PADDLES OUT, FRIENDS; IT IS TIME TO BEAT THE ROTTEN CARCASS OF A DEAD WHITE MAN
Back in June last year I wrote Deconstructing Pointy-Eared White Supremacists. It was one of the most linked things I’ve ever written, even though I didn’t think it addressed anything new or broke new ground. I thought I was, frankly, belaboring the obvious.
I was wrong, of course. There was a number of interesting discussions off the site (some of which I joined). But mostly what happened was a flurry of assorted man-child types who came in, absolutely hysterical, to defend Tolkien from charges of… well, anything actually. It’s that thing again with rabid fanboys thinking that their favorite thing being called -ist or -phobic means it’s a personal assault on their sterling characters–which compels them to not only get particularly shrieky, but also to defend their neckbeard icon in such a way as to make it obvious that they are racist, sexist, and homophobic.
In any case, I’m not interested in further debating why/how Tolkien was a racist, sexist bore: they are evident things, and if you have to ask chances are good you are of the “BUT HE COULD NOT POSSIBLY BEEEEEE” camp. I’m more interested in the wonky mental gymnastics people perform in order to make him out to be the most progressive man of his time (lolno), and the cliches people bust out to further said wonky mental gymnastics. Some of them are conveniently listed here. Please imagine the following parts in bold are spoken by a manchild in a high-pitched, obnoxious voice to best capture the experience of engaging with one of them.
He wasn’t racist! LOOK AT THIS ONE SCENE WHERE SAM FEELS SORRY FOR AN EASTERLING MAN, god!
This is the passage in question:
It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.
Now please consider that this is the one single solitary passage in the entire trilogy. They comprise of seventy-seven (77) words. What is the total word count for Lord of the Rings as a whole? In the region of 473,000 words, if the google search I did is any indication.
That’s 0.01628% of the text.
Put that against the rest of the work where these faceless hordes under Sauron, who are of course not Caucasian, are portrayed as either, well, faceless hordes or misguided primitives who need the guidance of the white men to renounce their worship of Sauron, because Whitey is the Mighty, and Whitey knows best. Compare, as well, Tolkien’s thoughts on Jews:
The dwarves of course are quite obviously – wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.
Now consider the dwarves in The Hobbit:
The most that can be said for the dwarves is this: they intended to pay Bilbo really handsomely for his services; they had brought him to do a nasty job for them, and they did not mind the poor fellow doing it if he would; but they would have done their best to get him out of trouble, if he got into it, as they did in the case of the trolls at the beginning of their adventures before they had any particular reasons for being grateful to him. There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much.
“The dwarves of course are quite obviously Jews,” eh?
For further reading, check out Abigail Nussbaum’s review of The Hobbit.
Collolary: BUT TOLKIEN ONLY MEANT THEIR LANGUAGE!1!! This requires the aforementioned mental gymnastics. One does not say “wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of Jews?” when you mean to say “I constructed their language to sound Semitic.” I promise, o neckbeard of little literacy.
He meant to Europeans! God! EYE OF THE BEHOLDER OKAY? Get some perspective, you PC police!
This originates from people pointing out this wonderful, charming quote from one of Tolkien’s letters where he describes orcs like so:
they are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.
According to fanboys, this is not racist in any way whatsoever, and if you think it is, you are applying modern sensibilities to a man of… uhm… the twentieth century. Which is, like, totally hundreds of years ago, man.
Here’s a newsflash, assholes: even in that time saying something like that in public wouldn’t have gotten you kudos. Tolkien’s time? Not exactly the era of the British Empire. Considering that Tolkien himself was a European, what does his acknowledgment of “to Europeans” mean exactly? A tacit admission that he found “Mongol-types” repulsive? Was he under the impression that everyone in Europe was white? Hmm. A bit sheltered of him, isn’t it? One might even say ignorant. One might even say… racist.
He didn’t like fascists! He said so! He said he hated apartheid! That makes him NOT racist! HAH TAKE THAT.
Relevant quotes are:
I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
And:
Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge–which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light
There’s also an “I have many Jewish friends” clause in there too.
Yelling as shrilly as possible that you are not a sexist, or a racist or a homophobe, does not necessarily mean you aren’t one. For one thing, such declarations predicate on an assumption that you are self-aware. Unfortunately, straight white males are not usually very self-aware. You may think the more repulsive thoughts about Asians possible, and you’d still say “But I can’t be racist! My best friend is a chink!” or “I can’t be racist, I married a Thai woman!” You may defend to the death your right to use “cunt” as an insult, and you’ll still believe you are a Great Defender of Equal Rights. (Yes, I told him I was going to get an iron-toed boot and kick him in the cock after he said that he believed misandry, heterophobia and anti-white racism were real things and just as bad as misogyny, homophobia and actual racism. I regret nothing.)
Tolkien was, in a lot of ways, a proto-neckbeard. He thought he was a pretty progressive guy who would never ever think a single racist thought, but there is a reason neo-Nazis adored (and likely continue to adore) his books; there’s a reason the British National Party did (and for all I know, still do) make Lord of the Rings required reading. It’s not an isolated incident–multiple white supremacist groups honestly thought his works endorsed their principles. While I doubt Tolkien consciously believed all Jews should be eradicated, his treatment of his Semitic analogue in his own fiction is telling. Likely he never thought “women’s only place is on the pedestal,” yet that’s where his female characters generally end up. In short, authorial intent doesn’t matter. The neckbeards of today likewise think of themselves as progressive, liberal, and open to gay marriage–but spend your time in the company of any neckbeard and you quickly realize they are some of the most regressive people you’ll find outside of an Aryan Nation meeting. After a while bleating that you can’t possibly be racist or sexist or prejudiced in any way becomes protesting way too bloody much.
