: : Of course, Jackson is from New Zealand, and he is making a movie based on a story written by an Englishman. The racial sensitivities that we Americans make so big a fuss over don't seem (to me) to have anywhere the kind of impact in those countries as they do here.

: : Anyway, read my late-night ramblings at the link below.

: Excellent ramblings. Way to hoist them on their own petard.
: I wonder why no artist,none that I've seen, has ever depicted hobbits as dark-skinned. Tolkien did say that they had "clever brown fingers". If they had brown fingers, then the rest of their skin must have also been brown. If not, did they never wash their hands, or did they have both dark and light skin? Pinto Hobbits is something I don't want to think about. Does the lack of artwork depicting dark-skinned hobbits mean that all the Tolkien/LOTR artists are racists? If we use the Tolkien is a racist rational, the answer must be a resounding yes.

I think it has to do with people seeing what they want to see. They "see" dark skinned people from the south as racial sterotypes (with no evidence to support their view), but do not see the Hobbits with "brown" skin, or all the white races under Sauron's power. For some reason they think that it was a war of white against black rather than good against evil.