Barad-Dur sounds more Persian than Persian

But Barad-dûr is the Sindarin name. In the Black Speech of Mordor, the Dark Tower is Lugbúrz.

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.

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 movie, in its depiction of “the other,” struck many people as racist” in its implications.

He called on poetry and science to counteract that. I wouldn’t want to put a crimp on anyone’s enjoyments—of Tolkien, say, or video games, but I do hope (with Wordsworth) that maybe someday in the future people will be able to discover pleasure in other things as well.

The evil Orc “blood” trumps the good. This is Aristotelain biology (i.e., the foundation of certain kinds of racism).

But Tolkien was a sincere Christian and a good linguist. For Christians all people are equal, if only after death. As good a linguist and scholar he would know that all that stuff about Aryans being a racial instead of a language group was hooey.

I did read Lord of the Rings when I was 18 years old and I was very disappointed because my friends had hyped it so much. I found it rather dull, I’m afraid (but not racist or ideologically offensive in any way). It just seemed to be lacking in characterization, and the prose style was very flat-footed. I was very much a bookworm and had already read countless Victorian and Gothic novels
as well as modern lit. and found them more satisfying. The movie, and the way it was hyped by warmongers in the run-up to the Iraq war, is another story. It was very troubling.

As far as Tolkien’s politics, I wholly sympathize with the nostalgia for an earlier, agricultural as opposed to industrial, way of life. Or at least many aspects of it (not the plumbing, drudgery, disease, lack of sanitation, and repeated possibility of “Malthusian collapse” of course).

I don’t think children all see the world in black and white and good and evil unless brainwashed into it. They are capable of drawing finer distinctions and can be encouraged to do so.

I find the comparison of Tolkien and Wordsworth unconvincing. Wordsworth said we should make science the inspiration for modern poetry. He also abhorred the gross sensationalism which he saw as having taken over mass entertainment (and which the movie of LOTR seems to exemplify). In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1808?) he states that poetry helps people to make fine distinctions and that this one of its justifications.

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 think Tolkien was playing on old NW European imagery when he described most of the elves and dunedain as fair skinned with dark hair. Consider the medieval Irish Story of Dierdre, where Dierdre describes the man she desires:

‘I saw a face in my dream,’ said Déirdre, ‘that was of brighter countenance than the king’s face or Cailcin’s, and it was in it that I saw the three colours that pained me, namely the whiteness of the snow on his skin, the blackness of the raven on his hair, and the redness of the blood upon his countenance,

Anyone who claims that the good guys in Lord of the Rings are all blond haired and blue eyed hasn’t read the book.

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?