LOTR promotes racial harmony! I mean, elves and dwarves MAKE FRIENDS OKAY LOOK LEGOLAS AND GIMLI.
Consider this guy:
Well, we know someone got all A’s in her womyn’s studies curriculum. [...] Lewis, like most racial panderers, reads race into everything under the sun but there is no place race is more inappropriate to discuss than in reference to this epic work of creative genius.
[...]
Perhaps it is really multicultural envy that causes Lewis to praise The Matrix for its African and Asian characters as any honest examination would cause her to admit that the figures she mentions in the film are all members of the same species; whereas those in Middle Earth she describes as being “whiter than white” are often members of differing species. [...] Why does Lewis hold white males in such contempt?
This is an article from 2004 from what I assume is a Men’s Right Movement website. But I’ll bet you anything that these views are both current and held by neckbeards who think they are anti-racist, anti-sexist, and perfectly enlightened saints. A few I have engaged pulled this very same card:
Again: you are counting nonhumans as “white” simply because they have superficial resemblances to human Caucasians. Your obvious underlying assumption is that “whiteness” and “blackness” transcend SPECIES, which is far more racist than anything in Tolkien’s world.
Within Tolkien’s world, which is the context in which the characters live and which governs the assumptions on which they operate, Humans and Elves have separate origins (far more separate, in fact, than those of Caucasians and Negroes in the real world) and very rarely interbreed (there are ballad-cycles sung for millennia about the rare exceptions to this rule).
[...]
Compared to these differences of origin, fate and appearance, the minor fact that the Elf might be light-skinned (and we have no evidence, btw, that all Elves are light-skinned) and you were light-skinned would be a trivial resemblance. To put it in real-world terms, some chimpanzees are pink-skinned and some are black-skinned on their faces and palms, owing to melanin variations. Do you imagine that the pink-skinned chimps are closer kin to Caucasians and the black-skinned ones closer to Negroes, on the basis of this single trait? No? Then why do you imagine the same thing about Elves and Dwarves, on the basis of the SAME trait?
I don’t think this requires any commentary.
Tolkien was writing an Anglo-Saxon mythology, of course everyone is white!
This is valid only if you believe there have never been any POCs whatsoever in Europe or specifically England. It requires a staggering amount of ignorance, but then people who defend Tolkien rabidly tend to be burdened with staggering amounts of ignorance. This, incidentally, is what Tolkien actually said:
I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own, not of the quality that I sought, and found in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish, but nothing English, save impoverished chapbook stuff.
So “English” to Tolkien was… what? All white, all the time?
Tolkien wasn’t sexist, Eowyn and Luthien are STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS!1!
Ah, yes. You know, Eowyn and Luthien, women who are entirely defined by men? Luthien, the one who gave up her immortality for a man? When in the entire history of Middle-earth no male elf ever gave up his immortality for a woman.
There’s no end to the creepiness of how women are treated by Tolkien’s narrative. Let’s run down some of the major ones (if I miss any, feel free to contribute):
Luthien - performs heroics for a man (Beren), dies for a man; overcomes Morgoth by dancing and singing, which is peculiarly gendered and sexual (hurr hurr! The only way a woman may defeat a man…). When she passes away, the world mourns her not because she is powerful and heroic: it mourns her because she was the most beautiful woman. She’s so much on a pedestal that it becomes extra special creeptastic when you realize that she’s meant to be Tolkien’s tribute to his wife.
Eowyn – performs heroics because she crushed on a man (Aragorn), almost dies defending a man (Theoden), speaks to other women about once (in the House of Healing), gives up the sword for a man (Faramir) who treats her like a child.
‘What do you wish?’ he said again. ‘If it lies in my power, I will do it.’
‘I would have you command this Warden, and bid him let me go,’ she said; but though her words were still proud, her heart faltered, and for the first time she doubted herself. She guessed that this tall man, both stern and gentle, might think her merely wayward, like achild that has not the firmness of mind to go on with a dull task to the end.
[...]Then quietly, more as if speaking to herself than to him: ‘But the healers would have me lie abed seven days yet,’ she said. ‘And my window does not look eastward.’ Her voice was now that of a maiden young and sad.[...]Then the heart of Éowyn changed, or else she understood it… ‘I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.’ And again she looked at Faramir. ‘No longer do I desire to be a queen,’ she said.
Eowyn’s problem–and it’s treated very much like one–is that she underwent a “phase” of wanting to compete with the men, which is just not on and entirely childish (whereas riding to war is, for men, a perfectly proper, mature and correct thing to do: the narrative chastises no other character for wanting to go to war, or seeking martial glory–see Gimli and Legolas competing on orc kills). Naturally it takes a man to fix her and love her back into proper femininity; just as naturally she accepts that love as restorative and proper. A woman’s place is to love growing things and healing; ambition, like “desiring to be a queen,” should not exist in a woman–she’s meant to be a man’s adjunct, and if she becomes queen it is only because her husband is king: see also Arwen.
Arwen – she has how many speaking lines in the books? Prizes that exist to be won by a man don’t need to talk, okay? Oh hey, she wove Aragorn a banner! Awesome.
Nienor – where do I even fucking start. She has her memory erased by a dragon, runs through the forest naked, is rescued and falls in love with her brother, and commits suicide after discovering her pregnancy is first-class incest. The narrative then focuses on her brother’s manpain. Finduilas, from the same story, fulfills a similar role–falling in love with Turin, and then dying, all to contribute to said manpain and make Turin super extra sad because abloo bloo bloo emo wangst bullshit.
Celebrian – implied to have been raped by orcs and sailed to the west.
