I love Lord of the Rings. Seriously, it's amazing.
In between the page-long run-on sentences and detailed descriptions of Mordor's shrubbery,
we have the definitive epic tale of the modern age, and one of the most
influential and thoughtful fantasy novels in the history of the genre.
With this series, and his earlier work The Hobbit, Tolkien becomes almost the
definition of fantasy; the only person in the English language who even comes close
in my opinion is Ursula Le Guin, and she's probably like... my favorite author ever.
And even though I'd argue she redefined the genre,
Le Guin is herself clearly inspired by and commenting on Tolkien... like everyone is.
All this to say, I like this guy's writing. I'm not trying to posthumously cancel JRR...
But you know, the men of the West are white, beautiful, strong,
great leaders who have to fight against the dark-skinned, elephant-riding southerners who
literally ally themselves with the dark lord of evil... and like, let's talk about that.
I think at first glance there's a very simple analysis to be had here:
that the world of Lord of the Rings is one of good and evil, often represented by white and black.
The central conflict revolves around the war between Gondor and Mordor.
The latter of these is controlled by the Dark Lord Sauron,
Mordor itself means the "Land of Shadow", the Nazgûl dress in black.
Meanwhile, Gondor's coat of arms bears the White Tree, its capital,
Minas Tirith, is centered around the White Tower.
This is classic symbolism, right? The duality between light and darkness, good and evil,
and this dualism is here extended to the people: we see the difference between white
and black people, those who stand against the Dark Lord, and those who stand with him.
Black people are bad and/or easily manipulated by power,
whereas white people are valiant and brave, etc, etc.
Okay, some white people might be cowards or whatever, or even evil,
but the black people in this novel are a faceless monolith - we don't
get their perspectives, descriptions of their societies, and so from the
perspective of the heroes and the reader, they're just the bad guys, Sauron's goons.
And I think that's a fine analysis, that works, that makes sense... but for me personally,
it just isn't quite enough, and the reason is this single line in The Two Towers,
where Sam Gamgee, the best character and one of our good guys, sees a dead
soldier from Harad (the land where the black people come from), and the narration runs:
"[Sam] wondered what the man's name was and where he came from;
and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him
on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace."
And just like that, this supposed symbol of darkness, just a goon,
becomes humanised, becomes a human soldier, and then Tolkien basically never does that again.
So what is going on there?
I'll tell you from the start, I do think this is racist, but I think it's racist
in a weird and complicated way. This is of course not to say that the genre of fantasy
needs to be racist. You know what's a very unproblematic fantasy novel?
My new favorite book, and this video's sponsor,
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I'm exaggerating, but it's a worthy addition to the tradition of English-language fantasy.
I was actually quite scared when I took this deal that I wouldn't like the book,
but it's actually really good, albeit not quite in the way I expected.
It does function as an ordinary fantasy tale: the worldbuilding is consistent, building upon
itself in a satisfying way, with some genuinely interesting concepts at times; we follow a host
of characters, who Bennett writes very vividly, so that they're all clearly defined in your
mind basically by the time you've left the first chapter; as they try to find a secret treasure.
A classic setup. This is all very nice if you, like me,
are a fan of fun fantasy romps with some interesting ideas and well-characterised
protagonists, then you've probably already decided to buy the book.
Uh, but where it gets really interesting is in its exploration of storytelling. See,
the book is framed as one of the characters who went on this adventure collecting testimonies
from his fellow adventurers. This means that the narrative is always questionable, people
know and withhold different information, they have different opinions or even contradict each other
about what happened, or how it happened, there's one character at the beginning of the story who's
just like, "no, I I don't want to be included, don't mention me", and how cool is that, right?
We just get this sense that there are whole chunks missing, hints at where that character would have
been important if she hadn't asked to be left out - and I genuinely just think that's brilliant.
So go and show this book some love, buy yourself a copy of Symphony of the Sojourn,
which is also, by the way, inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, a game that was,
in turn, inspired by the man himself. That's right, I'm pulling it back in, I'm integrati-
Tolkien was a philologist, who specially studied Anglo-Saxon. He held the Rawlinson & Bosworth
Chair at the University of Oxford, brought out what would become the 20th century standard
edition of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 1936,
he gave some super influential lecture on Beowulf, an epic poem of Old English.
He also became interested in the Germanic in general,
allegedly reading the Völsunga Saga in its original Old Norse while still a boy.
In fact, Lord of the Rings is very inspired by the Norse myths: just take how the names of Norse
dwarfs in the Prose Edda provide Tolkien with the names of Gandalf, Dain, Durin, and most of
Thorin's company, including (fun fact) the names "Thorin" and "Ejkinskjalde" as separate dwarfs.
More substantially, the dwarves themselves, and the elves too,
seem to have been based on their Norse counterparts.
At the same time, we keep that English feel, especially in the Shire, where both The Hobbit
and Lord of the Rings start out. I mean, it's called "The Shire", like an English
county. Author Tom Shippey has argued that the Shire is a calque of England, with many of
their aspects corresponding one to one, but with surface-level changes made to the Shire's version.
