Also, they had mayors and stuff, a VERY clear class division and were technically under the rule of Gondor after the Northern Kingdom fell but Gondor didn’t really have the resources or urge to do any ruling over there. Once Aragorn was in they were essentially an autonomous zone under military protection in exchange for maintaining the local roads and bridges.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    Gondor had kings, they just hadn’t had one in a long time because they thought the line died out. That’s why Denethor sits next to the throne and not on it, he was just the Steward. As Isildur’s heir, Aragorn had the “rightful claim” to the throne. It’s actually encouraging that he waited until after the evil threat was destroyed to take power.

    • huf [he/him]
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      81 year ago

      aragorn spent his youth travelling in the east, stirring up discord against denethor. he also spent time in gondor, learning its ways.

      then he used the war he stirred up to coup the rightful steward.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 year ago

        Rightful King > Rightful Steward

        A King can’t coup a Steward, that’s like saying your regular teacher “got the sub fired”, when all they did was come back from vacation. And besides, Denethor has only Denethor to blame for his fate, the dude was a prick and a psychopath who killed himself while trying to kill his own son.

        • huf [he/him]
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          1 year ago

          lol who says he’s the rightful king? where’s the proof he’s even descended from the last king? denethor can point to an unbroken line of rule from kings to ruling stewards, all in minas tirith, all witnessed and documented. aragorn? well, some scruffy old hobo says he’s the direct male line descendant of the last king of arnor. which went tits up more than a thousand years ago. now, if someone walked up to your city claiming they were the rightful king cos his great-great-great-great-… granddad used to be king of some other kingdom (that he lost, lol) but he swears it was a high king, so it counts as a king of your kingdom too… uh, you’d tell them to fuck off. him and his hobo friend. and dont get me started on elrond, he’s absolutely CIA. pulling strings from far away.

          aragorn got to be king cos he “won” the fake war he himself instigated and his “friends” just happened to arrange the death of the current ruler. there’s no proof sauron even exists, wake the fuck up.

          what you have to realise is that ALL the texts we have from the period are actually from aragorn’s reign, and he’s obviously falsified a lot of it to make it look like he had a legit claim for his coup. it’s just propaganda.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 year ago

            Then where’s Denethor’s proof of lineage? Remember, you can’t reference anything in any of the texts, since they’re all falsified.

            • huf [he/him]
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              11 year ago

              i didnt say you cant trust anything. obviously stuff that ordinary citizens of gondor could verify had to be correct

              • @[email protected]
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                21 year ago

                Yeah, cuz I’m sure the ordinary citizens of Gondor are doing a lot of reading, lololol. However I am actually sure there were plenty of witnesses to the fucking ghost army Aragorn controlled by rite of the oath sworn to his ancestors, not to mention his unnatural age and healing abilities. Denethor couldn’t even heal his own fractured psyche (another thing I’m sure many people in Gondor were actually well aware of).

  • Candidate [he/him]
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    181 year ago

    Thing is, the Shire was a hereditary monarchy, they just didn’t call their ruler a king - it was Thane. Pippin was in line for and did eventually inherit the title.

    There’s also Buckland, the small offshoot of the Shire ruled by the Master of Buckland, and of course this title was inherited by Merry.

    • CloutAtlas [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      Tom Bombadil is the grillpilled wife guy and is therefore unaffected by the the threat of Sauron, the temptation of the ring, or the plight of the Fellowship.

      grillman

  • davel [he/him]
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    341 year ago

    This tickled something in my brain, and I finally figured out what: Последний кольценосец

    The Last Ringbearer is a 1999 fantasy fan-fiction book by the Russian paleontologist Kirill Yeskov. It is an alternative account of, and an informal sequel to, the events of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. […]

    Critics have stated that the book is well-known to Tolkien fans in Russia, and that it provides an alternate take on the story. Scholars have variously called it a parody and a paraquel. They have interpreted it as a critique of totalitarianism, or of Tolkien’s anti-modern racial and environmental vision coupled with a destruction of technology which could itself be called totalitarian. The book contains sections of Russian history, and while it says little directly on real-world politics, it can be read as an ironic riposte to American exceptionalism. In 2001 the book earned the Strannik Literary Award in the “Sword in the Stone” (Fantasy) nomination.

