LoTR, Racism & Historical Analologies

[spaceviking]

PS. Besides, do you really want to push the Numenorean angle? The ones who turned to evil were called "Black Numenoreans", after all.

Are these guys actually darker skinned? The Russian civil war had the whites and the reds. The Black Army was a bunch of Ukrainians.

[Darth Wong]

PS. Besides, do you really want to push the Numenorean angle? The ones who turned to evil were called "Black Numenoreans", after all.

Are these guys actually darker skinned? The Russian civil war had the whites and the reds. The Black Army was a bunch of Ukrainians.

Who knows? It's just not an element you'd want to inject if you want to dispel the notion that Tolkien unconsciously injected racist attitudes into his books. It seems to me that most of the apologists are trying to dispel the notion that Tolkien consciously intended LOTR to serve as a promotion of racism, but nobody is actually saying that in the first place. He consciously intended it to serve as a mythology for western Europe, and his racist (by modern standards) attitudes influenced the result.

[open_sketchbook]

I don't think he was particularly trying to push a racist agenda, even though there are racist undertones. Before widespread awareness of racism, people didn't really examine such things in literature; he probably didn't even notice it himself. He set out to write a eurocentric mythology, and the people in Europe are white, so we have white heroes. When your big bad gathers forces together, they are usually "other" in nature, so it makes a degree of sense to use fantasy counterpart cultures. Furthermore, dark vs light was a major theme in Tolkien's writings, hence the glowing angelic Elves and the dark lands of Mordor and the colour coding of everything; it didn't nessesarily carry a negative subtext of racism yet, when he was writing it. That doesn't make him or his books any less reprehensible, twisted, ignorant or wrong, but at least there probably wasn't any real malice there. Probably.

[Duckie]

Yeah, I'm not disputing there's some racial overtones in LOTR with regards to the makeup of the evil and good sides- I just posted the bit on the letters because it's somewhat racist, but also a portrait of a man clearly realising this at least in part, so I thought it'd be interesting.

Racial overtones are pretty much inevitable when you get black vs white in some way, and that he was trying to make a mythology for Europe. He clearly didn't intend to be racist by the standards of his time*, writing a scathing letter to a german publisher who asked if he was Aryan, opposing Apartheid, etc., but good intentions doesn't stop one. He also was a germanophile (in the sense of germanic peoples- goths, anglo-saxons, germans, etc) who basically set out to write a germanic mythological epic for England and Europe. Which is, on this side of Hitler, totally different than what he (probably) intended. And at the same time he did have some really fucking racist things in his book which can't even be discussed int he context of his time, like Ghan-Buri-Ghan. You can't really cast that in a more detailed light except Europeans being arrogant dicks at the time.

Although as another tidbit from his letters he said that the worst thing Morgoth did was make man fear black and darkness as evil by claiming it as his own. But yeah, a lot of his stuff has unfortunate implications and is a product of his era. Thinking of another letter, he indeed was struggling with the whole 'free will / evil race' thing later on in his life (he apparently retconned trolls, or at least Olog-Hai Trolls, into unthinking automatons and was considering doing the same with Orcs before he upped and died.)

Hm, and another passage from a letter- following the whole German Mythology/Germanicphile thing, he hated Hitler, not only for what he did to the Jews, but for forever associating the "noble northern race" with racism. Granted, I'm not sure how you can have 'racial pride' without being racist. I suppose you could be proud of what your ancestors did, or something? I guess it'd be like being proud of one's country without being a nationalist douchebag? Or maybe you can't, but I'm pretty sure "northern noble race" gives me more willies because of Hitler than because of any intrinsic racism, although my discomfort probably isn't a good measure of objective racism.

*As opposed, to say, Lovecraft, who in certain stories feels pretty much the literary equivalent of Birth of a Nation. The Herbert West story, anyone? I admit I laughed aloud when he felt the need to add that the Negro brain, being smaller and tougher, needed different chemicals to reanimate, but only because it was the stupidest thing I'd read that day.

[Balrog]

(sigh) shit like this reminds me of American Civil War era progressives who may have been progressive for their era, but who still said horribly racist things by modern standards. Does this make them evil men? Perhaps not, but their statements are no less racist. Similarly, this is not about whether Tolkien was an evil man; it is about whether there are racist overtones in his work.

The fact is that there's plenty of racial overtones in it, and even his defenders keep pointing them out but then making excuses. Those excuses may exonerate Tolkien of the crime of being a terrible man, but that's not the subject here. I think certain people are assuming that to be the subject, and responding to it accordingly.

See, you almost get it right here.

Tolkien or his work isn't racist because it doesn't promote racism, the idea that one race is superior to all others, and people who believe that are fucking retarded and didn't read the books. There is a difference between being racist and being indifferent or insensitive, as was explained in the post cropped from this split. The "white" men are not inherently better than the "colored" men, both are fully capable of being good or evil. The fact that the Haradrim got stuck fighting for the wrong guy does not mean that Middle Easterners are all evil men threatening to steal your white women. Is it a lot easier to paint that picture than it ought to be? Sure, but as a lot of people have already said, that wasn't a concern during his time. If he did write it today it would be a lot more different to meet modern sensibilities, just so you couldn't be told by smug white people how you're oversensitive.

