Hermits
I think the overwhelming response to recent changes by Wizards of the Coast in the ongoing One D&D project something like: “Cool new word! It’s still race science. Maybe worse.” As it should be. It’s been litigated elsewhere before, so I don’t want to throw my hat into the ring because I don’t have anything else much to say about it except that you should read C.W. Mills’ essay “The Wretched of Middle Earth”, about how J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings encodes race fantasy by mythologizing it [1]. Consider that, and then consider how Dungeons & Dragons is a significant degree worse by barely even mythologizing the racial aspects of its fantasy. It’s almost impressive.
On a totally unrelated note, I have been really into my favorite Minecraft survival multiplayer (SMP) server—Hermitcraft. That’s right, motherfuckers: emotionally and mentally I am much more attached to these family-friendly Minecraft YouTubers than to D&D or anything related to it. Their videos have a broad focus especially depending on which specific hermit you watch: some of them are into building huge structures, others are into complex redstone machines, others like to create and run minigames. Whatever drama there is does not revolve around explicit player-versus-player conflict but is mediated through secret conspiracies and market forces (since hermits tend to operate shops where they sell Minecraft items or blocks to each other in exchange for diamonds). It’s all very chill and low-stakes, if sometimes aggressively so—which is when it gets really fun.
Lately the hermits have “invaded” another SMP called Empires after getting stranded there by an intelligent and aggressive computer. Of course, that’s not really true; it’s a collaboration between the members of the two SMP servers since many of them are friends but are not hermits (or on the flip side… emperors? not really sure). Another part of the role-play premise is that the hermits are a totally different “race” from the emperors, being physically small and totally obsessed with the concept of currency. While the hermits were stuck on Empires, they collaborated on building their own “empire”: a massive tower full of automatic farms connected to huge storage systems via water pipes. I thought it was funny seeing that their first impulse was to industrialize for its own sake, even if the emperors are not really interested in buying anything from them. It’s just what hermits would do.
I think that these hermit creatures are a funny and compelling concept. They’re like a counterpoint to the folksy (volksy?) hobbits, who live undisturbed lives with their giant clans drinking ale, smoking weed, and most of all being cautious of outsiders. The hermits are not like hobbits. As their name suggests, they tend to live apart from one another. They spend their time erecting monuments to themselves or designing crazy devices or dramatically altering the landscape, just on a whim. Most of all, they welcome visitors because they always have something for sale (usually raw materials, lumber and stone, or sometimes fine masonry, and less often goods manufactured entirely by machine). Meanwhile, they won’t buy anything that isn’t available in industrial bulk.
What does all this have to do with the hot topic as of late? I like that these hermits are not really a Tolkienian or Gygaxian fantasy race, and certainly not a biological species. They’re just little people you can find somewhere out there—not your typical human people, but like fairies or brownies or whatever. They’re like one of those, except instead of kidnapping you or cleaning your house, they are totally obsessive industrialists. I think they’re cute. That’s all!
Endnotes
[1] Mills, Charles W. 2022-09-08. “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 60.51, pp. 105-35.
Interestingly enough, I have two friends—a Tolkien enjoyer and a Tolkien hater—who agreed with the paper in its broad strokes but thought that some specific examples given by the author were mischaracterized (or just misread) by him. I’m not a Tolkien scholar in either direction, but we all found the paper to be insightful nonetheless.
Another objection I’ve read is that there are human cultures in Middle-Earth which align with the real-world peoples but also which the author argues are mythologized in the fantasy world’s races (elves, dwarves, orcs). I don’t really see an issue with the author’s thesis when there are literal and mythologized depictions of the same people groups in the text, especially when the literal groups are sometimes said to be semi-monstrous hybrids. It seems likely that the humans of Middle-Earth are depicted as a microcosm of the greater conflict between the major fantasy races—and, if Tolkien’s legend is to be “believed” (since Middle-Earth is supposed to be a mythos of our Earth), it is a microcosm which survives even into modernity. I don’t know, that’s just the impression I get. It’s like ultra-racist.
How’s that for a footnote? Goddamn. I just hope that the relitigation of all that will keep the comments quieter. The paper is really good. Read the paper.
From a number of different perspectives, I find this to be a really interesting topic. I'm a big fan of the podcast "Kill Every Monster" where the two hosts and a guest dive deep into the topic of a different DnD monster. They talk about its origins, as well as the cultural implications of the creature.
ReplyDeleteTo a degree, I think they sometimes go too far trying to be culturally aware. It's one thing to point out that a "golem" as a monster takes its name from Jewish mythology. It's another thing entirely to conflate the monster as being anti-semitic just because it's not true to Jewish mythology and that the people who came up with it aren't Jewish. Occam's razor sort of applies here. The most likely outcome is the simplest. Whoever first started using golems in a fantasy monster context were inspired by the idea of a creature made from different parts that could be commanded through magic.
Then again, they also did an episode about hags, and looked at it from the perspective of feminism, where when you think about the depiction of witches in old stories, they were just women who lived in the woods and rejected social norms. But can we really blame people who took a much shallower interpretation of these things just for the opportunity to put familiar words in front of players at a table? Gygax and Arneson probably weren't running hags in their games as an opportunity to hate women.
Just because something has a certain history, it doesn't necessarily mean that everything borne out of that history shares the same characteristics. That's how I feel about "race" in DnD. Whatever you want to call it, it's a chance to look at different aspects of our own humanity. The main problem I have is that in most fantasy, "humans" are still considered the default and aren't given a specialisation of their own. Elves are immortal humans who love nature. Dwarves are short, stocky humans who love digging. Orcs are evil, warlike humans. This is the problem with fantasy races, that we don't differentiate "human" from the others, but differentiate the others from "human".
I think making fantasy races look like a commentary on real life race theory is easy to do and often wrong. Even after a very quick search, I've found things written by several people on the topic of Mills' essay.
http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2022/09/on-mills-on-lotr.html
Even in this short post, some of the inconsistencies in Mills' paper are highlighted. For example, "Tolkien in fact famously showed his lack of sympathy with the latter in a response in 1938 to a German publisher who asked him if he was of Aryan extraction. (Tolkien coldly replied that he was English and not, in fact, Indo-Iranian, none of his known ancestors having spoken Indian or Persian languages, a comment which is fundamentally inconsistent with 'the Aryan Myth'.)"
The fact is that Tolkien's concept of a fantasy world, and Gygax's in turn, was borne out of the styling of Norse mythology, and Norse mythology has different races in it. Orcs represent something like jotun, which does not translate as giants, as many modern definitions would tell us, but actually translates as "monster". Jotun in Norse myth are varied in appearance, size, and attitude.
This has led to the pre-modern interpretation of Orcs as a monstrous race, giving them their characteristic appearances. And then there's the newer interpretation where all races are expected to be as diversified as humanity is in real life, and then somehow the even newer interpretation that having any sort of biological distinction in a fantasy setting is racist.
Sometimes things are just what they are, and reading into them too much isn't helpful any more. As a result, we've had Wizards take away the lore around their races in an effort to try and appease parts of the fanbase. But now the coolest part of a Tabaxi or a Tortle is completely missing.
And it no longer physically means anything to play an Orc because you can spend your ability score improvement in character creation on any ability you want.
Fucking love hermitcraft good taste op
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