Rose Cotton – does she even talk? She just seems to exist to give Sam a litter.
There are a lot more rapes in Middle-earth. Like, lots and lots. And women who commit suicide. The men are, of course, never subjected to any sexual threat because NO HOMO, NO HOMO. About the only women in Tolkien’s narrative not treated creepily are Galadriel and possibly Haleth, but the former also ends up on a pedestal while the latter is very minor. The next time someone attempts to cite any of the women on this list as evidence that Tolkien was an exemplary feminist, feel free to brain them with a sack of bricks. Twice.
Tolkien wasn’t classist! Samwise Gamgee was a gardener.
Ah, the one commoner in a cast full of landed gentry, princes, kings, aristocrats and descendants thereof. Sam ends up a landed gentry by the way, having inherited Frodo’s stuff. Sam, who always deferred to his Mister Frodo, sir? Tolkien wasn’t exactly Dickens, if you catch my drift.
Ultimately the core of the trouble is that fanboys don’t want to believe that Tolkien’s body of work is anything other than an “epic work of creative genius,” that anyone saying otherwise must either have an agenda, have no taste, or in some way defective. They refuse to consider the thought that Middle-earth fiction has contributed nothing of worth to culture at large, outside of enforcing the straight-white-male hegemony of the genre… which, naturally, they are all too happy to keep up and praise as excellent and worthy. Much of the politics in it will resonate strongly with those believing in the nobility of the bromance, the boys’ own adventure, the exclusion of women outside the sphere of a reward at the end of a quest, someone who keeps the house tidy (or weaves them banners, as it were).
When confronted with the faintest suggestion that anything might be defective in Tolkien himself, or the works he produced, their reactions tend toward the knee-jerky sort:
My friends accused The Lord of the Rings of being racist, opinions?
I got quite offended by this as I have personally never considered Tolkien’s writing racist in the slightest – to me my friend seemed to be putting on all these racist connotations on a piece of work that didn’t have them to begin with. :/
[...]
“Your friend might be racist for noticing all of this. =P”
The Return of the King: Three Unforgivables
Brought face to face with the cruel ringwraith, he announces that no man can kill him, and she, removing her helmet and revealing her long blond locks, utters, defiantly, “I am no man.” She might as well have thumped her chest and grunted, “I am woman, hear me roar.”
[...]
To make it a feminist battle cry is to celebrate where Tolkien would have us weep. It is, in short, one of the most appalling alterations in the film.
…which incidentally cements the truth that the grimdark purveyors/fans, and the Tolkien purveyors/fans are the same people. Try to tell these quotes apart from the ones linked and discussed here. Fanatical Tolkien fans and fanatical grimdark fans are of the same overlapping demographics, the same attitude, the same neckbeardism: feminists are scary, anti-racist critiques are not to be borne, interrogating the text from the wrong perspective, silly ad hominem, the whole lot.
Contrary to the barking of people like Richard Morgan, the fantasy being touted for their gritty maturity today isn’t much different from the regressiveness of Tolkien. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
HOLD ONTO THOSE PADDLES, FRIENDS; WE MAY SOON BE BEATING LIVE WHITE MALES
To that I would add the following:
1) The Men of Far Harad: “…Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Khand, Southrons in scarlet, and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues.” and “…East rode the knights of Dol Amroth driving the enemy before them: troll-men and Variags and orcs that hated the sunlight.”
2) Notice how any “crossbred” with an Orc or maybe a Troll is automatically evil?
3) Monolithic race/ethnic characteristics. What Easterling or Southron is ever described in neutral, much less positive tones?
And if one wanted to go further and note the classism in LotR, that shouldn’t be too hard to do, what with the “rightful king,” the “pure Númenorean blood,” the deference that Samwise give ol’ “Master Frodo, sir!”, and so forth.
I’m a tad confused how you can justify applying what the man wrote as fiction to who the man was. Tolkien may very well have been a racist and a sexist (he came from an era when that wouldn’t have been terribly unusual), but you can’t make that case on fiction alone. Otherwise, we’d have to apply every work of fiction to the author, even the fiction doesn’t represent the author’s thoughts.
The real question, then, is this: does the viewpoint of his work correspond to Tolkien’s actual viewpoints in any way? Did he say anything somewhere that exposes his sexism or racism?
Do you expect to engage seriously, or…
I’m retracting that previous statement. I completely missed two things above where Tolkien does, in fact, say some things which could be seen as racist. No idea how I missed those. That’s my fault. Ignore that above!
I meant to engage seriously. I’m not one of those Tolkien fanboys and have no reason to defend the man in order to preserve some “pure” version of him.
:p
The “Mongol-types” and comments about Jews are pretty lolarious, and make his protesting-too-much re: apartheid and Nazis look like little more than hollow face-saving. But even that aside, it’s usually pretty obvious when an author is slavishly, unquestioningly perpetuating -ism (or his own privilege) versus when he’s criticizing them. Even without those letters, I’d still think very little of Tolkien for the way all his women are on a pedestal, and all his major heroic characters barring Sam are landed gentry and above. Compare to the thing with Abercrombie’s lesbian rape, where the author outright admitted that when he wrote it he was not at all thinking.
Much of the racist stuff (orcs look like the ‘least lovely Mongol-types’, dwarves are totally Jewish) was written in his author’s commentary and letters, as opposed to his actual novels.
So if the viewpoint of his work is different from his actual viewpoint, it’s because it’s less bigoted, not more.
Oops, totally got ninja’d there.
“Here’s a newsflash, assholes: even in that time saying something like that in public wouldn’t have gotten you kudos. Tolkien’s time? Not exactly the era of the British Empire.”
