Khazad-dûm: ‘Fate of the Jews’

 

‘Greatest of all the mansions of the Dwarves,’ says Tolkien in The Silmarillion, ‘was Khazad-dûm, the Dwarrowdelf, Hadhodrond in the Elvish tongue, that was afterwards in the days of its darkness called Moria.’ In Tolkien's invented language, Khazad-dûm means something like ‘that which was dug by the dwarfs’, as in the ‘Old English’ equivalent dwarrow- [= dwarf] -delf [= delved, dug].  

In The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the fellowship pass through Moria, discover that Balin's attempt to resettle the great Dwarvish realm had been defeated, and afterwards flee from orcs and a Balrog. Gandalf dies (or ‘dies’) there and the rest of the fellowship escape eastward back into the sunlight.

So, yes: dwarfs. Dwarves, as Tolkien insisted, idiosyncratically, on pluralising the word. What are they? In the invented world of Middle-Earth, they are a race of creatures, diminutive, hardy, secretive, burrowing and delving, fond of money (gold, jewels, that kind of thing), big-nosed, bearded, ‘natural’ enemies of the Aryan elves, but not in themselves wicked like Orcs, Goblins, dragons, spiders or whatnot. But what are they, beyond this in-world description? Here's Tolkien, writing to Naomi Mitchison in 1955:

I do think of the ‘Dwarves’ like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue. [Letters, 229]

And in an interview with the BBC in 1965, Tolkien said this:

But the Dwarves are, of course, quite obviously, couldn’t you say they remind you of the Jews? All their words are Semitic, obviously-constructed to be Semitic. [quoted in Zak Cramer, ‘Jewish Influences in Middle-Earth’ Mallorn 44 (2006), 9]

Cramer, in that article, notes that the Dwarfish battle cry, as uttered by Gimli at the Battle of the Hornberg—Baruk Khazadl! (‘Axes of the Dwarves!’)—takes a Jewish form: Baruch is Hebrew, as in the blessing that starts the Friday shabbat meal, baruch atah adonai, ‘blessed are you, O Lord God’.

What about Khazad though, the Dwarfish word for Dwarf? Zak Cramer's interesting article doesn't consider this, but it's obvious enough where Tolkien has sourced this word: it's Khazar.

The Khazars were a semi-nomadic Turkic people who from the 6th-century onwards dominated a stretch of land across south-west Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, and Kazakhstan (which nation is named after them). ‘Khazaria became one of the foremost trading empires of the early medieval world, commanding the western marches of the Silk Road and playing a key commercial role as a crossroad between China, the Middle East and Kievan Rus’. And here's the thing: nowadays we understand that the Khazars were a multi-ethnic population, including various Pagan, Tengrist, Jewish, Christian and Muslim populations. But, in the later nineteenth century the assumption in the west was that the Khazars were Jews—were in fact a distinct Jewish people known as the ‘Mountain Jews.’ (Despite their importance, the Khazars did not leave a literary heritage that impinged on Western traditions, and 19th-century European cultural and archeological of the Caucausus was limited). Hence you get statements like this [Henry Howarth's ‘The Khazars’, Travaux de la Troisième Session du Congrès International des Orientalistes (E J Brill 1879), 141]:

This was the intellectual tradition out of which Tolkien worked: for him the Khazars were Mountain Jews. Khazad-dûm, or its homophone Khazar-doom, is the doom of the mountain Jews: their fate, the judgment passed upon them: namely, wealth, glory, greed that unearths a fiery demon from below and their terrible destruction. Isn't all this a touch anti-Semitic? Hard to deny, really.

It's complex, this. Tolkien was not necessarily personally anti-Semitic. His 1938 letter is well known and rightly celebrated: written (perhaps sent, perhaps not: but certainly written) to a German publisher who was prepared to offer good money for the translation rights to The Hobbit, but who required, under the Nazi race laws, that Tolkien confirm that he was not a Jew: ‘I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine ... if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people’. At this point in his life, Tolkien certainly needed the money this translation would have brought him, and there is something splendid in the certitude with which he repudiates racism here. Nonetheless, he was a man of his era, his imagination conceived the world in part in racial terms, and the ‘mountain Jews’ clearly inform his dwarfish, dwarvish, characters.

“Avatar: The Way of Water” (dir. James Cameron, 2022)

 This isn’t a review of Cameron’s second Avatar movie: Avatar: the Way of Water. You don’t need another review of this film, I know. I will just briefly note that it’s basically the same movie as the first one but with added water, that its story is strung together from a series of statements, hard to disagree with but not in themselves inherently dramatic (‘white settlers persecuting Native Americans was bad!’ ‘The Vietnam war was bad!’ ‘Whaling is bad!’ ‘Family is good!’)—and that the storylines are all refried from elsewhere: Moby Dick plus Androcles and the Lion, Apocalypse Now plus Titanic and so on. I will add that the alien-world visuals are very colourful and detailed without being especially immersive or moving or remarkable, that the actions sequences are lively without being in the least bit tense or exhilarating, and that everything in this movie is too long, way too long, way way too long. This movie is too long.

Instead of a review, I am going to notate an annoyance I had concerning the movie’s worldbuilding and the logic of its representation. You are free to dismiss me as a crank, a pedant and a killjoy, for I am, it is true, all three of those things. But I think there’s a larger point here.

