Posted on 12/02/2002 2:42:43 PM PST by The Iguana
Wraiths and race
What with the dark skin, broad faces and dreadlocks, it's a wonder Tolkien didn't give his baddies a natural sense of rhythm, says John Yatt, examining Middle Earth's suspect racial undertones
Monday December 2, 2002
It was the same with The Phantom Menace - I had no choice. When part of your childhood is playing down the road on a big screen with surround sound and popcorn, there's no escape. But as the wonder of discovering that there was more to New Zealand than sheep wore off, something began to worry me.
Maybe it was the way that all the baddies were dressed in black, or maybe it was the way that the fighting uruk-hai had dreadlocks, but I began to suspect that there was something rotten in the state of Middle Earth.
Perhaps Dubya's war on terror is making me a bit uneasy, or maybe it's just good old-fashioned Guardian-reading imperial guilt, but there was something about watching a bunch of pale faces setting off into the east to hack some guys with dark faces into little bits that made me feel a little queasy.
When I got home I dug out my copy of The Lord of the Rings from a box somewhere - okay, so I pulled it straight off the shelf - and found there was worse to come. The Two Towers is the story of the battle between Isengard and Rohan. In the good corner, the riders of Rohan, aka the "Whiteskins": "Yellow is their hair, and bright are their spears. Their leader is very tall." In the evil corner, the orcs of Isengard: "A grim, dark band... swart, slant-eyed" and the "dark" wild men of the hills. So the good guys are white and the bad guys are, erm... black.
This genetic determinism drives the plot in the most brutal manner. White men are good, "dark" men are bad, orcs are worst of all. While 10,000 orcs are massacred with a kind of Dungeons and Dragons version of biological warfare, the wild men left standing at the end of the battle are packed off back to their homes with nothing more than slapped wrists.
We also get a sneak preview of the army that's going to be representing the forces of darkness in part three. Guess what: "Dark faces... black eyes and long black hair, and gold rings in their ears... very cruel wicked men they look". They come from the east and the south. They wield scimitars and ride elephants.
Perhaps I'd better come right out and say it. The Lord of the Rings is racist. It is soaked in the logic that race determines behaviour. Orcs are bred to be bad, they have no choice. The evil wizard Saruman even tells us that they are screwed-up elves. Elves made bad by a kind of devilish genetic modification programme. They deserve no mercy.
To cap it all, the races that Tolkien has put on the side of evil are then given a rag-bag of non-white characteristics that could have been copied straight from a BNP leaflet. Dark, slant-eyed, swarthy, broad-faced - it's amazing he doesn't go the whole hog and give them a natural sense of rhythm.
Scratch the surface of Tolkien's world and you'll find a curiously 20th-century myth. Begun in the 1930s, published in the 1950s, it's shot through with the preoccupations and prejudices of its time. This is no clash of noble adversaries like the Iliad, no story of our common humanity like the Epic of Gilgamesh. It's a fake, a forgery, a dodgy copy. Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain.
But it's the same with The Attack of the Clones - I've got no choice. Maybe the fizzy pop will go to my head, maybe the Pearl and Dean music will be able to work its magic, but I'm worried that the popcorn is going to taste a bit wrong - I'm worried that childhood isn't going to be quite so much fun the second time around.
email: johnyatt@yahoo.com
Dear Sir:
Re: Your "Wraiths and race" column of 2 December:
Your conclusion that "The Lord of the Rings is racist" is of course hardly original though no less tedentious for all that, as you have no doubt already been informed in varying terms by a fair assortment of fans of Professor Tolkien and his works as you sifted through your "Inbox" today.
I am not sure what I might add to what others might have offered, save to suggest the dangers of literal-mindedness in approaching literature, especially of this nature - which is to say looking hard for hair in your soup until you find it, even if it turns out to be a bit of celery. More likely it's just the imperial guilt.
Tolkien dealt in archetypes in his fictional work, and those archetypes happened to be drawn mostly from those cultural mythos with which he was most familiar: what he termed the "Northern World," from the early history of northwestern Europe. It is no surprise therefore that his protagonists should be mainly what we might understand to be white or even "Nordic," any more than Chinua Achebe's characters end up being black, or that Kirosawa confined himself with East Asian archetypes. Even so the picture ends up a good deal more complicated when a discerning eye is employed. If "Nazi" or other white supremacist hierarchies were employed we might expect to find that the more nearly Nordic-appearing the characters or peoples, the more they might appear in positive light or at least at the top of the food chain. Yet we find that the dark-haired (if fair-skinned) Numenoreans/Gondorians sit at the head of Tolkien's cultural table (as it relates to Men), more so than the Anglo-Saxon-inflected blonde warriors of Rohan.
How Dwarves, Elves, Wizard, or Hobbits or other imaginary creations fit into the typical racist cosmology is yet to be explained, especially given that good, bad, and even mixed examples of all are available throughout Tolkien's relevant works - orcs and other created manifestations of evil being the exceptions to the rule, for reasons that I would think self-evident to anyone familiar with the study of Faerie. In the end you'll have to account for how Saruman the White (what a name!) ends up firmly on the villianous side of the ledger while the swarthy skinned and unattractive appearing Ghan Buri Ghan of the Druadan (as related early on in Return of the King) ends up with a better c.v than we might expect from ubermenschen. Or why the Semitic-seeming Easterlings and Southrons (dreadlocks are nowhere mentioned) are pardoned and freed after defeat rather than bloodily dispatched a la The Turner Diaries or similar racist dystopias.