Uhm, Tolkien’s time was the tail-end of the British Empire. A time when a colonialist monster like Churchill could get elected. A man so horrible the only reason history is kind to him is because he fought Hitler.
Anyway, I don’t disagree with your general opinion that his work has, ah, problematic elements. Somehow all the more puzzling when you knew his stance on stuff. Like Numenor’s “benevolent” White Man’s Burden colonialism, written by somebody opposed to colonialism of all kinds.
Fair point, but the problem is that people like to say “product of his time!” like they think Tolkien was alive during the reign of Elizabeth I and as such his views may be perfectly excused. He is often touted, moreover, as progressive “for his time,” which ignores that he was from a time where people like, say, Malcolm X were alive and active.
I don’t buy into his anti-colonialism or seemingly anti-racist sentiments, for the same reason I don’t buy into the same of a present-day liberal slacktivists: people like @Weirdmage and Amanda Rutter both believed they were alllll about equality, and insisted repeatedly that was the case, but the former kept insisting he had the right to use “cunt” as an insult, and Rutter tweeted about basking in her “first-world white supremacy” as though this was a hilarious little joke. Before breaking into some white woman’s tears and saying that she didn’t want people to think she’s racist, oh god no.
So unless Tolkien actually participated in political activism of the anti-racist or feminist kind, I just find his apparent progressiveness hollow. Now I don’t know if he actually did any such thing, and if anyone has some quotes/accounts to supply that he did in fact participate in any such thing…
Oh hmm. You consider Tolkien’s time to be the 50s and 60s? I think most Tolkien fans consider his time to be more like the 20s, 30s and 40s.
Anyway, despite being a Tolkien fan of frankly embarrassing proportions (When I was a little kid, I used to read Lord of the Rings, and when finished I started it all over again..) I see the flaws in his work, and realise one reason I can enjoy it is, well, my white privilege. 20 years ago I would probably have argued back at you. How sad.
“About the only women in Tolkien’s narrative not treated creepily are Galadriel and possibly Haleth, but the former also ends up on a pedestal while the latter is very minor.”
Haleth being the only good human not in awe of the elves, and snarkily talking back to them is the absolute best part of Silmarillion.
I think this all depends on what we mean by “Tolkien’s time.” Personally, I would say his time would start at around mid-1900s (as in 1900-1910) until the 1950s, maybe the 1960s on the outside. But that’s because I don’t think you can even bother talking about Tolkien without a) focusing on the events which clearly influenced his life (WWI and WW2), and b) talking about his literary life in relation to that (LOTR came out in the 50s).
And I think all of that is important to note. Was Tolkien anti-semitic? Probably, but so were a hell of a lot of great people at the time. Was he racist? Probably, and ditto. A sexist? Probably, and ditto. I noted on Twitter that while we can acknowledge Tolkien’s greatness, we also must acknowledge that he was human and flawed, living in a time when his beliefs were not exactly unpopular, per se, let alone un-shared. We have to reconcile the literary figure with his time and who he was. If didn’t do that, then those of us in America could not talk about the Founding Fathers or the formation of the nation without falling into a trap, because those guys were racists, slave owners, and sexists. Great men? Yup. But all great men are flawed. Progress is a slow beast, and it always comes up against monsters who don’t want to see the world change for the better.
I should think the standard applies to great women figures in history too, as Susan B. Anthony and other suffragettes (a too obvious example, perhaps) undoubtedly had characteristics we might not agree with today. So it goes.
You are talking about “great men” who, keep in mind, have no relevance to me. Like, zero. The founding fathers? I struggle to care. I mean, really, why should I. I wouldn’t be any worse off if the US didn’t exist today–possibly my part of the world would be better off, and other parts mightn’t have been treated to the “democracy” and “liberty” of bombs. Similarly, Tolkien isn’t “great” to me. I think his prose is dull, I don’t think he’s done anything meaningful beyond what other Oxford academics of his time did, and his fiction itself is culturally worthless. Fantasy might well have been a less shitty genre if he weren’t so prominent.
You’ll have to try something else. Sorry.
Tolkien was writing an Anglo-Saxon mythology, of course everyone is white!
I do want to point out that Anglo-Saxon-inhabited lands =/= all of Europe. And, as far as I know, all Anglo-Saxon peoples have been white (although, having traded with, married and raped other peoples, they’ve never been a 100% exclusively white group, but the vast majority have been). The olive-skinned peoples of Southern Europe aren’t Anglo-Saxon, for example, and Tolkien has never claimed (to my knowledge) to be writing a pan-European epic.
So this argument mostly works! Oh, right up until Tolkien casts the brown people as villains. Why not make the Easterlings other white people? Anglo-Saxons have definitely fought other white people, after all, not just brown people. Gosh, I wonder why. Lazy racist shit.
Actually, I think the thing people like to say is that he was writing an English mythology rather than “Anglo-Saxon” per se, which IIRC is what Tolkien himself said (“I want to write a myth for England” or something).
Ahh. Set in the idyllic past before South Asians and Africans moved or were brought to England?
But of course.
I’m trying to hunt down the exact quote right now, but google’s not helping.
I did find this, though!
I think “epic work of creative genius” and “full of racism, sexism, and classism” aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I mean, I love Dickens, but he was writing a hundred years before Tolkien and pretty much everything said in defense and criticism of Tolkien applies to Dickens as well.
That said, I read The Hobbit as a kid, but I’ve never actually made it through Lord of the Rings. For an epic fantasy adventure, LotR is really pretty damned boring most of the time.
The problem with the “man of his time” defense it that it assumes it’s good enough to be just a typical specimen of your era. Tolkien was certainly no worse than most of his contemporaries, and he was probably a relatively decent man with no active malice towards other races, but neither did he make any effort to be better than his contemporaries. It’s like people today who think it’s good enough just to agree that the KKK is awful and rape is bad. I don’t think Tolkien particularly deserves to be hated on, but he certainly deserves no accolades for progressiveness or enlightenment.