So: the ‘avatars’ themselves. As we learned in the first movie, the aboriginal population of the planet Pandora are the Na’vi, 9-ft-tall blue-skinned humanoid aliens, with elf-ears, tails and a mystic-electrical dreadlock with which they can plug-in to other mystical-electrical aspects of their natural world, mind-melding with dragons in order to ride them through the sky and so on. Earthlings have come to this planet to extract its valuable mineral ‘unobtanium’, an element that makes huge chunks of landscape float in the sky. But humans cannot breathe the Pandoran atmosphere. So humanity has developed ‘avatars’, cloned (one assumes) organic bodies shaped like native Pandorans, which human pilots remotely control by lying in special immersive VR tanks.

There’s lots that is handwavy about all this, especially towards the end of the first movie where the human protagonist Jake Sully not only remote-controls his avatar but mystically unifies his consciousness absolutely with it (via the mystic-electricity of Pandora’s world-tree). Thereafter he is not remote-controlling his avatar, his avatar has become his body.

Now, you might well say that there’s no point in objecting to the industrial-grade Cartesian pineal-gland bollocks of this. It’s the set-up for everything, and without it the whole film series couldn’t exist. So let us swallow that camel, for I have a gnat I wish to strain at. 

Avatar 1 pitches heroic Sully against a savagely violent human military officer, played by Stephen Lang, who is set on extirpating the Na’vi and destroying Pandora’s ecosystem. In a review of the first film Nick Mamatas called this character ‘Sergeant McRapeTheEarth, and that’s the name by which I’ve thought of him ever since. He dies at the end of Avatar but rather than gussy-up a new villain for episode 2 Cameron has him resurrected at the beginning of Avatar: the Way of Water. The shift is this: Sgt McRapeTheEarth’s consciousness and memories were previously downloaded onto a flash drive, which means they can be uploaded into a specially grown avatar body.

This is the main dynamic of this second film: McRapeTheEarth’s avatar, not remote-controlled but literally containing the we-might-as-well-say soul of the dead soldier, pursuing Sully’s avatar from forest to seashore, with lots of fighting and explosions and whatnot. At one point McRapeTheEarth, in Na’vi avatar form, goes to the site of the battle from the end of the first Avatar movie and discovers his own corpse, a Na’vi arrow still sticking out of it. He picks up his own skull in his gigantic blue hand in what looks like is going to be a Hamlet moment; but instead of discoursing on mortality he crushes it to dust with one mighty squeeze. Hah!

The camel I have swallowed is: that we have souls (souls which, moreover, can be recorded onto flash drives and uploaded into other bodies) and that the ‘avatar’ bodies are not just fleshy robot suits but actual bodies—in this film Sully has married his Na’vi girlfriend and fathered multiple children upon her, which means his avatar produces sperm and is able to pass on its DNA. Pretty sophisticated tech! But alright, I swallow all that. Here’s what I can’t swallow:

Sam Worthington’s avatar sounds exactly like Sam Worthington did when he was a human, just as McRapeTheEarth returns in Na’vi form with exactly the same voice as he had before. But his voice-box must, surely, be a different shape now, and is certain of much larger dimensions, and his new chest is perhaps twice the capacity of his human one. He ought to speak with a really deep and booming voice. He doesn’t. We can take this as a convention of representation: alright, the Na’vi are our p.o.v. characters, so have them speak ‘like us’. But in that case the least Cameron could do is have the human characters communicate in high-pitched, squeaky, pinky-perky Tiny Tim voices. I honestly feel cheated that he didn’t do this.

Part of my problem is that the movies make such ostentatious show of attending to questions of ‘verisimilitude’. All the helicopters and giant boats and submarines are scrupulously designed to work just as such machines would work if they were real. All that hyper-highdef SFX, all these intricately interlocking thought-through ecologies, and yet no squeaky-voiced homo sapiens? Pff.

The more I thought about this, the more it irked me. It’s the pea underneath the hundreds of Cameronian mattresses that prevents me from getting a good night’s sleep—and how I wanted to sleep, sitting through the three hundred straight hours of this interminable movie. It leads to other problems. So, the reason humans have returned to Pandora for Film 2 is no longer to mine floaty unobtainium, but to hunt the whales, or the alien whale equivalents, which they do ruthlessly and cruelly, even though they know the ET-whales are highly intelligent, sensitive and emotional beings. The reason for the hunting is that the spacewhales produce an amber liquid inside their giant brains that, we are vouchsafed in a gobsmacking aside, reverses human aging.

This means that Earth has (a) the technology to keep our bodies endlessly young, and (b) the technology, as per Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon books, to download human consciousness and then upload it into new bodies, combined with (c) the ability to grow cloned bodies so close to the original that they generate their own sperm and, one presumes, eggs. Add these together and Earth has solved death and created immortality. That’s the story, right there. If there’s something ‘in’ the spacewhale’s brainjuice that reverses aging, then find out what it is, synthesise it, and give it to everyone, keeping a store of cloned bodies and downloaded consciousnesses to cover occasional deaths by accident and so on: everyone’s immortal. Why are we piddling around in these lagoons spearing sushi with a stick? We’re gods now!

This, though it seems to me a major worldbuilding hole, doesn’t irritate me so much as the voice thing.