PS. Besides, do you really want to push the Numenorean angle? The ones who turned to evil were called "Black Numenoreans", after all.

Don't be an idiot, the concept of the color black being a representation of evil is one of those things that goes way back in Western culture.

And no, they weren't darker-skinned than the other Numenoreans.

[Rye]

Man, you wouldn't think it would be so hard to go "Yeah it was written in the thirties/forties so it unsurprisingly has some racial themes that would probably raise eyebrows if it were written today, but I still enjoy the story so whatever."

That's a very reasonable statement (about the book; the original thread was actually about the movie). However, some people are prone to saying "oversensitive!" every time a minority brings up race, while others just can't bring themselves to admit there could be anything wrong with their beloved LOTR at all.

What about this makes you think it's got anything to do with you being a "minority" and not just being oversensitive yourself? I don't think anyone would give a shit if you were a lesbian feminist film critic or a KKK member using it to support his attempt at convincing some christian kids, the content is ultimately the same, but I guess a little tinge of an accusation against the characters and purpose of the opposing side never hurt anything. Unless you're going to go all "hey, a minority among film critics, not races, you shitfuckburger!!" now.

The books are old and contain monarchist nonsense, and he uses descriptions that would be considered rude and un-PC today, but Tolkein was a writer from his time, even if he was still pretty far from contemporaries like Lovecraft (a cat called Nigger-Man? Really?!). Even so, he does go further towards equality than you would expect a person in that era with a what one would expect to be an unmodern racist story to tell. Sauron can only come back because of the weakness of men. What colour men? Black? Well actually, the weakness and failure is down to the same royal white people the rest of the story revolves around.

The films were made with an understanding of modern concepts of racism and efforts were taken to avoid any clear racial stereotypes (hence why the Haradrim were a mix of sexy eyeliner wearing Egyptians, Aztecs and others). I see no reason to not give them the benefit of the doubt in telling a story about a mythical medieval white part of the world walking off to hack up a bunch of darker-fleshed (and as noted, same-coloured) baddies. I think it was more ballsy or at least artistically valid to do it that way than to put the source material through the PC minority reallocation table.

Tangentally related (due to the amount of lotr-related material in the genre), black metal has hardly any non-white musicians. The "wickedness of the black" amongst its most obsessive supporters has dick-all to do with being non-white.

[Bakustra]

That's a very reasonable statement (about the book; the original thread was actually about the movie). However, some people are prone to saying "oversensitive!" every time a minority brings up race, while others just can't bring themselves to admit there could be anything wrong with their beloved LOTR at all.

What about this makes you think it's got anything to do with you being a "minority" and not just being oversensitive yourself? I don't think anyone would give a shit if you were a lesbian feminist film critic or a KKK member using it to support his attempt at convincing some christian kids, the content is ultimately the same, but I guess a little tinge of an accusation against the characters and purpose of the opposing side never hurt anything. Unless you're going to go all "hey, a minority among film critics, not races, you shitfuckburger!!" now.

The books are old and contain monarchist nonsense, and he uses descriptions that would be considered rude and un-PC today, but Tolkein was a writer from his time, even if he was still pretty far from contemporaries like Lovecraft (a cat called Nigger-Man? Really?!). Even so, he does go further towards equality than you would expect a person in that era with a what one would expect to be an unmodern racist story to tell. Sauron can only come back because of the weakness of men. What colour men? Black? Well actually, the weakness and failure is down to the same royal white people the rest of the story revolves around.

So you don't disagree at all, but are upset over the labeling used? Because the argument we are using is not that the work is purposefully racist, but that the set-up of the plot and setting create racist implications. The idea of monochromic West versus multicultural East is something that does carry racist implications if the West are heroes and the East villains, because this associates multiculturalism with evil. The only speaking non-white characters are either horrendous stereotypes, or one-note villains. Saying, "well white guys are villainous too" ignores several factors a) the concept of a "race traitor" which is surely something you are aware of, and b) there still are no non-white characters on the same level as the other heroes, and indeed only one nonwhite heroic character at all. Of course, rather than have a discussion about this, you decide to condemn the tone of the argument in such a way as to aggravate the other person. Curious method of conversation you've got.

If you are unwilling to use the word "racism" to describe this, then that's all well and good. This becomes merely a matter of semantics then, which is something that I would prefer not to spend my time on.

The films were made with an understanding of modern concepts of racism and efforts were taken to avoid any clear racial stereotypes (hence why the Haradrim were a mix of sexy eyeliner wearing Egyptians, Aztecs and others). I see no reason to not give them the benefit of the doubt in telling a story about a mythical medieval white part of the world walking off to hack up a bunch of darker-fleshed (and as noted, same-coloured) baddies. I think it was more ballsy or at least artistically valid to do it that way than to put the source material through the PC minority reallocation table.

