Introduction
As Rings of Power is confirmed to be coming back with a season 2, the old questions of casting and race are slowly but surely resurfacing.
In case you are new to this complicated ordeal, allow me to recap: For a long time, many critics of J.R.R, Tolkien have stated that the ways in which Tolkien writes entities such as orcs and goblins is inherently racist. For one thing, Tolkien characterizes race as a predictor of one’s morality. Elves are always good, orcs are always bad, and all other races are somewhere in the middle. For another thing, the depictions of these orcs and goblins is often interpreted as racist caricatures of actual ethnicities.
Tolkien himself has stated quite explicitly in his prologue to the second edition of The Fellowship of the Ring that he did not intend for his works to be stand-ins for his political opinions. Rather, he hoped that readers would enjoy his stories for what they were–stories.
As a person of mixed Asian and White descent, I was not offended by the depictions of the orcs, but I also was not reading the text through the lens of race in my real life experience.
I realize that many people were offended, and that’s alright. I truly think that both interpretations are valid. Literature is a reflection not only of the author’s experience, but of the experience of the person reading it. A person who has been racially profiled and marginalized may see these descriptions and match them to the way that they are characterized by the hostile world around them. Whether Tolkien intended this or not, these criticisms have a right to be heard and validated. They are a reflection not only of the literature, but of the world that inspired the literature. In acknowledging them, we address the real-world issues.
Characterization of Tolkien’s Races
“…squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the least lovely Mongol-types”
JRR Tolkien speaking about orcs in a letter to his son, October 9th 1944
There is no getting around it: the way that Tolkien characterizes race in his works is…well…racist.
Many, many people have studied Tolkien’s descriptions of the orcs. Some are absolutely disgusted, others are willing to cut him some slack (to be discussed in next week’s article). One thing is for certain, however. The monsters of Tolkien’s world more closely resemble people of color than the “free peoples,” who more closely resemble Europeans. For me, there’s not a lot of discussion to be had around this point. Whether he intended it or not, the language that Tolkien uses to describe the more monstrous races and characters betrays racist ideologies and beliefs.
That’s not to say that all of the villains in The Lord of the Rings are meant to resemble people of color. Saruman, Denethor, and Wormtongue, for example, are lighter skinned opponents to the free peoples of Middle Earth.
Tolkien also often compares the orcs to Europeans in his letters, particularly the ones he encountered while fighting in the first world war. The letters that he wrote to his son, Christopher Tolkien, for example, archive his beliefs that the German soldiers whom he encountered were particularly Orcish in behavior.
Tolkien and Scientific Racism
When addressing this issue, the conversation often lingers towards scientific racism. Scientific racism is essentially the theory that different races have different physical and mental makeup. In the discussion of Tolkien and racism, the question of the orcs’ morality is often what comes up the most. It’s pretty taken for granted that an elf has a different physical makeup than an orc, but what about moral makeup? Is an orc capable of good, or an elf capable of evil? Tolkien seems to suggest that neither are true in Morgoth’s Ring. He states that the orcs have “an irredeemable allegiance to evil,” and that they are “creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad” (411). Morgoth’s Ring goes more into detail about the creation of the orcs and their association with the evil Melkor.
Why does this matter? Well, if the orcs are meant to be stand-ins for people of color, then them being genetically incapable of good doesn’t bode well.
Tolkien seems to reject this theory in one of his letters to his publisher form July 25th 1938. He says “I should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine” . This statement shows, at the very least, that Tolkien was not wholly subscribed to this train of thought. The extent to which he wholly rejected it, however, is yet to be proven.
Tolkien and Moral Geography
Another focus in discussions about this topic is the subject of moral geography. The argument is often made that, the further east you go in Middle Earth, the more evil you find. Furthermore, the free peoples of the world, those being humans, elves, hobbits, dwarves, the like, are found in the west, while the people of the east live in subjugation. Some have found this to be reminiscent of eurocentrism, with freedom and morality being associated with the western world, while the rest of the world is regarded as being backwards or corrupt. This theory has some ground to it, as it seems the further east the fellowship goes, the more danger and hardship they face. Whether or not there is any merit to it is unknown.
Some scholars argue that this sort of eurocentrist thinking was more of a product from Tolkien’s time period and the literature that he had available to him. Helen Young, for example, writes, “To say he inherited the usage is not to excuse, but to contextualize it. Western literature and culture has continued to reproduce the dichotomies of Self and Other and West and East.”1 In other words, Tolkien’s literary experience was filled with a train of thought, and he continued it.
Conclusion
This controversy is not one with a cut and dry answer. In my next article, I intend to dig further into evidence that we have of Tolkien’s subscription to theories of racial equality, even if he had inadvertently internalized some very racist ideals.
- Young, Helen. “Diversity and Difference: Cosmopolitanism and ‘The Lord of the Rings.’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 21, no. 3 (80), 2010, pp. 351–65. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24352268. ↩︎