Bilbo, “the Man” vs. Bilbo, the halfling

OK, spoil it for us. Is the threat from the East postwar immigration of orcs, or goblins, or the Ten Lost Tribes of Gollums, or what?

Tolkien a racist? Never! Kentucky was a source for Tolkien because it was a remnant of an agrarian England. Tolkien was a conservative, even a reactionary, but never a racist, as a cursory examination of The Fellowship will reveal. Tolkien’s work was backward-looking: Middle Earth was in decline, the Age of Men was approaching. The British of the 1800s as seen by the 30s mind were pretty clearly represented by the Shire: content to mind their own business, but when adventure called, wildly successful, and at the end ravaged by industrialism. Tolkien saw all of this as passing, and wrote retrospectively rather than con temporarily. The Age of Men had, in WWI, showed itself.

foolishmortal: I have to disagree with you about Tolkien & race. Any Men who side with Sauron, for instance, are all swarthy & shifty-eyed, or have black or yellow skin. There isn’t any *overt* racism in LotR – but there are small pockets of casual racism. I don’t think Tolkien was consciously racist. I do think he fell back upon racial tropes fairly easily when creating images of the enemies of the West.

You’re spot on about Kentucky, though – much of Appalachia preserves names, traditions & folkways that were wiped out by Victorian era reforms in England.

England’s rich ancient traditions of poverty, ignorance, and disease survive only in a few backwaters of the former colonies, so that traditionalists have to go overseas to experience them.

Holbo, like Kotsko, is a Slovak. Zizka is the Slovenian.

Wait, no, Zizka is the Czech, Zizek is the Slovenian.

Tesla is the Serb. Kucinich is the Croat. Alexander is the Macedonian. St. Jerome is the Bosnian. Herzegovinans are either Croats or Bosnians. Dalmatians are dogs.

5, in fact, is not completely true. Although they don’t appear in the main story very much, the Black Númenoreans are tall Aryan types, just like the Dúnedain of Arnor and Gondor, and they serve Sauron.

But I think that it is generally correct – Tolkien was a man of his times, and his times included a great deal of casual racism which he probably didn’t even consciously realize he was transmitting.

In a letter to a 1930s German publisher wishing to reprint “the Hobbit”, Tolkien responded to being asked whether or not he was “pure Aryan” by saying that he was not fortunate enough to have any known Jewish ancestry, though he wished he did.

In “The Two Towers” Sam sees a dead Southron soldier and wonders about his life, his family, and what deceit made him fight for Sauron.

The appendices mention Gondor almost being destroyed by a racist civil war over “purity” of the royal line. The “mixed-breed” is the good guy and the winner.

About Orcs – Tolkien did realize that he had a problem there, and one of the reasons why he never finished the “Silmarillion” was that he couldn’t find a solution. Could Iluvatar (God) have created a race evil by nature? If, instead, Morgoth created them, then that’s Manichaeanism. If they’re really corrupted Elves or Men, then they have free will. And so on.

I always thought that Tolkien was writing a mythology for the proto-British isles, to the point that other than some very early Silmarillion stories relating to the origin of the elves in unknown Eastern lands, Tolkien’s ouvre happens in the Northwest of Middle Earth.

In the Tolkien mythology, Numenor’s the only thing to the west of Gondor/Arnor/the Havens and other lands of the Northwest, and Numenor goes under.

Inevitably, enemies of the Numenorians and Rohirrim had to come from the South or West of Middle Earth, which in some ways forced Tolkien’s hand about who was to populate those lands.

BTW – I wouldn’t go as far as saying Southrons and other allies of Sauron were black or yellow skinned – frankly, I always thought of them as Northern AFrican (i.e., Berber/Tourageish) or Middle Eastern (i.e., Arab/Semitic).

That also makes sense within the framework of Tolkien’s stories, because blacks and (particularly) yellow skinned types are very far away from the events of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd age of the world….

Tolkien was a huge racist. I say this as someone who was read the Lord of the Rings books as bedtime stories as a child, and who reread tehm, along witht Silmarillion, the Lost Tales, and anything else I could get my hands on, repeatedly as an adolescent. But come on.

Everybody in his boks is an instance of a racial type. Elves? Wise and beautiful. Orcs? Crude and violent. Dwarves? Greedy but loyal. And so on. As others have noted the various races of men are on the side of good exactly insofar as they are blond and blue-eyed; the bad ones are swarthy as swarthy comes.

Of course Tolkien doesn’t announce that he’s a racist. Of course he doesn’t say the black bad guys are bad because they’re black. But that standard there’s never been any racism in the world, ever.

