"Excuse me: that is a part of my name for it; I do not know what the word is in the outside languages: you know, the thing we are on, where I stand and look out on fine mornings, and think about the Sun, and the grass beyond the wood, and the horses, and the clouds, and the unfolding of the world." #LordOfTheRings
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Derek Caelin 🌱 (derek@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 08-Apr-2024 04:43:01 JST Derek Caelin 🌱 -
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Derek Caelin 🌱 (derek@social.coop)'s status on Wednesday, 22-May-2024 21:52:55 JST Derek Caelin 🌱 My son asked me if the orcs in the #LordOfTheRings were totally evil. I said yes, but I read this passage from my Hammond and Scull reader's companion and now I think I was wrong. A close reading of orc conversation after they discover Frodo's body...
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Derek Caelin 🌱 (derek@social.coop)'s status on Wednesday, 22-May-2024 21:54:05 JST Derek Caelin 🌱 "It is clear that he regards abandoning one's comrades as contemptible, and also characteristic of the other side. And yet only a page later it is exactly what characterizes his own side': Shagrat describes how they found 'old Ufthak still alive, but chose not to interfere with Shelob and her prey. 'Regular orcish trick, Shippey remarks, but notes the implications of the conversation between Gorbag and Shagrat: 'that orcs are moral beings...
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Derek Caelin 🌱 (derek@social.coop)'s status on Wednesday, 22-May-2024 21:54:40 JST Derek Caelin 🌱 ...with an underlying morality much the same as ours. But if that is true, it seems that an underlying morality has no effect at all on actual behaviour. ).How, then, is an essentially correct theory of good and evil corrupted? If one starts from a sound moral basis, how can things go so disastrously wrong?' He points out the relevance of this question to the twentieth century, 'in which the worst atrocities have often been committed by...
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Derek Caelin 🌱 (derek@social.coop)'s status on Wednesday, 22-May-2024 21:55:09 JST Derek Caelin 🌱 ...the most civilized people (pp. 183-4).
Shippey carefully analyzes other fragments of Orc-conversation in The Lord of the Rings and finds that they 'recognize the idea of goodness, appreciate humor, value loyalty, trust, group cohesion, and the ideal of a higher cause than themselves, and condemn failings from these ideals in others....
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Derek Caelin 🌱 (derek@social.coop)'s status on Wednesday, 22-May-2024 21:55:40 JST Derek Caelin 🌱 ...So, if they know what is right, how does it happen that they persist in wrong?' (p. 186). He concludes that Orcish behaviour is also human behaviour, 'and their inability to judge their own actions by their own moral criteria is a problem all too sadly familiar'"
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Derek Caelin 🌱 (derek@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 23-May-2024 00:40:34 JST Derek Caelin 🌱 “Now at last they turned their faces to the Mountain and set out, thinking no more of concealment, bending their weariness and failing wills only to the one task of going on.”
Me when the caffeine bump wears off
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Derek Caelin 🌱 (derek@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 17-Jun-2024 02:10:12 JST Derek Caelin 🌱 "Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."
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