And as is so often the case, the fanboys could enjoy their Tolkien sans defensiveness if they were just willing to admit that what they love is problematic. You can enjoy something that’s great and flawed and acknowledge the flaws. Like Dickens.
“Not exactly the era of the British Empire. ”
Eh, depends. When he died Rhodesia had been independent for less than a decade. When he was a young man the empire was in it’s prime, and it was still largely intact by his middle age. People often forget how recent colonialism was.
Calling Tolkien *progressive* is pretty damn silly though, he wasn’t. Not in any way, shape or form. He was considered kind of silly and old-fashioned by most people even when writing. (The epitome of an ivory-tower british professor studying ancient languages…) but H.P. Lovecraft he was not.
Sorry, were you saying that H.P. Lovecraft was progressive? Kinda hard to parse that sentence there.
Hi, I followed links back from somewhere back to your blog some time ago, and have been reading it with much enjoyment. I’m delurking now to say that my father, who was born in the 1930′s in a small town in the American Midwest, and who was enough of a Tolkien fan when he was in college to make a series of flash cards about Elvish vocabulary, knew perfectly well that LoTR was racist, and made sure I knew it when I was a kid. He pointed out early on that the various races of Middle Earth allow for “safe racism”–orcs are bad without question, and the taller and fairer you are, the better–and that this especially was seized upon by Tolkien-derivative writers.
It’s not hard to notice. Even if you like some things about the books, even if you love them, it doesn’t have to turn you into a slavishly loyal idiot.
Your dad sounds awesome, to be honest.
Exactly.
Yeah, I think people have a worship complex to this stuff. I love Dante’s Comedy, but the whole thing reeks with a creepy torture porn scent where he celebrates the unbelievers who will tormented for eternity.
(He does have a few virtuous pagans, and there is something interesting that happens when he meets his gay teacher in Hell, but there is probably more fail there than in LoTR.)
It is important to realize this is entertainment first, and like any work – including religious scriptures – you can take the good while realizing there is a lot of bad.
Kirill Eskov wrote an alternate take on the LOTR as told from the point of view of the Orcs, who are merely defending their peaceful homeland from the Imperialist forces of Gandalf(!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
[...] I followed again some links from Larry’s blog to the indignant woman on a crusade. [...]
I had linked your deconstruction article on my Facebook page. One of my friends mainly had tone arguments. Kinda ridiculous.
I am shocked, shocked I say.
I would like to say that misandry and anti-white racism are real things (I have never seen or heard anything about heterophobia, so I can’t comment on that). The only reason that they are less problematic than their counterparts of misogyny and anti-black/asian/whatever racism is because white males usually have more power and thus cause more damage with prejudice. However, misandry and anti-white racism are just as toxic, disgusting and reprehensible. Misandry is just as sexist as misogyny and anti-white racism is just as racist as anti-black/asian/whatever racism.
Also, I just do not understand why you are so angry, aggressive and contemptuous on this subject. I would say that Tolkien isn’t nearly the most interesting writer I’ve read (though I wouldn’t call him a bore) and I have absolutely no idea whether he was sexist or racist (there are good arguments for both sides), but why the hell do you care? And why do you have to be nasty about it? This feels like an ugly diatribe designed to upset people and I dislike that.
Approved for lol. I swear, even if I were to make up a caricature of butthurt straight white dudes…
White dudes like me need reminding that some of the stuff we like is deeply problematic. I love Lovecraft and Tolkien. But I get deeply embarrassed by the people trying to defend them. Harry Hopkirk and his branch of “He wasn’t too bad!” is one reason I feel ashamed being a Tolkien fan sometimes.
And the Tone Argument is really really bad.
I do think there’s a place for moderating tone, and I’ve certainly learned to moderate mine… when speaking with other marginalized people. Like, I used to be a lot more combative towards other minorities, but I’ve tried to be better about it since.
But Hophop here and the likes of Pat? Nah. Bile all the way, that or just not engaging.
Also, I just do not understand why you are so angry, aggressive and contemptuous on this subject. I would say that Tolkien isn’t nearly the most interesting writer I’ve read (though I wouldn’t call him a bore) and I have absolutely no idea whether he was sexist or racist (there are good arguments for both sides), but why the hell do you care?
Uhh… because he basically set the tone for the fantasy genre (and speculative-fiction in general, for that matter) for the past hundred years? Uncritical aping of Tolkein, Lovecraft, and Howard is one of the genre’s biggest limiting factors and sources of terrible shit. Seriously, if there’s one thing fantasy needs, it’s a few more of its sacred cows being turned into delicious, delicious hamburgers.
With bacon.
But consider. Of Tolkien, Lovecraft and Howard, Tolkien was definitly, by far, the lesser evil…
Scared?
This is your classic bald-men-fighting-for-comb scenario but even Robert E. Howard thought Lovecraft was a bit much:
“You express amazement at my statement that ‘civilized’ men try to justify their looting, butchering and plundering by claiming that these things are done in the interests of art, progress and culture. That this simple statement of fact should cause surprize, amazes me in return. People claiming to possess superior civilization have always veneered their rapaciousness by such claims…
Your friend Mussolini is a striking modern-day example. In that speech of his I heard translated he spoke feelingly of the expansion of civilization. From time to time he has announced; ‘The sword and civilization go hand in hand!’ ‘Wherever the Italian flag waves it will be as a symbol of civilization!’ ‘Africa must be brought into civilization!’ It is not, of course, because of any selfish motive that he has invaded a helpless country, bombing, burning and gassing both combatants and non-combatants by the thousands. Oh, no, according to his own assertions it is all in the interests of art, culture and progress, just as the German war-lords were determined to confer the advantages of Teutonic Kultur on a benighted world, by fire and lead and steel. Civilized nations never, never have selfish motives for butchering, raping and looting; only horrid barbarians have those.”