I am certainly not the first to make the observation that Tolkien seems to want to
construct a mythology for England. Not completely, but in part, the world of Arda can be seen as
a kind of Germanic paganism, almost filling in the gap in the national identity of the English,
an attempt at a substitute for a long-lost Anglo-Saxon mythology,
which we know very little about, especially compared to its cousin, Norse mythology.
But we do know that the Germanic beliefs were related to one another,
and here we can see where all the elements fall into place: the inspiration from the
Old and Middle English epics; the slightly changed Norse mythology; the fondness for
England and creating a parallel history to it - it all creates this English mythology.
At this point, you have to start to wonder, what are the Haradrim (the black people)
even doing here? There's no elephant-riding Africans in Germanic mythology, right?
Well, not exactly, no, the elephant-riding part probably comes from somewhere else,
the history of Carthage or something, but there are many mentions,
in ancient Germanic literature, of Africa.
In an Old English poetic retelling of Exodus, for instance, Tolkien came across the phrase
"Sigelwara land", that is, the land of the Aethiops - and it's probably this that inspired
Harad, a hot, southern land, where the people are dark skinned, seen without its intricacies
from far away, just as the Anglo-Saxons saw it. Aragorn speaks of his travels into the south,
reminiscent of the mentions of "adventures in Africa" present in some ancient Norse poems.
But see, Tolkien cannot give voice to the Haradrim, cannnot tell us of their language or
their political structures, because to do so would be to gain knowledge that no Anglo-Saxon writer,
no English folklore, could ever have. But at the same time, they must be there, in their hot
land to the south, interacting with the politics of other nations, with whispers and legends of
them traveling northward - because Sigelwara land is mentioned in Anglo-Saxon folklore.
And what a fascinating question that poses - is this racist? Can it be racist?
At the time of the literature that Tolkien is drawing upon,
it makes sense for distant cultures to write this way about each other.
If a 10th century Saxon described distant peoples to the south who
were "black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues"... sure,
that's not a flattering portrait, but what would it even mean to call that Saxon racist?
That wouldn't make any sense, right? He has never seen an Aethiop, will never see one,
there is no-one to offend, and no racist structure to uphold,
and no concept of race in the modern usage of the word at all.
Calling this stinky Saxon racist is almost as meaningless as criticising Star Wars because
its depiction of Greedo might offend real space aliens, and Tolkien wants to write
in that mythological sense, he wants to escape into the storytelling of the past.
In Lord of the Rings, the main antagonists, Sauron and Saruman, are industrializing
Mordor and Isengard respectively. One of the central tensions in this work is between the
industrial and the new on the one hand, and the natural and the old on the other.
In both the text and the metatext, Tolkien looks backwards in time, towards an older age, but
can he really escape the present day?
When Tolkien writes of the southerners as "black men like half-trolls with white eyes
and red tongues", many of those who have read it since its release, including me,
instantly go "that's uncomfortable", "that is racist". And isn't that tragic? That no matter
how much Tolkien wants to create a mythology and hark back to the olden days, what we see
as modern people reading a modern writer is only a reflection of our modern conception of race.
But just for the sake of the argument, what if we just let him get away with it? We go yes John,
you can LARP as an Anglo-Saxon myth writer, this is you now.
Yes, it complicates things that you made not one, but two,
groups of far-away non-white people the antagonists of your book. Oh yeah,
did I forget to mention the slanty-eyed Easterlings that also team up with Sauron?
But we can say here, you know, it's a myth, the ideas of race don't apply. We only see these
peoples through the eyes of those who don't understand them, don't know their cultures;
they could have a million kingdoms, have rebellions against Sauron and civil wars,
all the complexities that are laid out when it comes to the lands west of Mordor,
but those can't be spoken about - because this isn't their mythology, this story is
not about them. And again, we see that Lord of the Rings is only as racist as you read it to be.
But there's an issue with this analysis and it's a single line in The Two Towers, where
Sam Gamgee, the best character, and one of our good guys, sees a dead soldier from harad and
the narration runs: "[Sam] wondered what the man's name was and where he came from;
and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him
on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace."
This is a beautiful line, it is a deeply humanising moment. Not only had Tolkien himself
been a soldier, seen the horrors of war, but he also showed, in real life, anti-racist sentiments.
And in this one sentence, he can rehumanise both the enemy and the dark-skinned other, an
opportunity he can't help but take. But see, this moment is so irrefutably modern, and it occurs
when directly talking about a Haradrim, so there's no possible mental separation between the two.
No, suddenly the internal conflicts within the writing of this tale are laid bare. The
Lord Lord of the Rings is not an Anglo-Saxon epic; it may apply many aspects of older texts,
such as interlacing, but it applies these to a modern format: the novel.
And in the modern novel, we often see the world through characters,
we get to experience Sam's perspectives and thoughts in sort of real time.
Unlike in older writings, and indeed Tolkien's own previous work, where authors describe their
characters' emotions the same way they describe a city or a forest, the novel
asks the author to create characters, people, not just heroes. What better way to make Sam
human than to give him these intricate thoughts - and ironically, it leaves this gaping hole in us.
In the end, for me, it is this humanising moment that ruins the illusion of a raceless story,
because we are confronted with the fact here that the Haradrim are not human in the same
way Sam is. Our white characters have been modernised, taken, to an extent, out of their
mythological context - but these dark-skinned southerners are trapped as ancient caricatures.