Tolkien = Racist?

[Freddy Buggins]

I am necessarily inclined to point out something I have noticed that may make Tolkien seem like a racist or that he held racist view points. Now Tolkien's ROTK was published back in 1956, which means he wrote it before then. Back in those days, black people still didn't have the civil liberties and rights that they have today, and there was segregation and discrimination, etc. So it is entirely possible that Tolkien could've been of the mindset of White supremacists. That would be ironic by the fact that he fought in WWI, and (I think) either fought in or was opposed to WWII. But then again, the hatred of WWII was specifically against Jews and not so much against Africans.

Point #1:

Mordor is in the East, and the Shire is in the West. "Evil Lands" such as Dunland, Harad, etc. also seem to be South/SouthEast

This is a parallel to the real Earth that I find too blatantly obvious to ignore. The name of "The Shire" is obviously influenced/inspired by England's various places that have "Shire" in their name. Tolkien grew up in such a place that ended in "Shire," according to his biography.

And so, it could be surmised that Tolkien seemed to have something against the East. Taking into account the geographic distance, this could mean that Tolkien favored Europe or England (which is in the West) and despised or thought ill of Asia (which is in the East) and so he could have something against Asians by making Mordor be in the East, since Asia is often described as the Far East.

Tolkien's term, Easterlings seems to me to be some sort of profane, vagrant epithet, similar to how the N-Word is something that used to be used by Whites to vulgarize black people, which now only they can use amongst themselves. If I recall, the Easterlings are evil men who are allied with Sauron, like the Haradrim and Dunlanders.

Dunlanders = Dune landers? As in Desert-people?

Point #2:

In the scene in TTT the novel, Tolkien is describing the Haradrim as they pass through the forest with their Oliphaunts, and Frodo and Sam watch as they get ambushed by Faramir and company, and also the one where they observe the Black Gate Is Closed and the Evil Men marching towards it. The gist translation of this narrative, IMHO, is:

"And these people were dark-skinned and dark-haired, and very evil. Not good at all like the pale-skinned pale-faces with golden hair of Rohan, who were good. No. These Haradrim were very evil because they were dark-skinned. Oh, did I mention they were Evil?"

The actual text from The Black Gate Is Closed, pg. 299:

"More men going to Mordor," he said in a low voice. "Dark faces. We have not seen Men like these before, no, Smeagol has not. They are fierce. They have black eyes, and long black hair, and gold rings in their ears; yes, lots of beautiful gold.........Not nice; very cruel wicked men they look. Almost as bad as Orcs..."

My English teacher tells me that a lot of the Author's ego goes into his novel, and some of the characters can be extensions of ego. A lot of his own opinions also go into the story. "Almost as bad as Orcs" seems to be what Tolkien thinks of such men who are "Dark faced, big black eyes, long black hair."

In the movie those Haradrim in the Forest scene and the evil men marching into Morder in the Black Gate scene look kinda like Arabs/Sheiks, IMHO, because their headdresses look akin to turbans, and they wear veils, etc.

Now if he really was a racist, then its very ironic that he spent the young years of his childhood in South Africa, and that it was a black woman that sucked the poison out of his foot when he got stung by a spider, and it was that spider which was the inspiration for Shelob. All this according to a biography I read about Tolkien, I had to write a report about it.

Also, I don't think PJ or Howard Shore are really a racist, but then again in the cd cover insert for the TTT soundtrack does kinda go out of the way to say:

"More familiar to you will be the North African instrument, the rhiaita, played by Jan Hendrickse which forms part of the Mordor theme."

Either way, I think if Tolkien really was a racist, then he'd be rotting in his grave right now if he knew a Thailand midget woman doubled for Pippin and Orlando Bloom starred as Legolas.

[Jermaine76]

Originally posted by Freddy Buggins
I am necessarily inclined to point out something I have noticed that may make Tolkien seem like a racist or that he held racist view points. Now Tolkien's ROTK was published back in 1956, which means he wrote it before then. Back in those days, black people still didn't have the civil liberties and rights that they have today, and there was segregation and discrimination, etc. So it is entirely possible that Tolkien could've been of the mindset of White supremacists. That would be ironic by the fact that he fought in WWI, and (I think) either fought in or was opposed to WWII. But then again, the hatred of WWII was specifically against Jews and not so much against Africans.

Point #1:

Mordor is in the East, and the Shire is in the West. "Evil Lands" such as Dunland, Harad, etc. also seem to be South/SouthEast

This is a parallel to the real Earth that I find too blatantly obvious to ignore. The name of "The Shire" is obviously influenced/inspired by England's various places that have "Shire" in their name. Tolkien grew up in such a place that ended in "Shire," according to his biography.