Wow.
Eh, knew that already. Lovecraft famously ghost-wrote a story in which this was the final twist:
“[She] was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe’s most primal grovellers…. [T]hough in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.”
As for Howard, I’m pretty sure that he jerked off to brown people getting massacred. About the best you could say was that he was honest about it.
My point was that none of ‘em was exactly squeaky-clean, and considering that modern fantasy tends to draw from a combination of the three… well.
At no point did I defend Tolkien. I was purposefully vague on that. At no point did I denigrate another person. I pointed out something I believed to be untrue in you argument and then I objected to the tone of your argument (and I do not feel the way I did so was “really really bad”). The response I receive is condescending and unpleasant (what was it that I said that brings up your bile?), and the belief that one should only treat minorities fairly, but anyone else is the enemy; that prejudice is allright as long as the target isn’t a minority. Please explain yourself.
lol
lol
See? I could not make Hophop up. And yet! What a perfect exemplar. Hey, Hophop? When you get over yourself and realize that someone being mean to you on the Internet isn’t anything like being denied a job, being beaten up, or being refused marriage, or being denied a visa, or anything of the like on grounds of your gender or ethnicity, I’ll start treating you like a human being. Until then: squeal, piggy, squeal.
Please just ban him… I feel embarrassed, because the crap he spews is so close to crap I would have spewed when I was younger. In 10-20 years he may have matured.
At no point did I defend Tolkien. I was purposefully vague on that.
And why in the name of the seven hells did you think that being purposefully vague would be remotely helpful in a conversation?
Also, tone argument. Read, and be enlightened.
So, I must ask, why are you so hateful? Especially to someone who all you know about them is a picture and three paragraphs of text? Especially since I believe I have been polite?
I do realise being insulted online isn’t important at all, but I do think it is an injustice, though very inconsequential, and also I believe it is important to stand up for myself.
Why do you think another white man finds you embarrassing to the point that he asked me to ban you?
I’m sorry. I just read your “About” section and realised that you don’t want balanced opinions. You want purely angry discourse. I now realise that being reasonable, polite, tolerant and wanting to genuinely understand the world is not what you want. I will now vacate this comment section and its encouragement of terribly prejudiced and ignorant views of how people should talk about one another.
Remember, folks, by this he means “terribly prejudiced toward straight white men.”
Door hitting you on the way out and all that, Hophop.
Well, I have been commenting in this thread a lot, because I am a long time reader, AND a huge tolkien fan, so this felt like the first time I actually had something to say, but…
This blog is not made for white people like you or me to feel liberal and cool!
Seriously, that took a bit of time for me to recognise but… This blog isn’t about making white liberals feel happy. And that is why I love this blog. It challenges me a lot. And it makes no excuses.
I don’t really think Tolkien was trying to save face much, he wasn’t really in an environment where face-saving would be *needed*. Rather I suspect he was simply deeply hyppocritical and inconsistent.
Trying to paint him as some modern-day progressive trying to hide his prejudices I think misses the point and context of Tolkien’s own life and situation: He was a conservative among conservatives in a conservative institution in a conservative country.
I’m not sure that is necessarily better.
This may seem wildly not relevant. But Bram Stoker opposed pornography heavily, and claimed all crime came from sex. Yet… Reading “Dracula” today it is pretty much heavy duty porn. Same thing with Tolkien I think. He consciously rejected racism, but subconsciously used it. And neither man realised how hypocirtical they were.
I’m not sure that is necessarily better.
I’m not sure it was meant as a defence.
(Yes, I told him I was going to get an iron-toed boot and kick him in the cock after he said that he believed misandry, heterophobia and anti-white racism were real things and just as bad as misogyny, homophobia and actual racism. I regret nothing.)
C-can I help? On a more serious note I love reading things like this, they’re a refreshing take on the material we worshipped as kids and the disturbing material it contains within. People don’t understand just how important analyzing stuff like this is, because they either don’t or refuse to understand the way things implied within a text will shape your thoughts and standards of what is normal or beautiful.
^ I don’t think it neccessarily is either. But it’s a different class of wrong:
^ Naishee: I don’t think Tolkien neccessarily rejected racism in any serious way. It wasn’t a term that was used very much in contemporary thought. He lived in a pre-’68 world. While a lot of the intellectual apparatus we use today existed or was in the process of being constructed, it wasn’t something that Tolkien would know or come into contact with much. (being y’know, a pretty reclusive proffessor in an unexciting subject)
I haven’t cared much for Tolkien since I was a teen, but his idea of a burning private grudge about WWII makes me see red.
Look, everyone who uses the following:
He wasn’t as bad as so-and-so: if you are judging your fucking morality using a relativity stick, then get bent. You do the right thing and you don’t say “but that other guy is way worse!”. It, absolutely and 100%, does not make you look good and has no bearing on whether you are a good person or not. It’s like saying “He only advocates kicking the fag in the nuts! He doesn’t say kill them!” or “He only writes about white people in good roles and everyone else wants to kill the white people, but it isn’t racist!” F that in the A, it is! If you being a good person is contingent on how horrible someone else is, then give up on life. It’s already given up on you.
