Tolkien and race

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1938, a publishing house in Potsdam sent J. R. R. Tolkien a demand he found deeply offensive. Rütten & Loening wanted him to certify his pure Aryan descent before publishing a German translation of The Hobbit. Tolkien asked his publisher Stanley Unwin whether he should "suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name." His draft reply to the publishers stated he regretted appearing to have ancestors of "that gifted people," meaning Jews. In Newsweek, David Brennan wrote that the letter demonstrated Tolkien's contempt for the Nazi state in no uncertain terms. That episode has anchored the case for Tolkien as a principled opponent of racial bigotry. Yet scholars who have read the same fantasy novels and private papers have reached deeply uncomfortable conclusions about his work. How deeply do the racial anxieties of the Victorian age run through the world of Middle-earth? And how much can an author's personal decency insulate a text from the ideas it was born into?

• 2. Orcs and the Other

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  In a private letter, Tolkien described his Orcs in terms that scholars have found arresting. They were, he wrote, "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." Dimitra Fimi calls these details of swarthy complexions and slanted eyes "straight out of Victorian anthropology, which links mental qualities and physique." Andrew O'Hehir, writing for Salon, notes that the Orcs are dark-skinned and slant-eyed and, despite possessing reason and speech, "inherently evil." O'Hehir reads the description as a revealing representation of the "Other." He also calls it "the product of his background and era, like most of our inescapable prejudices."

  Jenny Turner, in the London Review of Books, calls Orcs "a northern European's paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about." She adds that Tolkien "does not appear to have been half as crackers on these topics as many others were." Walter Scheps argues that Tolkien's accountability "does not extend beyond" his creation. Since Tolkien is the only source of data on Orcs, the moral framework of Middle-earth operates on his own terms alone. Patricia Meyer Spacks holds that "amorality is not really possible in Tolkien's scheme," and Scheps concurs. He notes, however, that the morality of Middle-earth "is nevertheless radically different from our own."

  Anderson Rearick III offers a counter-argument grounded in the text itself. He cites Steuard Jensen's observation that "light skinned characters did evil things," naming Boromir, Denethor, Gollum, Saruman, and Gríma Wormtongue. Rearick traces the link between darkness and evil to the Bible, which uses phrases like "the shadow of death" throughout. He also notes that the Old English word orc glosses the Latin Orcus, meaning the ruler of the underworld or death. His larger point is that racism is a philosophy of power, whereas The Lord of the Rings embodies the Christian renunciation of power. "Nothing could be more contrary to the assumptions of racism," he writes, "than a Hobbit as a hero." In a wartime letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien wrote that Orcs are "as real a creation as anything in realistic fiction." In real life, he added, "they are on both sides, of course." That letter sits alongside a moral geography of Middle-earth that scholars have found harder to defend. In Tolkien's fictional world, virtue lives in the West and evil in the East.

• 3. Good West, Evil East

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  John Magoun, writing in The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, describes Middle-earth as possessing a "fully expressed moral geography." The hobbits occupy the Northwest. Evil Easterlings fill the East. Imperial sophistication and decadence characterize the South. Mordor, in the Southeast, is hellish. Harad, in the extreme South, "regresses into hot savagery." The medievalist Marjorie Burns has also noted Tolkien's "superiority of North over South, West over East."

  In a 1967 letter to his interviewers Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, Tolkien denied that the North held any sacred status. He acknowledged a personal "affection" for the North-west of Europe, where he and most of his ancestors had lived, but insisted it was not sacred. He pointed out that in his own fictional history the North was "the seat of the fortresses of the Devil," meaning Morgoth. On the East-West divide, however, Tolkien did not deny the pattern. The goodness of the West and the badness of the East, he wrote, "has no modern reference." The concept arose, he stated, through "the necessities of narrative."

  Sandra Ballif Straubhaar, a scholar of Germanic studies, argues that the moral geography of Middle-earth is only part of the picture. She describes the "polycultured, polylingual world" of Middle-earth as "absolutely central" to Tolkien's creation. She writes that Tolkien made a "concerted effort" to break the Western European assumption that speakers of supposedly superior languages were "ethnically superior." Her key example is the contrast between Gollum and Sam Gamgee when both encounter a fallen soldier from the southern land of Harad. Gollum's view is, Straubhaar argues, "arbitrary and stereotypical." Sam wonders what the man's name was and where he came from. He asks himself, in Tolkien's prose, whether the soldier was "really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home." Dimitra Fimi, examining the same scene, writes that Tolkien was "far from demonising the enemy or dehumanising the other." That argument is complicated, however, by a strand of scholarship focused on what the Ent Treebeard calls, in The Two Towers, a "black evil."

• 4. The Fear of Degeneration

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  In The Two Towers, the Ent Treebeard raises an unsettling question about the changed Orcs of Saruman. "Are they Men he has ruined," Treebeard asks, "or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!" The scholars William N. Rogers II and Michael R. Underwood note that fear of racial mixing was widespread in late 19th-century Western culture. It was, they write, one of the forces that drove the movement known as eugenics.