And so, it could be surmised that Tolkien seemed to have something against the East. Taking into account the geographic distance, this could mean that Tolkien favored Europe or England (which is in the West) and despised or thought ill of Asia (which is in the East) and so he could have something against Asians by making Mordor be in the East, since Asia is often described as the Far East.

Tolkien's term, Easterlings seems to me to be some sort of profane, vagrant epithet, similar to how the N-Word is something that used to be used by Whites to vulgarize black people, which now only they can use amongst themselves. If I recall, the Easterlings are evil men who are allied with Sauron, like the Haradrim and Dunlanders.

Dunlanders = Dune landers? As in Desert-people?

Point #2:

In the scene in TTT the novel, Tolkien is describing the Haradrim as they pass through the forest with their Oliphaunts, and Frodo and Sam watch as they get ambushed by Faramir and company, and also the one where they observe the Black Gate Is Closed and the Evil Men marching towards it. The gist translation of this narrative, IMHO, is:

"And these people were dark-skinned and dark-haired, and very evil. Not good at all like the pale-skinned pale-faces with golden hair of Rohan, who were good. No. These Haradrim were very evil because they were dark-skinned. Oh, did I mention they were Evil?"

The actual text from The Black Gate Is Closed, pg. 299:

"More men going to Mordor," he said in a low voice. "Dark faces. We have not seen Men like these before, no, Smeagol has not. They are fierce. They have black eyes, and long black hair, and gold rings in their ears; yes, lots of beautiful gold.........Not nice; very cruel wicked men they look. Almost as bad as Orcs..."

My English teacher tells me that a lot of the Author's ego goes into his novel, and some of the characters can be extensions of ego. A lot of his own opinions also go into the story. "Almost as bad as Orcs" seems to be what Tolkien thinks of such men who are "Dark faced, big black eyes, long black hair."

In the movie those Haradrim in the Forest scene and the evil men marching into Morder in the Black Gate scene look kinda like Arabs/Sheiks, IMHO, because their headdresses look akin to turbans, and they wear veils, etc.

Now if he really was a racist, then its very ironic that he spent the young years of his childhood in South Africa, and that it was a black woman that sucked the poison out of his foot when he got stung by a spider, and it was that spider which was the inspiration for Shelob. All this according to a biography I read about Tolkien, I had to write a report about it.

Also, I don't think PJ or Howard Shore are really a racist, but then again in the cd cover insert for the TTT soundtrack does kinda go out of the way to say:

"More familiar to you will be the North African instrument, the rhiaita, played by Jan Hendrickse which forms part of the Mordor theme."

Either way, I think if Tolkien really was a racist, then he'd be rotting in his grave right now if he knew a Thailand midget woman doubled for Pippin and Orlando Bloom starred as Legolas.

My girlfriend's mother, who is a middle school teacher, told me similar things about Tolkien. Hearing it kind of kills my excitement of LOTR. But it makes you wonder. Think about this. How come there is not one single black person in LOTR?

[Bacchus]

*sigh*

Do you really believe that you have stumbled onto something that no one has thought before?

The "Is Tolkien Racist?" question is brought up every so often by those with just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough to fully research the question. Each point that you present has been thoroughly answered and repudiated ad nauseum on this and other forums. The short answer is, no he was not. The most telling counterexample lies in a pre WWII letter to a functionary in Germany answering a query regarding Tolkien's ancestry. The response is classic, and I leave it to you to look up in Carpenter's Letters of JRR Tolkien

[Michael]

Originally posted by Freddy Buggins
I am necessarily inclined to point out something I have noticed that may make Tolkien seem like a racist or that he held racist view points...

Don't worry. Many people make the same mistakes.

... Now Tolkien's ROTK was published back in 1956, which means he wrote it before then. Back in those days, black people still
didn't have the civil liberties and rights that they have today, and there
was segregation and discrimination, etc...

J.R.R. Tolkien did not live in the United States. The American experience in race, while not exactly unique, is nonetheless uniquely American.

...So it is entirely possible that Tolkien could've been of the mindset of White supremacists.

Quite the contrary. He condemned the Nazis and all they stood for. The Nazis were, of course, the epitome of White Supremacists (many of whom are today called NeoNazis).

Point #1:

Mordor is in the East, and the Shire is in the West. "Evil Lands" such as Dunland, Harad, etc. also seem to be South/SouthEast.

The original home for evil in Tolkien's mythology was THE NORTH. So, your point one is invalid.

Furthermore, the peoples of the east and south were subjugated by Sauron. They were slaves to his will. That is why he created the One Ring. Hence, their subservience to evil is excused.

And you're also overlooking the fact that most of the Numenoreans (who lived in the WEST) fell into evil.

So, there are two more strikes against your first point. But the most telling blow comes from your own remark:

...This is a parallel to the real Earth that I find too blatantly obvious to ignore.

