Althoun
Menegroth
Oct 27 2020, 10:46am
Views: 2854
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A few points of clarification ....
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Your argument about the Semitic flavor of Adúnaic oversimplifies Tolkien. Just because the Númenoreans spoke a quasi-Semitic language does not in any shape or form mean Tolkien intended them to be a stand-in for ancient Akkadians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, or Hebrews.
With respect, I feel you're taking me far too literally there and missing my underlying point, which is that Tolkien imbued heterogeneity into his depiction of Númenor and did not portray it as a cipher for "European".
Its a myth of a seed-bearing parent culture that is meant to have influenced many other later civilizations in our primary world, to have been the literal source of all higher knowledge and culture.
As such, I'm saying that Amazon have legitimate scope for depicting Numenoreans as non-Europeans, because the culture Tolkien describes for us is impossible to pin down to anything in the real world exactly.
Also, the ancient Israelites started out as henotheists. The Tanakh refers repeatedly to other gods (Elohim in Hebrew is plural) with Yahweh originally being the only God worshipped by the Hebrews, not that they didn't believe in a council of lower divinities (the Psalms refer constantly to El Elyon taking his seat amongst the other divine beings and judging them). You don't get stricter monotheism until Trito-Isaiah after the Babylonian Exile.
So the Eru Iluvatar / Valar pantheon is discernibly Hebraic and fits with Tolkien's very primitive past setting.
Tolkien would have known this, given that he was a translator of parts of the New Jerusalem Old Testament (Jonah) and an expert linguist.
Now as to Iranians, yes, they speak an Indo-European tongue but to most casual viewers, a Persian is a middle-easterner with a somewhat darker complexion - on average - than your typical Western European phenotype.
As such, viewers will look at Boniadi in her Egyptian or whatever style clothing and think, "exotic foreign, non-European beauty", which is I imagine the look they're going for with her as a kind of Queen of Sheba archetype if she is Numenorean nobility of royalty.
(This post was edited by Althoun on Oct 27 2020, 10:48am)
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