He’s a product of the time: this is even worse than “He isn’t as bad as…” Why? Just because Tolkien or your parents or your grandparents lived in a time of unrelenting, unabashed racism (and other -isms) and expressed that belief structures DOES NOT MEAN THAT PEOPLE OF THE FUTURE CANNOT JUDGE YOU HARSHLY AND USE IT AS AN OBJECT LESSON ON HOW NOT TO BE! If you can’t understand that, then put a bullet in your brain and be done with it because you are terrible human being. His works are lauded and praised and imitated to the point of ridiculousness. This is what is being represented. And if you aren’t moral enough, decent enough, or human enough to recognize something is problematic, then there are no words. You can still like what you like, but you and other people have to realize how damaging that narrative it is. If you can’t, then you’re wrong and ignorant.
<3
“If you being a good person is contingent on how horrible someone else is, then give up on life. It’s already given up on you.”
Awesome.
This accounting for changing times is something that is really hard to deal with for fans of hip-hop/rap, where the word “faggot” is used rampantly. Though here we are talking about, what, 1-3 decades at most?
And it feels like it is almost a given that any mythology will be sexist in some form or another, and if not outright homophobic will feature roles supporting straight relationships.
‘he was the product of his time’ also gives people of whichever era a much too easy way out – there were anti-racists/sexists/homophobes at the height of the British Empire and before the words had even been coined: they were called _decent people_.
There wasn’t some amazing scientific breakthrough in the early 1960s that awakened humanity to the idea that people shouldn’t be prejudged on how they look or what their customs are; people were simply confronted with the stupidity and cruelty of these prejudices at level never before and started to realise what had been obvious all along.
‘s/he was the product of his time’ explains, doesn’t exculpate.
Not to mention that racism/sexism/homophobia continues well into today, so technically people who hold such views would also be “a product of their time” considered perfectly decent and moral among certain circles, churches, and movements.
I think one thing people should keep in mind is that people can have positive and negative qualities. Ghandi was a great man and a major force for nonviolent resistance. He also had a lot of sexist ideas, and earlier in life a lot of racist ones.
Heck, my parents used to think gay marriage was awful and disgusting, but my sister and I kept working on them and they met our college friends who they came to love and find out were gay. Now they aren’t totally accepting of the idea, but both of them are far more supportive of gay rights.
Hell, if Joe Abercrombie can change, can’t anyone?
I missed the great literary ship that was Tolkien. But like a slacker I did see the movies. At the time, I didn’t know that Peter Jackson made some revisions to it, like giving Arwen more of a role, or having Eowyn actually kill the bad guy rather than just wound him. I didn’t know that Tolkien had much more limited roles for women in his books, and I didn’t know that the bad guys were basically implied Asians until I saw the giant elephant things.
A friend of mine did mention that “they’re all crackers.” Which lead to a discussion about how that compares to a movie like “Crouching Tiger” being all Chinese. However, a lot of wuxia is also Chinese vs. Chinese in conflict, which is not the same for LoTR or, apparently, a lot of fantasy. I mean, yes, we had white wizard vs. white wizard in LoTR, but the evil one’s pawns were faceless killing machines implied to be dark skinned and non-Euro looking.
Contrast this to a more recent S. Korean war film about the Korean war, which sets the conflict as Korean vs. Korean, and an American reviewer who commented that it’s interesting that the N. Korean commander wasn’t portrayed as absolute evil. He probably would have been in an American film. But from a Korean viewpoint, maybe you don’t have the luxury of turning the other side into some faceless Other.
The historical narrative surrounding WWII as it is taught in schools and in documentaries (in the U.S.) is often very black and white. “America saved the world” is what it came down to in my history classes (education is different in different parts of the country, and maybe my school was just one of the bad ones). With that in mind, I can see the appeal of LoTR because it seems to frame the conflict in exactly the same way. It’s a limiting world view that can become dangerous once it enters the collective consciousness.
“Contrast this to a more recent S. Korean war film about the Korean war”
What film is this? Thanks!
Really, as a maker of myth, Tolkien did a good job. As a work of literature I think the work is arguably good to mediocre and my opinion swings. It’s impact is largely limited in this day and age, and would not be at the top of my recommendations when a sorta fantasy book like Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison exists.
BTW love your posts Falcon, they provide a good deal of insight/perspective.
^ I don’t think the two cases are neccessarily comparable, civil wars (which is what the korean war was, in essence) tend to have a different kind of narrative than external wars. It’s not universal of course, but civil war narratives tends to play up the tragedy of “people who should live together fighting” a lot more than “resist external conqueror” narratives. It’s also often used explicitly for that purpose (to try to mend wounds after the conflict)
It’s probably notable that Tolkien wrote his story as an escapist, he tried to create a black-and-white, “just”, “noble” war (with all the problems that this entails with demonizing the enemy, in LOTR’s case literally) precisely becuase he knew that real war wasn’t like that. That I think is where you can actually draw real parallels between Tolkien and fascism. It’s just that Tolkien kept his attempts at redeeming and.. ennobling? Making meaningful? His role in the war to his literary pursuits, rather than trying to make the real world conform to it.
There’s a current of “All that suffering must be meaningful somehow” going through the interwar period (it’s not the only current of course, but it’s one of them) and one way to find meaning in it is to raise it as something glorious and worthy, comradeship of the trenches, etc. etc. And I think Tolkien is (if only distantly) a part of that.
I come back the next day, and this conversation is three times as long. Internet!
Anyway, I came back to say (1) yes, as suggested in a comment far above, my father is awesome, and (2) here’s my favorite essay about Tolkien by a hardcore Tolkien fan. It was written when the first movie was just coming out, and it’s a refreshingly rational positive take. The writer asks “Is Tolkien any good?” and answers himself, “Tolkien was a consummate world builder; a pretty good creator of stories, and a rather poor novelist.”
He doesn’t take on the race issues, though.