There is certainly a popular school of thought that to be white is to be racist; and if racism is part and parcel of the northern European cultural milieu from which Tolkien emerged and made his life's study then perhaps we are left to conclude that he is guilty as charged. But before leveling the verdict I might offer the following correspondence (dated July 25, 1938) by Tolkien in regards to Allen & Unwin's negotiation of publication of a German translation of The Hobbit with Rutten & Loening of Potsdam, who inquired whether Tolkien was of "arisch" (aryan) origin:
"I must say the enclosed letter from Rutten and Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of "arisch" origin from all persons of all countries?
"Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestatigung (although it happens that I can), and let a German translation go hang. In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of any Jewish blood as necessarily honorable; and 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.
"You are primarily concerned, and I cannot jeopardize the chance of a German publication without your approval. So I submit two drafts of possible answers."
Of the two drafts mentioned by Tolkien, only one was preserved in the Allen & Unwin files (it is unclear which version was finally sent), from which the relevant excerpt was as follows:
"Thank you for your letter...I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But 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. My great-great-grandfather came to England from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject - which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forebear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride."
All of this and more (including some highly critical comments of South African society) can be found in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter (published by Houghton Mifflin).
All this might merely mean that Tolkien's racism was merely unconscious (as it so often can be), but it might also suggest that the offered analysis deserves at least a fair hearing if not the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise I can only suggest that the reckless imputation of racism is generally as obnoxious as the attitude itself.
Respectfully,
(Name)
Kansas City, MO
I don't have a copy handy, but if I remember correctly the Haradrim were definitely dark, with the men of Far Harad described as black-skinned. I envisioned them, while reading, as incorporating all the varieties of Mediterranean to Hamitic to Negroid peoples presently encountered throughout the Middle East and Africa.
I don't recall any specific mention of the "race" of the Easterners. My mental picture of them is of a sort of cross between the Ostrogoths and the Vikings. They were bearded and fought with axes. (Maybe they had dwarven blood?!)
Ahem.
Has this moron read the Iliad?
The entire story is based on Achilles' pitching a fit because Agamemnon takes his captive Briseis away from him before he gets to rape her. Note that Agamemnon doesn't want to protect Briseis from Achilles. He just wants to be the one who rapes her. This is all portrayed as perfectly normal, even admirable, behavior.
I really don't see why such behavior qualifies as more "noble" than the characters in LOTR.
Orcs are not a "race." They're a separate species. There is nothing racist in an assumption that an alien, non-human species might be inherently evil, by our standards.
Or maybe not. Saruman apparently cross-bred them with men. Although it apparently required magical intervention to work, since he seems to be the first to have done it.
Inherent evil would be especially possible in a race or species specifically bred to be so. Is he trying to say that in, say 1,000 years, it would not be possible to intentionally breed a race or species that is inherently inimical to all others?
The Dunlendings were not black. Their only difference from the Rohirrim was their black hair -- like the men of Gondor.
I don't recall any specific mention of the "race" of the Easterners. My mental picture of them is of a sort of cross between the Ostrogoths and the Vikings. They were bearded and fought with axes. (Maybe they had dwarven blood?!)
You are probably not far off the mark.
I always pictured the Southrons as more or less Arabic: dark skinned, dark haired,but not necessarily black. But Tolkien isn't so precise in his description. Who knows?
Not that this should stop Mr. Yatt from hauling down his tablets from Sinai.
That reminds me of a gawdawful cartoon I once owned called Fire and Ice, which was produced by Ralph Bakshi (who also tried to do a rotoscoped LOTR back in the 1970s). A reviewer described the F&I monsters as "obvious Negro stereotypes" (this was the early 1980s).
The monsters were giant, hunched over, fanged, clawed, and covered from head to toe in glowing long green fur.
Good point.
The author actually has a point with regard to the Haqradrim (especially) and Easterlings, although not a very good one. But Orcs aren't human.
The Wild Men:
The Easterlings: (Their hats look a bit Asian in design)
A sample Orc (what a character!): (Anyone who would compare this to a race of men based on it's color is indeed racist, IMHO)
![]() Ring Ping!! |
I thought everyone got this out of their system last year. Oh well. Here we go again...
Subject: Lord of the Rings
"Perhaps I'd better come right out and say it. The Lord of the Rings is racist."
I think I'll come right out and say what I'm thinking, myself.
You're a moron.
Normally I'm more respectful whenever replying to articles, but I didn't feel such a need after reading the stteaming pile of turd which I just read penned by yourself. You're a complete, blithering idiot who needs to find something more productive to do with his time if you're spending so much time psycho-analyzing books and movies that you see racist undertones where none exist. Get a life, you inbred quack.
(Name)
Miami, FL USA
When I look at an orc, I see a nasty, slimy spiny creature not even remotely human. You see black people? I think you have a racism problem you should look inward about. Don't blame Tolkien for it.
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