    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]OP
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      261 year ago

      I’ve really gotta read that. I’m a giant Tolkien nerd and interact with some of well known Tolkien academics online and have added ‘Do normal spiders exist in middle earth or are they all descendants of Ungoliant?’ To the discussion with a degree of pot stirring. I’m also generally a pretty sympathetic to the orcs and have some criticism regarding elves.

      • Florn [they/them]
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        71 year ago

        I was positive that regular spiders do exist and were servants of Vairë the Weaver, but I guess I was extrapolating from a line that refers to her weavings as “webs”.

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]OP
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          21 year ago

          The ‘spiders’ that descend from ungoliant can make webs. But shelob for example is said to have compound eyes, a thick hide (weird way to describe an exoskeleton) and a stinger on the thorax. Spiders don’t have these

          • Florn [they/them]
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            31 year ago

            Shelob herself is only ever described as “most like” a spider.

            I guess it’s fair to say that because Middle Earth is a fictional time and place in our world that real spiders do exist, but that they don’t appear in canon

            • GalaxyBrain [they/them]OP
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              31 year ago

              I’m guessing the intent is they gradually diminished into the lil guys we know and Tolkien just didn’t know much about bugs. Whether he was afraid of spiders was addressed by him in a letter, since both of his really popular books have giant spooky spiders. I guess he didn’t have any specific fear of spiders, he wasn’t a fan but wasn’t bothered by them. He just had a rough idea for the whole ungoliant thing, the broad strokes came into The Hobbit spiders and then Shelob kinda reconnected it to the greater mythology.

      • combat_brandonism [they/them]
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        181 year ago

        It’s a page-turner, but what no one ever says about it in the summaries is that it’s like a geo-political spy thriller set in middle earth after the books. It’s so good and not at all what I thought it’d be going in.

        while it says little directly on real-world politics

        fucking baby-brained summary I expect nothing less from natopedia

    • i’ve heard of it and it does sound interesting, but i’ve always been somewhat wary of the LOTR extended universe since being burned by the silmarillion (its so long and my dyslexic ass has a job 😭) - how knowledgeable about middle earth do you have to be to enjoy it? i loved the original books but i’m a bit of a noob when it comes to fingolfin/feanor/etc

  • ChaosMaterialist [he/him]
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    131 year ago

    I’m a little more sympathetic to the Hobbits. Here you had a stable kin-based society in a part of the world that nobody cared about until some Fed from a far off Western Superpower (that destroyed an entire continent and sunk another island nation under the sea, mind you) is meddling around.

    • huf [he/him]
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      71 year ago

      they’re settler colonists. where are the original inhabitants of the shire? bit suspicious, eh?

      • ChaosMaterialist [he/him]
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        51 year ago

        The timeline says they were “allowed” to move there by original settler-colony of Arnor, which suggests displacement since Tolkien is a known Western sympathizer.

  • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]
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    1 year ago

    Hmm. IMO it’s kind of weird to assume all hobbits were ideologically identical. They clearly didn’t establish a completely anarchist society for themselves, but there was also a lot of resistance to and outright ignoring of authority among them. They didn’t really give a shit if they were technically under the rule of some empire, and at least some of them didn’t seem to give a shit about what the Mayor had to say. I don’t think we got much of an insight into their economic relations.

    It’s true the ones who went adventuring were—or turned into—some pretty gross bootlickers, though.

    • HexBroke [any, comrade/them]
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      81 year ago

      I just say horrible things about our anarchist comrades and when anyone has any issues I whine about the use authority

      Wrecker? I’ve never met her in my life

    • Owl [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      I could call you a spineless weasel who’s trying to imply an insult to our anarchist comrades without getting in trouble, but I won’t.