Tolkien and race
With the late 19th-century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline, Robin Anne Reid and others have suggested that the mention of race mixing in The Lord of the Rings embodies scientific racism.
Scholars including Patrick Curry and Christine Chism have noted that assertions that Tolkien is a racist based on The Lord of the Rings often omit relevant evidence from the text.
and analysing in turn Tolkien's use of black and white (including his antipathy to racism and apartheid from his mother's experience in South Africa[5]), the nature of Orcs, the racial connections in his language, antisemitism, and the apparent hierarchy of races and lords within them.
She notes that scholars including Anderson Rearick, David Perry, and Patrick Curry have criticised or defended Tolkien on "racial charges".
She states however that Tolkien wrote mostly "when race was still a valid scientific term", while scholars still held "ideas of the nature of Man and his place in the world".
"[8] The scholars of English literature William N. Rogers II and Michael R. Underwood, note that a widespread element of late 19th century Western culture was fear of moral decline and degeneration; this led to eugenics.
[9] In The Two Towers, the Ent Treebeard says:[T 1] It is a mark of evil things that came in the Great Darkness that they cannot abide the Sun; but Saruman's Orcs can endure it, even if they hate it.
[12] The philosopher Charles W. Mills comments that in his Middle-earth writings, Tolkien effectively reprises the racist myth of 19th century European thinking by men such as the British advocate of eugenics, Francis Galton.
[10] Stuart concurs, examining Tolkien's alternative proposals for the origins of Orcs, whether "Animals, Automatons, or Twisted Elves", and finding signs of a racist attitude there.
The Germanic studies scholar Sandra Ballif Straubhaar states that "a polycultured, polylingual world is absolutely central" to Middle-earth and that readers and filmgoers will quickly see that.
[14] She replies that this was milder than that of many of his contemporary novelists such as John Buchan, and that Tolkien had made "appalled objection" when people had misapplied his story to current events.
Among these, Rearick cites Steuard Jensen's observation that there are "light skinned characters who did evil things",[22][a] including Boromir, Denethor, Gollum, Saruman, and Grima Wormtongue.
[30][17] She writes that Middle-earth is hierarchical like the medieval great chain of being, with God at the top, above (in turn) Elves, Men, and at the bottom monsters such as Orcs.
In her view, this makes sense in terms of theology, and indeed in a mythology like The Silmarillion, whereas a novel like The Lord of the Rings demanded rounded characters rather than symbols of good or evil.
[17] In a private letter, Tolkien describes orcs as:[T 5] squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.
"[T 5]Fimi describes Tolkien's mentions of "swarthy complexions" and slanted eyes as "straight out of Victorian anthropology, which links mental qualities and physique".
The editor and critic Andrew O'Hehir describes orcs as "a subhuman race bred by Morgoth and Sauron (although not created by them) that is morally irredeemable and deserves only death.
They are dark-skinned and slant-eyed, and although they possess reason, speech, social organisation and, as Shippey mentions, a sort of moral sensibility, they are inherently evil.
[T 6]The literary critic Jenny Turner, writing in the London Review of Books, endorses O'Hehir's comment that orcs are "by design and intention a northern European's paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about".
[17] In 1938, the publishers of the German translation of The Hobbit, Rütten & Loening [de] of Potsdam, wrote to Tolkien asking if he was of pure arisch ("Aryan") descent.
He asked his English publisher, Stanley Unwin if he should[T 11] suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of 'arisch' origin from all persons of all countries?
In a 1944 letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien wrote:[22][T 10] ...it is distressing to see the [British] press grovelling in the gutter as low as Goebbels in his prime, shrieking that any German commander who holds out in a desperate situation (when, too, the military needs of his side clearly benefit) is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic.
There was a solemn article in the local [Oxford] paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil!
[38] Commentators including the scholar of English literature Julie Pridmore have noted Tolkien's opposition to South African racism; she describes his views as "advanced in terms of the acceptance of different cultures and ethnicities".
[39] During the Second World War, Tolkien's son Christopher, training in South Africa, expressed concern about the treatment of black people at the hands of whites, and his father replied:[T 12] As for what you say or hint of 'local' conditions: I knew of them.
[T 12]Stephen Wigmore wrote in The Spectator that Tolkien explicitly rejected the South African policy of apartheid, racial segregation, in his 1959 speech on retiring as a professor at the University of Oxford.
The journalist David Ibata writes that the orcs in Peter Jackson's Tolkien films look much like "the worst depictions of the Japanese drawn by American and British illustrators during World War II.
