Posted on 12/31/2025 1:21:07 PM PST by River Hawk
Students at the University of Nottingham are upset after a history course labeled J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as racially offensive.
The controversy comes from a module called Decolonising Tolkien et al, taught by historian Dr. Onyeka Nubia, which examines how British literature has historically reflected racial bias. According to course materials, darker-skinned characters in Tolkien’s works, including orcs and other groups, are depicted as morally corrupt, while lighter-skinned characters are shown as virtuous. The module argues these depictions tie into a long tradition of racial stereotyping.
The course also examines how Tolkien’s Eastern characters, such as Easterlings, Southrons, and the men of Harad, are portrayed as inherently evil.
The materials claim that Tolkien’s fictional races carry echoes of “anti-African antipathy,” portraying Africans as “the natural enemy of the white man.” Students are taught to consider literature through the lens of decolonization, analyzing established works from non-Western or non-white perspectives.
Dr. Nubia has written about how Africans lived in medieval England but were often erased from literature, and the course also extends its critique to C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, highlighting orientalist depictions of the Calormen. Shakespeare has also been discussed, with Dr. Nubia stating that his plays helped create an “illusion” of a racially homogenous England by omitting references to Africans.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Ah...shut up!
If someone is looking to be offended, they will be successful 100% of the time.
Any course with “Decolonizing” in the title is a solution looking for a problem.
While I don’t doubt that orcs may have been originally elves, the problem, however, is that elves only reproduce to replace themselves at a near 1-1 ratio.
The only way that orcs can multiply in numbers is if their stock they draw upon were originally humans. That doesn’t contradict the idea that some orcs were originally elves until they got twisted.
I personally think that Tolkein was slowly working back towards the idea that orcs were a form of artificial life. Life can only come from Eru. No matter how close a being can replicate living functions, even reproduce. If that imitation of life was not endowed with life by Eru, it’s not a lifeform even if it is reproducing.
Orcs that were based on elves go to the Halls of Mandos when they die. Orcs that were based on man go to where man wings when he dies. Orc that do not have those origins cease to exist when they die, because they were not living beings.
So what!
What has this got to do with the price of rice in China?
Go ahead, ask me if I give a care.
Possibly. Tolkien said something to the effect that evil cannot create, it can only mock. I think he realized that there are moral problems with creating a whole race that is inherently evil by design, and didn’t quite know how to explain it. But a person shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that LOTR is based on mythology, like these woke lib virtue signalers seem to.
It is always all about them.
I think LOTR is full of moral truths, even if wrapped up in a mythological story.
Yes, Morgoth and Sauron cannot create life, so they either have to rely on stock that is life. Elves and man. Or they have to resort in arcane engineering by starting with non-life, like a rock, and molding it over time to imitate life. No matter how well that rock is made to imitate life, it is not life.
I think the context of mocking is not meant to be ridiculing, but just a poor imitation of the original. Like a five year old’s attempt to paint Rembrandt.
However, I agree with another poster who said that a modern writer would have used Somalis as a model instead.
I’ve imagined orcs to be more Slavic, eastern European.
See my tagline.
To “mock”, in this context, is to make a crude resemblance of. An inauthentic copy. So orcs were mockeries of elves or men, etc. A lot of Morgoth’s “monsters” were fellow fallen angelic beings—Balrogs and so forth. But others, such as Orcs, were mockeries. But then again, Tolkien was often not very specific and it probably shouldn’t be scrutinized too closely anyway. It spoils the magic.
Ah, yes, Elric of Melnibone’! :) I had to reach WAY back for that! I’ve got a couple of those books on a shelf somewhere around here.
Nick Shirley disturbed America's Orcs and Swarthy Men from their feasting at Minnesota's government trough - will a Theoden emerge to ride in and smash them completely?
So that’s who started the whole #MeToo thing.
They’re just mad that they can’t read.
,,, Tolkien was a visoinary. He knew that Dr. Onyeka Nubia would need to make a living in a sheltered workshop, so the Lord of The Rings was written expressly for that reason. :)
I wouldn’t call what he did “writing”.
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