Lawrence Auster wrote an unintentionally hilarious explanation of why humans and hobbits could not be friends (the difference in size would just be insurmountable). It was a .doc file that I can’t find anymore.

Anyone who tries to find ANY kind of coherent political viewpoint in Tolkien is on a fool’s errand — his expressed views seem to have oscillated crazily between monarchism and/or authoritarianism on the one hand, and libertarian anarchism on the other, with the only consistent theme being his regret that politics was necessary at all. We’re talking about a guy whose 1930s letters simultaneously furiously denounce Lewis for being anti-Franco (after all, Franco was pro-Catholic and so HAD to be a good guy) — and denounce the mistreatment of South African blacks and the Nazis’ anti-Semitism.

Similarly, his nostalgia (if that’s the word for it) for an imaginary world in which Goodness and Badness are racially determinate was interlaced with an awareness that in the real world things were not that way and have never been that way. Consider his poem about Charles Williams in which he describes Byzantium as “a hive… rotting within while outwardly alive”, or his late letter stating flatly that Aragorn’s descendants would end up being “as bad as Denethor or worse”.

And, really, it seems to me that this is the whole secret of LOTR’s strange but (for a lot of us) extremely potent appeal — despite Tolkien’s insistence that it was no allegory, I DO think it’s an allegory (perhaps subconscious) of the inevitable replacement of the mental world of childhood (with its view of people as firmly and deterministically Good or Bad, Black or White) with the mental world of adulthood (in which all of us are really Gray). The mental world of childhood does have to be abandoned in the end, or it turns morally poisonous — but there’s no pretending that it isn’t an immensely sad loss in many ways. LOTR is a prose version of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality”. View the pre-Fourth Ages of Middle-Earth as the child’s view of the world, the Fourth Age as the adult’s view of it, and the Three Rings as a means used to ARTIFICIALLY prolong the childish nature of Middle-Earth — thus preserving great beauties, but ultimately deriving their power from the One Ring, the embodiment of selfishness and deadly mental seductiveness. (Tolkien, in fact, explicitly mentioned this view of the Three Rings in another late letter.) And so, ultimately, the pre-Fourth Age — in which the Orcs and Sauron’s other monsters are DETERMINISTICALLY and unchangeably evil while the Elves are just as naturally and innately Better than mortal Men, and in which people (the Nazgul, the other victims of the One Ring, even Saruman through the influence of the Palantir) can be COMPELLED to be evil by magic but are neverthless described as genuinely evil — has to die and be replaced by the modern, gray world of human free will and mental autonomy. But how much less beautiful the latter is in many ways!

By the way, I’ve only recently read Tolkien’s famous essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” — in which, it turns out, he describes that poem as reflectng just the same sort of uneasy transitional view of evil, since it was written by a medieval Christian writer looking back on the age of heroic pre-Christian paganism. Beowulf’s monsters are to some extent seen as “evil” simply because they’re dangerous to humans — that is, they’re simply PHYSICALLY evil — but the poem also describes them to some extent as being deliberately, SPIRITUALLY evil by choice. But ultimately you can’t have it both ways, either in Beowulf’s world or in LOTR’s world — both of which end up passing away elegiacally at the ends of the two books.

Tolkien didn’t say that “Beowulf” was “deeply Christian” — that was my point. He said that there were some Christian elements inserted into it, existing rather uncomfortably alongside the purely “pagan” aspects of the poem (specifically, the primitivistic idea that a monster is just someone or something, either a beast or a member of an enemy tribe, that wants to eat you or bash your brains out — with the Judeo-Christian concept of a “morally monstrous” person only coming along later).

Beowulf” seems like a pagan poem with weak Christianity inserted or slapped on.

This is correct, and is true of LOTR as well. And, FWIW, 26 is spot on, except for his conclusions.

Tolkien was racist in that he saw races deciding to either fight together or fight against each other. Races in LOTR ,with the exception of humans,were nationalist. So, the Southrons excepted, Tolkien’s racism is really a nationalism. I’m willing to excuse the Southrons’ dark color as a mark of exoticism rather than a marker of some animosity toward the dark-skinned as the lines describing light-skinned bad people for outnumber those describing the Southrons. Tolkien wasn’t a racist: he was a nationalist.

Just to note: I read the four volume series by Christopher Tolkien, J. R. R.’s son, on the wriing of LotR & The Hobbit (I’m pretty sure it’s longer than the actual books) and the original name for Bilbo Baggins was “Bingo” Baggins. One can only wonder if it all would have gone over so well had “Bingo” been retained.