Wrong. In "the real Earth", evil is found everywhere, in every nation. There is no "home for evil".

...And so, it could be surmised that Tolkien seemed to have something against the East.

Many people have incorrectly made such a surmise. Of course, there is no basis for it. But people do make it.

Tolkien's term, Easterlings seems to me to be some sort of profane, vagrant epithet, similar to how the N-Word is something that used to be used by Whites to vulgarize black people, which now only they can use amongst themselves. If I recall, the Easterlings are evil men who are allied with Sauron, like the Haradrim and Dunlanders.

Any word or name can become an offense to those for whom it is used. However, since the Easterlings and Haradrim didn't express any offense at being called Easterlings and Haradrim, it's impossible to justify the idea that it was a derogatory term.

That would be like saying it's an insult to call Europeans by that name, or Americans by that name.

Dunlanders = Dune landers? As in Desert-people?

Nope. They were dark-skinned (as were the Men of Bree), and "dun" is an Old English word meaning "dark". So, you missed a "white-versus-black" misinterpretation that many people wrongly seize upon (that is, assuming that all dark-skinned people are bad, overlooking the obvious exceptions such as the Breelanders and the dark-skinned Gondorians who help defend Minas Tirith).

So, Point 1 is clearly blown out of the water.

Moving on....

Point #2:

In the scene in TTT the novel, Tolkien is describing the Haradrim as they pass through the forest with their Oliphaunts, and Frodo and Sam watch as they get ambushed by Faramir and company, and also the one where they observe the Black Gate Is Closed and the Evil Men marching towards it. The gist translation of this narrative, IMHO, is:

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but why isn't your opinion influenced by the scene where Sam looks at the body of the dead Southron and wonders if he was really evil?

The actual text from The Black Gate Is Closed, pg. 299:

"More men going to Mordor," he said in a low voice. "Dark faces. We have not seen Men like these before, no, Smeagol has not. They are fierce. They have black eyes, and long black hair, and gold rings in their ears; yes, lots of beautiful gold.........Not nice; very cruel wicked men they look. Almost as bad as Orcs..."

Well, if anyone wants to wrongly assume that Smeagol's idiom (choice of words) is a thinly disguised representation of Tolkien's views on race, well, we're not going to stop them from making such bad assumptions with more words.

However, it would have been rather silly to describe the Southrons as fair-skinned, blue-eyed, blond-haired peoples since such ethnic groups only come from northern climates.

My English teacher tells me that a lot of the Author's ego goes into his novel, and some of the characters can be extensions of ego.

Your English teacher is quite right. For example, Frodo, Aragorn, and Gandalf all represent the better qualities of Tolkien's ego. So, too, do Gimli and Legolas. And Arwen, for that matter.

Of these characters, all but Gandalf express some form of racism -- only to repent later on. They learn that just because people are different from them doesn't mean the other people are inferior or necessarily evil.

Aragorn, in fact, being an heir to the Kings of Gondor, is a descendant of a king who had to fight to regain his throne after racists took it from him.

However, what your English teacher should also have told you is that not everything in a story represents some personal point of view belonging to the author. Tolkien condemned racism, and he used it in The Lord of the Rings to depict a common human fault. Some characters rise above it, and others are destroyed by it. The Lord of the Rings therefore points out the fallacies of racism and condemns it.

...A lot of his own opinions also go into the story. "Almost as bad as Orcs" seems to be what Tolkien thinks of such men who are "Dark faced, big black eyes, long black hair."

No, it's just what Gollum/Smeagol says. Tolkien's opinion of narrow-minded, petty individuals is, in fact, represented by the Orcs themselves. You can learn this by reading his letters, in which he compares brutal, selfish, intolerant people (particularly in the military) to Orcs.

In the movie those Haradrim in the Forest scene and the evil men marching into Morder in the Black Gate scene look kinda like Arabs/Sheiks, IMHO, because their headdresses look akin to turbans, and they wear veils, etc.

And in Shakespeare, all evil people use Elizabethan English, so clearly anything written in Elizabethan English must be evil.

Do you see how equally applicable a movie representation is? Bad logic is bad logic.

Now if he really was a racist, then its very ironic that he spent the young years of his childhood in South Africa, and that it was a black woman that sucked the poison out of his foot when he got stung by a spider, and it was that spider which was the inspiration for Shelob. All this according to a biography I read about Tolkien, I had to write a report about it.

Sounds to me like you read the wrong biography. Most of them are pretty bad.

[Attalus]

Good point for point refutation, Michael. [flame-baiting edited - RR]

[Alvin Eriol]

We had a long and interesting discussion along these lines regarding alleged or hypothetical anti-semitism, which unfortunately seems to have vanished in the Downfall early this yr. Many of the same principles apply.