@saajanpatel: Thanks. I just ramble, really. The movie I was talking about is “71 Into the Fire.” There’s also a Chinese war movie out now called “The Flowers of War.” The American trailers spam Christian Bale’s face everywhere, but I heard that it focuses more on the women’s stories.
@Emil Söderman: You are absolutely right. I just wanted to talk about “comfort zones” when it comes to staging conflicts in fiction, I guess. WWII as it is presented in America is interesting. The movie “Letters from Iwo Jima” notably tells a story from the Japanese POV and is meant as a companion piece to “Flags of Our Fathers,” an American POV. This is all years after Tolkien’s time, of course, and while there’s been some effort to humanize the Japanese WWII perspective now, there hasn’t been much offered on China (from Hollywood). Someone I know told me about watching a documentary about American soldiers who became Chinese citizens and fought with them “like brothers.” He was surprised. He didn’t know about it at all. I was surprised at first, but then I realized that I shouldn’t be. Besides him being white, the public schools don’t teach it. The way we tell history is dependent on views and diplomatic relationships between countries in our current time. It might be that our views of the past are always tainted by modern bias, no matter what.
This is pretty funny! I have a series of posts on my blog about Tolkien’s racial theories, the way he is used by fascism, and various other topics. I’ve had pretty much every single argument you use here presented against me.
Though I must add, you haven’t included “The southrons weren’t black – you’re making that up!”
…people say that? I don’t think the southrons are Africans either, but IIRC they are at the very least dark-skinned.
The range of possible excuses people give is almost endless, and I’ve seen them all. The funny thing is that most of the people who crop up with desperate attempts to warp the text to escape the racism will also simultaneously claim that it doesn’t matter, because he was writing in a different time, we don’t have to always be politically correct, etc. If so, why the fanboy rage when people point out Tolkien’s racial essentialism?
The Southrons were, as I recall (and I know much of Tolkien’s work quite well), both black and non-black, with the non-black quite likely being quite dark-skinned whites. At the moment, I don’t have the trilogy with me so I can’t check for sure, but as I remember, the black southrons fought to the end at the battle at the black gate, while the merely brown ones sensibly surrendered.
(And just to add to the confusion, the Easterlings (the evil race in Silmarillion) were probably modelled on the vikings andNorthern Europeans. At the very least they had Northern European names.)
Like the Slytherin thing in Harry Potter except offensive.
Naishee that point about the relationship between loyalty and blackness is something I didn’t know and it certainly strengthens a lot of my claims. I’ll investigate that some more.
Another common excuse I’ve read is: not every Southron served Sauron (usually no evidence is supplied) and not every white person was good (e.g. the Numenoreans who attacked Valinor) so therefore there is no racism in the work. This really makes me tired (to use your phrase) because it’s so ignorant of how racism works, and sets up this ridiculous determinstic standard for judging a work – if even one person out of a billion deviates from Tolkien’s racial model, then there is no racism in the work at all.
I guess it’s of a piece though – can’t prove Tolkien isn’t racist, then redefine racism …
^ “Southrons” is a general name, the men of Harad are clearly black, but not all “Southrons” are from Harad. (most seems to be described as vaguel mediterranean)
“(most seems to be described as vaguel mediterranean)”
That is very obviously not right. Gondor was very clearly mediterranean, what with Faramir having raven black hair and such et cetera. But Harad was defintly an arabic/black mix.
“but not all “Southrons” are from Harad.”
You make me feel so sad and tired. Really. I have read all Tolkien’s books. Yes, including the “History of Middle-Earth” ones. And… Tolkien used Swarthy for whites who looked kinda dark. Southron was exclusively Harad, even though Harad was not all black, it had Eye-rabs too. But them Eye-rabs were Southrons of course. They weren’t white!
Seriously, I love Tolkien, have read almost all he’s written, and I re-read his books at least once per year. But people like you make me feel so… tired.
When you’re done kicking that subhuman turd, pass the iron-toed boot. I could use some leg exercises.
For me, reading something “problematic” is like eating a dish that is littered with dead flies and hairs. If the cook were to tell me I had no right to complain about the dead flies because of “artistic integrity” I wouldn’t apologize for criticizing his art, I would punch him in the face.
Privileged piggies have this weird idea that being an X is like wearing a bandana you can take off or put on depending on the situation. Newsflash: It’s an enormous part of who you are, a part we love and have no interest in changing.
I don’t have to tolerate works of fiction that insult who I am. Call me oversensitive. My time is valuable.
Sturgeon’s Law being Sturgeon’s Law, I’m not “missing” anything.
I haven’t read anything Tolkien has written. I picked a copy of LoTR, found it verbose and tedious to no end, and didn’t finish it. But I can say that creating a fantastic race that is Always Chaotic Evil as well as dark skinned is racist as fuck.
On a side not, anyone who believes fantasy fiction is an accurate portrayal of medieval Europe is an ignorant little shit. Muslims, jews and nonwhites contributed to medieval Europe a lot more than armchair historians will ever admit. Dear ignorant Americans: do your friggin’ research before you insult my continent like that.
Very much so. The pigginess seems to obscure this fact utterly from them. Everything marginalized people do is going to be, of necessity, political–because the dominant societal narrative is so shit, erasing, and damaging. Simply wanting it to be otherwise by itself is political.
You didn’t miss anything not reading Tolk, in any case.
Realizing she may not be the most popular person around these parts, but Jemisin wrote an essay about myths and her own experiences with Tolkien as a part of that:
nkjemisin.com/2012/02/dreaming-awake/
Figured people who come here might be interested. I was troubled by your highlighting of certain scenes in her trilogy, but this essay was, IMO, quite lovely.