This transposition of Middle Earth onto Europe by UCLA geology professor Peter Bird (via the strange maps blog) is worth a look. Not something to read too much into, but an interesting exercise nonetheless – especially for the map nerds among us.

For the record: Aragorn (in the chapter called “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”) and Boromir (“The Council of Elrond”) are both described as dark-haired and grey-eyed, not blond and blue-eyed. I can’t find the quote at the moment, but I’m pretty sure Aragorn is described somewhere else as “dark,” period. Not dark as in “African,” but certainly nothing like “Nordic,” at least in my imagining (which is the result of reading LOTR approximately once a year since I was 15, which was a very long time ago).

Bruce Moomaw: I really liked your analysis in #26.

Bingo Baggins! He would have run off with the dwarves out of love for some wildly inappropriate young woman, and Jeeves would engineered the whole dragon encounter to convince him that bachelordom was much preferable?

Well, since P.H. Cannon has written three stories in which Bertie Wooster meets the Cthulhu Mythos, I suppose intermixing Wodehouse and Tolkien isn’t that much of a stretch.

As for Tolkien’s “racism”: the Southrons aren’t Orc/Men hybrids, and neither they nor the Easterlings nor the Dunlendings nor any other “real” Men — whatever culture they may come from — are portrayed as innately, unchangeably evil, and the good guys make peace with them and pardon all their POWs the moment the opportunity presents itself. The only Orc/Man hybrids in the book are bred by Saruman, and they ARE porrayed as unchangeably evil — but not because they’re “half-breeds”, but simply because they’re part Orc.

As for the determinate evil of the Orcs (and Sauron’s other monsters): Tolkien was indeed uneasy about that subject his entire life. Note that his apparent (if fuzzily described) resolution of it in LOTR is that they weren’t really autonomous beings, but just detached fragments of the souls of Sauron (and, before him, his boss Morgoth) — so that when Sauron finally buys the farm completely (as opposed to his earlier incomplete falls, in which the Ring preserved the majority of his soul), all of them, “Orc or Troll or beast spell-enslaved”, instantly turn into harmless, mindless lunatics. Before then, they could occasionally behave as though they might be real, autonomous beings — they could make wisecracks about the Boss behind his back, or toy with the idea of running off on their own — but whenever the real crunch came they always slavishly obeyed the Boss. They weren’t really people, but semi-detached finger puppets of Sauron and Morgoth, and so they didn’t need to be treated as people.

And, again, the only possible way to view the pre-Fourth Age world is as a world in which free moral choice simply didn’t exist anywhere as universally as it does in the “adult”, Fourth Age world. The Elves, in LOTR at least, are unquestionly portrayed as more naturally, reflexively noble and generous than Elves or Men or Hobbits — their only sign of moral weakness is their habit of occasionally making snotty remarks about Dwarves. Goodness comes more naturally to them. (One of the shocking things about “The Silmarillion” was the extent to which the Elves there were portrayed as barely more moral than mortal Men — and, in some cases, as flatly evil.) Similarly, consider Shelob, a Beowulfian monster if ever there was one — is she a “monster” just because she’s hungry and therefore dangerous, or is she genuinely cruel and sadistic and thus evil? Tolkien suggests the latter. This ambiguity of Free Will vs. Determinism runs all through the book — including the power of the One Ring and the Nine Rings, which can literally force people to be evil against their initial will. (It’s no accident that, in the 1960s, some hippies regarded the Ring as a metaphor for drug addiction.)

This is the child’s view of Good and Evil, and its abandonment is a necessary part of growing up — but, as Wordsworth and Tolkien agreed, with that growing up there also passes “a glory from the Earth”. Thus the extraordinarily powerful emotional melancholy of the book, without which it would be trivial trash. And thus it remains a genuine — if strange — piece of literature despite the fact that (completely unlike C.S. Lewis’ works) it’s totally useless as an actual guide to the nature of morality and moral behavior. I absolutely loved LOTR as 13-year-old, but I never assumed for a second that it had anything important to tell me about morality — whereas, when I started reading Lewis’ books for adults at age 15 (I didn’t read his Narnia books until I was 27!), it was instantly apparent to me that he DID have genuinely important (and fascinating) things to say about the nature of good and evil.

@Harold #31

“Well, nationalism can have several aspects. There is liberal nationalism, which accords people the right to celebrate their ethnic heritages, languages, music, and traditions and to honor their ancestors—and also to decide freely for themselves what traditions to keep and what to discard and what customs to borrow and adapt from other groups.”

