Absitively, posolutely nothing.
The Tolkien Society, a literary organization founded in 1969 and dedicated to promoting the works of J.R.R Tolkien, has held an annual academic conference for decades. This year’s conference, to be held virtually via Zoom on July 3 and 4, is on the theme of “Tolkien and Diversity.”
Before we go on, understand that the Tolkien Society’s president was, and formally remains, the great J.R.R. Tolkien himself. His daughter, Priscilla, currently serves as the vice president. At its annual seminar, scholars present academic papers, archival materials are sometimes displayed and discussed, and a serious effort is generally made to understand and appreciate Tolkien’s unique genius. In other words, it’s not some ramshackle fan club for Middle Earth LARPers.
But this year, seminar attendees will be subjected to something different. Papers to be presented include, “Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings,” “The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Antiracism,” and “‘Something Mighty Queer’: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien.” Pretty much the entire program is like this.
The best thing we can say about a Tolkien conference that presents papers on, say, “Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” or “The Invisible Other: Tolkien’s Dwarf-Women and the ‘Feminine Lack,’” is that the scholars in question do not know the first thing about Tolkien or the meaning of his work.
The worst we can say is that they hate Tolkien and his work, and would like very much to destroy it.
The only reason to torture Tolkien’s work like this is not to understand it more deeply but to tear it down. And why would modern scholars want to do that? Because everything that Tolkien was, and everything he wrote, is an affront to the modern secular scholar’s understanding of the world, reality, and the meaning and purpose of life.
That men and women now come to slander and distort and ultimately destroy these sub-creations of Tolkien is also, in a strange way, a testament to his legacy. Like Melkor, they are possessed by dark thoughts of their own imaginings, unlike those of the great Tolkien, and seek not so much to increase their own power and glory, but to bring Tolkien’s down to their grubby station, where everything can be reduced to race and sex and politics.
Well, naturally. As has been said so many times and with unassailable accuracy of the Left, creation is beyond their ken; they are utterly incapable of it. They can only pervert, degrade, defile, and destroy. It’s truly sad that Tolkien’s own daughter would betray her father so profoundly by allowing such an atrocity against his timeless work to be perpetrated, carried out by tittering pygmies unfit to lick his boots.
Daddy Issues permeate a lot of “feminism”.