Mcsweeney's has a hilarious send up of both academic criticism and the Lord of the Rings. They have another send up of Return of the King in addition to their send up of Fellowship of the Rings. One of the questions that bears asking from their work, however, is whether Frodo and Bilbo are in fact post-de-facto Holocaust revisionists, trying to justify the orcicide of Mordor. I thought that idea, while hilarious, actually is pretty serious at the same time. Is Frodo Baggins a kind of David Irving, saying we "Only killed 500 orcs, not 500,000"? The problem is, Lord of the Rings, while never consciously racist, does have a strong undercurrent of unconscious racism going through its text, and that racism can not easily be denied. So, perhaps in the future, we should have a movie entitled "Judgment at Hobbiton", though unfortunately Spencer Tracy won't be able to star in it. So, I throw this out to you LOTR fans. Are you sure you're getting the real story about Mordor? We only have Frodo's word for it.
P.S. Supposedly Lord of the Rings is the Nazis favorite current reading material. Go figure.
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Frodo was just on a hike with some friends to throw a ring into a volcano and didn't really take part in massive orciside. Aragorn and Gandalf, well that is another story. Bilbo would be guilty of spidicide and maybe third-lunchicide.
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