I'm going to look again, but I seem to recall Tolkien himself might have addressed the point about Southrons/Easterlings, saying something to the effect that those peoples in the context of the mythology had come under the dominion of Sauron, and it had no relation to his attitude toward peoples of those regions or races in the Primary World.

Bravo to Michael for pointing out Sam's musings on the dead Southron soldier as an example of Tolkien's aim to humanize, rather than demonize, the unfortunates who found themselves conscripted into the service of Sauron.

As to the Shelob = spider-that-bit-him-as-a-child business, JRRT dismissed that one too, in one of his Letters, characterizing it as one of the unfounded conclusions drawn by people who don't know him or his work but must write something about him. Many of those quickie knock-off bio's that popped out in the wake of the movies surely rate that same comment. We've had some discussions in the Inklings forum re good and bad Tolkien bios and critical works, but I'm not sure if they are still there. If so, they're buried deep in the stack.

[Martin Read]

Dun is one of the few borrowings Anglo-Saxon made from Celtic, along with coombe and brock (badger). It is found in Celtic names such as Dunwallon and Duncan, and then in Anglo-Saxon names such as Dunstan and Dunhere. Rather than simply "dark" it had the meaning of a rather dull indeterminate colour (a bit like khaki or beige is an indeterminate colour), this would be a brown or greyish brown.

I always took the dun in Dunland to be a reference to hair colour, not skin colour. The Dunlendings, as relatives of the House of Haleth, wouldn't have been all that dark of skin, their major visible difference to the pony-boys would have been hair colour. Indeed at the Battle of Helm's Deep Tokien describes the Dunlendings as "tall and dark haired." The sallowness of the Isengard spies in Bree could be due to uruk crossings in their ancestry.

Tolkien in the use of dun in Dunland was being, as usual, linguistically spot on. It links the Dunlendings to their kin in Breeland, whose place names have Celtic elements (Coombe [again!] and Archet), but dun is also an Anglo-Saxon word and so fits in with the rendering of the speech of Rohan.

In reference to the wider question, not many people take on the fact that the Hobbits, being the major heroic people in Tolkien's fiction, are described as being mostly "nut-brown" in skin colour.

[Aelmer]

Originally posted by Martin Read
In reference to the wider question, not many people take on the fact that the Hobbits, being the major heroic people in Tolkien's fiction, are described as being mostly "nut-brown" in skin colour.

Absolutely correct, Martin. That, "clever brown fingers" and Harfoots being "browner of skin" fail to register, especially among those looking for racism.

[Alvin Eriol]

Here is a link to the discussion on books about Tolkien and his work, to which I referred above

[Bacchus]

Yet another fact that is often overlooked is the fact that the Corsairs of Umbar, a greatly feared enemy group from the perspective of Gondor, was of Numenorean stock. Likewise the Mouth of Sauron, one of the most evil individual characters that we meet.

How is Gollum evidence for who and what Tolkien concidered racist? Didn't he, on several occations, accuse the Elves of being nasty, mean or evil, as he did to the Hobbits?

Also, To the East and South of Britain were the then Faciest states of Germany and Italy, the distance acording to maps would also have been similar, or at east closer that Africa and Western Asia would be. At a guess, I'm not a Tolkien expert like some amoung us.....

I've heard some of the things Tolkien said to the Nazis were quite ammusing, or at least insulting to the Nazis.

[blizzard]

ok lets do this piece by piece



the word shire is an archiac term for a town or village
next we have to remember that tolkien inlaid in LOTR is Tolkiens views on religion and it says in the Bible that heaven is in the WEST hence his affinity for that direction
also in TTT when Frodo and Sam see the battle before they get to th crossroads it speaks about the southerns knowing about their own evil they were just fighting for there own cause


next DUNLAND is a grassy plain/forested area (well it was before the wars in the second age) it was not a dune like area


i have dark eyes and black hair and depending on the weather i could have dark skin but guess what im caucasian! and i've never been the point of any authors non-existant racial attacks



and Tolkien is rotting in his grave while a Thailand midget is playing as Pippin but i still dont think hes racist



just to point out the whole list of charecters may all have been white there is still plenty of racial DIVERSITY
hobbits are darkskinned
the men of Forod and Angmar where white but never the less malignatly evil


oh and tolkien wrote the stories as a mythology for england/britain so wouldnt it make sence for the racial distribution to be similar to Earth

Who cares if Tolkien was racist or not! Its a really strange idea you've got about Tolkien having something against people in the East just because he put Mordor in the East. Many other writers who write fantasy books put lands in the East and West. I'm quite sure it has nothing to do with racism, it probably never crossed his mind.
Therefore belt up and stop tarnishing his memory.

[Doncoriel]

I believe this topic has now been fully discussed, and as such this thread is closed.
~Doncoriel