Excellent essay. I think it is slightly too much to call LoTR a "children's story," but I do agree that it's particular way of exploring the nature of good and evil and what it means to act in the face of it makes use of many of the same simplifying assumptions that works explicitly aimed at children do - to think about how you would react if faced with evil, it's helpful to make "evil" explicit and obvious, at least sometimes. But I agree with you that it, and stories like it, have taken on far too much cultural/psychological weight in interpreting the world we actually live in.
I've also long admired the Iliad for this. The movie Troy came out when I was a classics major in college, land I read an interview with the director ahead of time that got me all excited - he stated the themes you cover here as exactly what he wanted to convey - there's good and bad on both sides, it's a very human story, so much of it focuses on the costs and griefs of war. So, imagine my disappointment when the movie turns out to be "Greeks bad (except Achilles, eventually), Trojans good." Such a wasted opportunity. A couple of related works you might find interesting: Honor: A History by James Bowman talks about the nature of honor cultures, and how from the Iliad on, the west has had at least a splinter of skepticism about honor culture built into it. Slightly lighter in nature, Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze is a hyper-ambitious project to synthesize and tell every scrap of story about the Trojan War from Homer to Shakespeare, as a comic book, with accurate bronze age clothing, architecture, and so forth. What I most admire about it as a re-telling is the way it handles the Gods: every vision, visitation, and so forth is reported by a character, so you get neither an omniscient "they're definitely real guys" nor "this guy is making this stuff up to get his way." It's an elegant way to give a "realist" approach while still featuring things like the Judgment of Paris.
Lastly, I think as Americans, we have an extra hangup to deal with here: the history of American Exceptionalism. We have always wanted to be, explicitly, "the good guys." With certain wars (especially the Civil War and WWII), we have really leaned in to this, and it makes it much harder to face and admit that those wars had their share of horror and evil, even on the "good" side, because they were wars and they were conducted by human beings. Tree of Woe has an excellent essay on the ongoing damage this does to our collective psyche, but unfortunately it's behind a paywall: https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/americas-dilemma
Anyway, thanks again for carefully reasoned thoughts and encouragement to our best natures and habits.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2023-10-13 07:23 pm (UTC)I've also long admired the Iliad for this. The movie Troy came out when I was a classics major in college, land I read an interview with the director ahead of time that got me all excited - he stated the themes you cover here as exactly what he wanted to convey - there's good and bad on both sides, it's a very human story, so much of it focuses on the costs and griefs of war. So, imagine my disappointment when the movie turns out to be "Greeks bad (except Achilles, eventually), Trojans good." Such a wasted opportunity. A couple of related works you might find interesting: Honor: A History by James Bowman talks about the nature of honor cultures, and how from the Iliad on, the west has had at least a splinter of skepticism about honor culture built into it. Slightly lighter in nature, Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze is a hyper-ambitious project to synthesize and tell every scrap of story about the Trojan War from Homer to Shakespeare, as a comic book, with accurate bronze age clothing, architecture, and so forth. What I most admire about it as a re-telling is the way it handles the Gods: every vision, visitation, and so forth is reported by a character, so you get neither an omniscient "they're definitely real guys" nor "this guy is making this stuff up to get his way." It's an elegant way to give a "realist" approach while still featuring things like the Judgment of Paris.
Lastly, I think as Americans, we have an extra hangup to deal with here: the history of American Exceptionalism. We have always wanted to be, explicitly, "the good guys." With certain wars (especially the Civil War and WWII), we have really leaned in to this, and it makes it much harder to face and admit that those wars had their share of horror and evil, even on the "good" side, because they were wars and they were conducted by human beings. Tree of Woe has an excellent essay on the ongoing damage this does to our collective psyche, but unfortunately it's behind a paywall: https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/americas-dilemma
Anyway, thanks again for carefully reasoned thoughts and encouragement to our best natures and habits.