  Robin Anne Reid, writing in the Journal of Tolkien Research, places Tolkien's Orcs within the tradition of 19th-century scientific racism. Helen Young, who studies white supremacism and medievalism, calls Tolkien a bridge between the scientific racism of the 19th century and racism in modern fantasy. The philosopher Charles W. Mills argues that Tolkien reprises the racist myth of 19th-century European thinkers. He points to Francis Galton, the British advocate of eugenics, as an example. Mills notes that this tradition feared racial mixing as a cause of "internal diminution and degeneration" of supposedly superior white Europeans. Robert Stuart examines Tolkien's alternative proposals for the origins of Orcs, whether "Animals, Automatons, or Twisted Elves," and finds signs of racist attitude there. Stuart concludes that Tolkien's legendarium "is suffused with racialist imagery and, at times, imbued with racist values."

  Dimitra Fimi offers a moderating view. She notes that Tolkien's Orcs fit into a literary tradition that includes the goblins of the earlier author George MacDonald. Fimi finds MacDonald's goblins "an equally uncomfortable product of 19th-century anxieties about race and evolutionary degeneration." A novel, she argues, is written within a tradition, and Tolkien's Orcs trace back ultimately to the monsters of Beowulf. Fimi writes that Tolkien "agonised" over the origins of Orcs throughout his career. She concludes that complexities of this kind draw each generation to read The Lord of the Rings and interpret it afresh.

• 5. Dwarves and Jewish Parallels

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  Tolkien stated plainly that he thought of his Dwarves as reminiscent of "the Jews." He also noted that the Dwarves' words were "constructed to be Semitic." The scholar Zak Cramer, writing in the journal Mallorn, documents the breadth of Jewish influence in Tolkien's Middle-earth writings. Cramer notes that words like "Adûnaic" and "Rohirrim," along with the structure of the Dwarvish language Khuzdul, are all evidently "Hebraic." Some commentators draw parallels between the Dwarves as a diasporic people yearning for an ancestral homeland and the historical movement known as Zionism.

  Rebecca Brackmann, writing in the journal Mythlore, examines whether there was an element of antisemitism in Tolkien's portrayal of the Dwarves. She notes that such antisemitism, if present, may be inherited from English attitudes of Tolkien's time, however deeply buried. She also notes that Tolkien attempted to work through the issue within the Middle-earth writings themselves. Robert Stuart discusses the evidence for and against Tolkien's having held antisemitic views, examining his language about Jews throughout the legendarium. Whether Tolkien succeeded in working through his cultural inheritance is entangled with the question of his personal conduct. That conduct, documented across his private letters and public statements, tells a different kind of story.

• 6. Against Racism

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  Tolkien called Adolf Hitler a "ruddy little ignoramus." Dimitra Fimi cites this as evidence of his active opposition to racialist theories. During the Second World War, Christopher Tolkien was training in South Africa. He wrote to his father expressing concern about the treatment of black people by white people. Tolkien replied that he had known of these conditions for some time, having heard them discussed by his mother. He added that treatment of "colour" almost always horrified anyone going out from Britain, "and not only in South Africa." The scholar Julie Pridmore has described Tolkien's views on different cultures and ethnicities as "advanced" for his time. Stephen Wigmore, in The Spectator, writes that Tolkien explicitly rejected apartheid in his 1959 retirement speech at the University of Oxford. Ed Jefferson, in The New Statesman, similarly writes that Tolkien "strongly disapproved of apartheid."

  In a 1944 letter to Christopher, Tolkien described the British press as "grovelling in the gutter as low as Goebbels in his prime." He also described an article in a local Oxford newspaper. It had been, he wrote, "seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory." His own verdict was unambiguous. "The Germans," he wrote, "have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done." The scholar Robert Tally writes that the letter showed "Tolkien's anger was palpable."

  Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter writes that Tolkien found the war distressing "almost as much for ideological as for personal reasons." Carpenter cites a 1941 statement in which Tolkien praised what he saw as the German virtues of "obedience and patriotism." He lamented Hitler's ruining of "that noble northern spirit" which Tolkien had "ever loved, and tried to present in its true light." Fimi published her full examination of these questions in 2009, in a book titled Tolkien, Race and Cultural History. The debates she documented there have only intensified with each new screen adaptation of his work.

• 7. Legacy

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  The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a television series set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, began screening in September 2022. According to Sam Thielman, its casting of people of color as Dwarves, Harfoots, and Elves attracted "fierce debate." Some viewers welcomed the casting; others, who felt the fantasy genre must remain white, did not. Many hostile to the casting cited a statement misattributed to Tolkien: "Evil cannot create anything new, it can only spoil and destroy." The cast of the series spoke publicly against racist hostility aimed at the actors involved.

  Neil Gaiman, the fantasy author, defended the casting by citing Tolkien's own text. Tolkien described the Harfoots as "browner of skin" than other hobbits, Gaiman noted. Anyone who objected, Gaiman wrote, was "either racist or hasn't read their Tolkien." Gaiman had earlier written in a wider context that "White Supremacists don't own Norse Mythology, even if some of them think they do." The science fiction author N. K. Jemisin described Orcs as "fruit of the poison vine that is human fear of the Other." Robert Tally, reviewing Robert Stuart's 2022 book Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth, called it "valuable and thorough." He warned, however, that the desire to absolve Tolkien must not allow the threat of white supremacy to be underestimated.

  Stuart Heritage, writing in The Guardian, observed that the Harfoots in The Rings of Power speak in Irish accents. They behave as friendly peasants and are accompanied by Celtic music. Heritage found in them a resemblance to John Leech's "wildly unflattering" depictions of the Irish in Punch magazine. His comparison points to a tradition stretching back to the Victorian era that shaped Tolkien himself.