Brilliant Asian Tolkien Satire: Lord of the Chings

Let me preface by saying that I really love Tolkien and all things Lord of the Rings.

I also enjoy reading critiques of Lord of the Rings. There's a lot of creepy racial undertones to his mythology; dark evil always lurks in the East and South, for example. But my favorite Tolkien critique is by genius British writer Michael Moorcock. It's an essay called "Epic Pooh" that takes a class-based approach and accuses Tolkien of smug Toryism. According to Moorcock, the hobbits are based on a wrongheaded ideal of lower-middle-class English rural life as seen from an urban upper-middle-class perspective. The book containing the essay is recently back in print with some additional writing by a few of my favorite urban fantasy writers.

I just happened to run across an incredibly entertaining exegesis of Lord of the Rings. It was featured on a site called "The Fighting 44s." I was chewing a piece of plum-flavored chewing gum (a special brand my father brings from Japan on visits) and I almost spit it out when I read about the Korean elves. Then I almost swallowed it and choked when I read who the Numenoreans were supposed to be.

In an interesting revelation, we learned in The Silmarillion that when elves are pushed over the edge, when they get angry and suffer intense pain and/or humiliation, they turn into orcs. Why, just the other day, I mistook a Korean for Chinese, and I witnessed a monstrous transformation: his face contorted like a devil-worshipping epileptic, and he started foaming at the mouth. I swear I heard him scream something like, "Che irumeun GORGUL imnida!!!" at which point he proceeded to eat a chubby little mainland Chinese kid in a bone stew. Time will tell if this glorious race disappears into the West with needless plastic surgery and questionable adoption practices.

From "Lord of the Chings" by Dialectic the Stealth MC

This piece is very insulting and very funny and very clever. It was a perfect antidote to that depressingly stupid geisha book review I read yesterday.