were there at first, and that he became himself aware of them 'in the revision'.
But I think that falls well short of him claiming to put them them in by design, purposefully. (Whereas Lewis' Narnia is biblical allegory by intention and by design.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday May 04 2015, @10:07PM
What I find most flawed about Narnia is that Aslan (Jesus) is playing games, and no one seems to get that. Aslan is obviously so powerful that He could have killed the White Witch in an instant, before she did any harm. Why didn't He? If it's because He doesn't want to interfere, then why is He always popping in and interfering? So... He's using the White Witch to test the peoples of Narnia? But the tests are softball tests, and He will step in when one isn't going the way He wants?
Fantasy is a very nice break from having to prove every little detail. It can also be an interesting trip into historic and wrong thinking. If you want your fantasy world to be flat, you can of course do that. However, most fantasy worlds begin to unravel when anyone actually applies some logic and thinking. We have to suspend disbelief, and any good story helps us do that. Narnia is weak on that front, but it still works.
Harry Potter has lots of glaring logic problems. Like, that it is impossible to cause love with magic. Why?! Harry Potter security is also pretty silly. Gringotts uncrackable vaults are always being cracked, polyjuice potion works far too well, the Order of the Phoenix can't keep their headquarters secure, the Ministry of Magic can't secure their offices either, Voldemort's Horcruxes which may be protected by the best security of all, Dumbledore's criticisms notwithstanding, are nevertheless still found and taken, and of course Hogwarts security is routinely broken by children. The Magic of Harry Potter is much more mechanized and detailed than in Lord of the Rings, and that can't help but run into problems. Middle Earth holds up better than most under the assault of logic, but it too has problems.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday May 05 2015, @05:43PM
What I find most flawed about Narnia is that Aslan (Jesus) is playing games, and no one seems to get that.
So, exactly like the bible, then?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gman003 on Monday May 04 2015, @11:54PM
The difference I see between Tolkien and Lewis is that the former built a world that reflected his religion, and the latter built a world that existed only to advance the cause of his religion.
If you had no idea what catholicism or christianity were, you'd learn nothing about it by reading Tolkien. Even if you were told "by the way these books reflect the religion", by the end of it all, you'd still not be completely sure if catholicism was monotheistic or not. And if you skipped the Silmarillion, you wouldn't even be sure if there were gods in Middle-Earth. Once you know what to look for, you can see the signs, but you can't really use it to learn more about Tolkien's religion.
In contrast, Lewis wrote religious propaganda with varying degrees of subtlety. Sit someone down with no knowledge of christianity, and hand them the collected Narnia books, and they'll have a pretty decent grasp of it by the end. They'll even have an idea of how Lewis saw muslims. They wouldn't quite end up being able to distinguish anglicanism from catholicism from eastern orthodoxy, but they'll have figured out the main gist of the religion, and probably have been a bit annoyed by it in the later books, if my personal experience was anything to judge by.
And to be fair, such things aren't restricted to the religious. Many atheist authors get annoyingly preachy - Philip Pullman intended his Dark Materials series to be an atheist parallel to Narnia, and he nailed it right down to throwing out subtlety and just shoving sermons in your face in the last book. Speaking as a catholic-turned-atheist who re-read them both after converting, it's incredibly annoying regardless of whether you agree with the point or not. Tolkien obviously agreed - he ranted sometimes about how people ruined Germanic/Norse mythology by inserting christian parable into them. I doubt he would intentionally put his own religion into Middle-Earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @03:00AM
I'm not religious, my parents never took me to a regular church service (have been to funerals and other special events in churches). I did grow up in an area that was primarily Christian/Catholic, with a few Jews in my schools too, but never paid a lot of attention to what my playmates did when they went to services.
I read the Narnia series as an adult one time when the set fell into my hands. I knew in advance that it was supposed to be very "Christian". Didn't bother me at all, I enjoyed the story and didn't come out converted or anything...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @08:43AM
Examples?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @08:08PM
Names are hard to come up with. Sometimes scientists try to be funny or reference popular culture instead of choosing a descriptive name. Most of the "fun" names for proteins come from developmental biologists.
Developmental biologist names:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_homolog [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_against_decapentaplegic [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog [wikipedia.org]
Molecular biologist name:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAP_kinase_kinase_kinase_kinase [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gman003 on Monday May 04 2015, @09:37PM
Tolkien was a philologist - a linguist who studied languages not as static things, but their evolution, how they lived and changed.
Middle-Earth was the sandbox in which he played with philology. Anyone who's read the books can see how crucial language was to the story. Even the movies showed it.
But languages do not exist in a vacuum. They change in response to events around them, and in response to the culture around them. Tolkien first started with their mythology, because he thought language existed to tell stories. But mythology is what people used to explain the world before science figured it out, and so he ended up creating a world to explain.
Thus you get a variety of cultures, interacting in complex ways, in a world that is mostly plausible by scientific standards. The astronomy is plausible (Venus is quite clearly explained, and Aldebaran is mentioned in passing and unnamed). The politics is plausible. The economics is plausible. The geography/geology is mostly plausible - the mountain ranges don't seem quite right to me, but the stories were written before plate tectonics was widely accepted so that's excusable.
Now, the stories obviously are unrealistic fantasy, in parts. Immortal elves, magic blades, literal gods walking about the earth. But they're the kind of myths that would actually exist in that world - the kind of stories people would make up and tell. That's why the time scale is all wrong - real history might happen in years, but the myths will spread it to decades, centuries. At least one part of the myth (sailing the Straight Road to Valinor) sounds like the kind of myth that would arise after science had disproven the original myth, to explain why both are "right" (in that case, explaining how the earth can be round yet Valinor can be in the absolute west).
Perhaps that's why scientists, and the science-minded, like Tolkien's work. Such people are curious, and Tolkien built an entire world to explore and be curious in.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday May 05 2015, @05:43PM
A very nice post. Having read Tolkein's work multiple times, I sometimes get the feeling that religious folks want to project their desire to have it represented (i.e. religion, any religion) rather than more general concepts which exist in our culture.
Just because someone claims to be a staunch Catholic, does not make it so. Devotion to religious dogma is impossible to prove, no matter how many heretics you burn.
But the linguistic imprints that Tolkein used from the Urgo-Baltic collection of languages is a demonstration of some of the ideals of the Norse myths, all nicely inter-weaved into a world with different "worlds" and magic binding peoples together.
It is why Sauron corrupting Saruman is not a simple "good vs bad" story, as it places wizards with the same weaknesses of man (9 men who became the Nazgul). If you read enough history and overlook the religious propaganda, alot of it looks like Lord of the Rings. The assumption being that "before these times were great empires" and bloodline etc...
Tolkein's books are brilliant because they create an authentic feeling world that echos the existing fantasy upon which our "culture" is based. It doesn't hurt he was a brilliant linguist, because he understood how melodic languages (those that sound sing-song) could be used as part of the oral tradition which was a part of pre-history.
In general anything that breaks the known physical laws is going to be hard to overcome the "really?" instinct, but strong mission statements often overpower humans assessment of the evidence....