I would argue that you are expanding the notion of national identity based on common civic institutions well beyond its traditional scope. What you discribe is an empire, not a nation. The counterpart civic nationalism would be ethnonationalism, national identity based on shared kinship (real or imagined), not authoritarianism.

Harold at 31:Tolkein was just passing on received ideas. They are also found in Faulkner, by the way, who also depicted his mixed-race characters as degenerates.

Harold, you should read Lord of the Rings. You’d find it interesting.
There are actually some mixed-race characters in it who are portrayed positively – a fact of which you seem unaware. Or did you think that Elrond and Arwen are actually despised degenerates? All that stuff about incredible wisdom and beauty was maybe sarcastic?

Ajay @46: I’m sure Faulkner’s half-elves were also portrayed more sympathetically than his half-Negroes.

On the other hand, the movies of Lord of the Rings can be interpreted as tending to a form of racism, in their depictions of the villains as misshapen and dark,

But the movies depict a range of skin colours amongst the villains.

Saruman is white.
Sauron is a red eye that’s on fire.
The orcs are pale-skinned, and inclined to dress in dark colours.
The Ringwraiths dress in black but are shown underneath their robes as a skeletal white.
The Uruk-hai are dark-skinned.
The monster at the gates is pale.
The balrog is black, and on fire. (arguably these two are not so much evil as just having a rather agressive method of defending their territory).
The Southrons look Asian, from what we can see of their eyes.
Gollum is a sort of greyish colour, but in the flashback is depicted as white.
Denethor is white.

It seems a reasonably racially-mixed group of villains in the movies. If anything, I would say it’s creating a negative image of Goths (all those pale skins and black clothes).

I should have said “lack of plumbing” of course!

I think discussions like this are kind of weird. Sure Tolkien was racist in that he viewed orcs as being inherently evil. Okay. In middle-earth it seems like that is a correct view. Is that racist? Or does that mean in such a world racism is a correct and moral view? I guess the act of constructing such a world has certain implications and suggestions about your beliefs about this world. But only if you really believe that the ‘evil guys’: orcs and southrons, etc, are consistently intended to represent people in this world (africans, middle-easterners, asians or whatever). I can see someone making this argument, but its not tremendously convincing, in my opinion.

I think we are looking at the wrong parts of Tolkien’s universe here, at skin color and physiognomy rather than what we know was his biggest passion, philology.

Let’s see: Hobbit names were old and English rural. The language of Rohan was in Tolkien’s own admission a mock-Old English, and this is obvious to the reader.

It gets more interesting with the Numenoreans. Numenorean names (I know nothing of the grammar which Tolkien fashioned), with the ph’s and their k’s and spare diacritics, evokes a kind of medieval Greek, with the ks not latinized into Cs. This fits with the general depiction of Gondor’s and Numenor’s urban architecture, in which I think he takes pains to evoke a kind of Byzantine feel, not the polis of classical Greece but a Mediterranean Venetian/Byzantine kind of urbanism. Far from Germanic.

Sindarin is vaguely Germanic, but I can’t say exactly how. Quenya looks most like Finnish — so we can say the Elves seem vaguely Nordic, but not rigidly.

It’s with Mordor that I think he makes the most interesting choices. We see in Mordor’s names a very clear debt to the ways in which words of Persian and Turkish origin have circulated in the Orientalist canon through the 19th and early 20th centuries. The same kinds of transliterations, the same diacritics (the kh, the circumflex), the same general phonetic features as 19th and early 20th century transcriptions of Ottoman and Persian names. Barad-Dur sounds more Persian than Persian; the Orcs could be speaking a caricatured Central Asian Turkic; names from the lands of Sauron’s allies farther afield (“Near Harad”) evoke nothing more than the kind of Arabian Nights oriental fantasy which Englishmen of Tolkien’s era imbibed from childrens stories and so on. And of course the locations of these regions in Middle Earth is equally clear.

Anyway, I thought that was interesting. I don’t think Tolkien is racist, but rather, as many have said, “concerned with civilization and myth”, and it’s very transparent what the opposing civilization was.

The appendices mention Gondor almost being destroyed by a racist civil war over “purity” of the royal line. The “mixed-breed” is the good guy and the winner.

If I recall my Tolkien, the “mixed-breed” was actually the _villain_ in that tale, as “mixed-breed” men (where it isn’t Dúnedain & Rohirrim!) tended to be in his stories.