Tangentally related (due to the amount of lotr-related material in the genre), black metal has hardly any non-white musicians. The "wickedness of the black" amongst its most obsessive supporters has dick-all to do with being non-white.

The films don't actually address the heart of the matter, though, which is that there are no heroic non-white characters (indeed they excised the only one, though this was a major improvement). Blending the cultures together is frankly half-assed way to go about it, but I can understand why they did so, judging from what people are saying here. I find it interesting that you blithely declare any efforts to modernize a work as the "PC minority reallocation table". I bet you hated the Patrick Stewart version of Othello with all the races reversed, or indeed any version of Othello which doesn't feature one black actor and the rest white, since that would presumably be also the result of your "table". Now, what could the filmmakers have done to satisfy us? Well, they could have simply made Gondor multicultural rather than being solely white. This is something that is possible from the books, this is something that eliminates many of the problems within the context of the story, and best of all, it pisses the sort of person who would use terms like "PC minority reallocation table" off.

Now, there are people who are married to the idea of Tolkien writing a mythology for northern Europe; but consider that he intended to publish all of his works to the general public. Was his audience the Germans of 745CE? No, it was the world of 1954CE, and the films are addressing the world of the 2000s CE. Further, in a world that presents dragons, magic rings, and elves, is it really so implausible to think that Gondor has had good enough relations with its neighbors for intermarriage?

Your final two sentences, meanwhile, are arrogant in the extreme; I can feel the condescension radiating from them. Just pretend for a moment that you don't regard your opponents as drooling vegetables and trust that we understand the connotations of black as a word within the English language. In fact, trusting that we understand the word "connotation" would be a marvelous start.

[Jade Falcon]

Quick question here, but what does anyone think the Dunlendings were an analogue of?

[CaptainChewbacca]

Quick question here, but what does anyone think the Dunlendings were an analogue of?

They seemed to be celtic/caledonian analogues to me. Rural folk without cities often used as mercenaries or boogeymen. They were 'swarthy' half-cousins to the dunedain.

[Rye]

So you don't disagree at all, but are upset over the labeling used? Because the argument we are using is not that the work is purposefully racist, but that the set-up of the plot and setting create racist implications. The idea of monochromic West versus multicultural East is something that does carry racist implications if the West are heroes and the East villains, because this associates multiculturalism with evil. The only speaking non-white characters are either horrendous stereotypes, or one-note villains. Saying, "well white guys are villainous too" ignores several factors a) the concept of a "race traitor" which is surely something you are aware of, and b) there still are no non-white characters on the same level as the other heroes, and indeed only one nonwhite heroic character at all.

Where was Saruman (for instance) treated as a "race traitor" and not just a powerful individual corrupted by a magic enemy and his own designs on power? And so what if there's no non-white characters on the same level as other heroes? How many Norse sagas have non-white people in as heroes? This is "incidentally racist," but not actively so like much of classical hollywood, and arguably less than the saccharine opposite of modern hollywood (which as other people have noted, rarely goes outside of certain stereotypes and romantic segregation) since it accepts the audience is mature enough to deal with "incidental racism" like the heroes being all white as a product of the setting.

Of course, rather than have a discussion about this, you decide to condemn the tone of the argument in such a way as to aggravate the other person. Curious method of conversation you've got.

Then again, I'm a smug white guy LotR fanboy or something. Smug racial superiority is apparently my schtick.

If you are unwilling to use the word "racism" to describe this, then that's all well and good. This becomes merely a matter of semantics then, which is something that I would prefer not to spend my time on.

It's about as racist as old Kurosawa films or a typical modern Nigerian film, albeit without the budgetary concerns. For a medievalist fantasy setting, it's not unreasonable to have ethnically monolithic groups being the heroes. Likewise, if I watch a Nigerian film or one of Kurosawa's samurai films, I will not get annoyed that there's no white people involved. As an audience member, I can accept that human characters occur in all (human) races and I have no problem identifying with people of another race, even if the film is pretty monolithic.

The films don't actually address the heart of the matter, though, which is that there are no heroic non-white characters (indeed they excised the only one, though this was a major improvement). Blending the cultures together is frankly half-assed way to go about it, but I can understand why they did so, judging from what people are saying here.

Actually, I don't think it was half-assed. It was an intentional mixture to create something symbolically recognisable yet unique to the setting.

I find it interesting that you blithely declare any efforts to modernize a work as the "PC minority reallocation table". I bet you hated the Patrick Stewart version of Othello with all the races reversed, or indeed any version of Othello which doesn't feature one black actor and the rest white, since that would presumably be also the result of your "table".

I think if the director wanted to make a wider point, that's a good way to go about it, I have no issue with it. I also have no problem with Barrington in "Maid Marian" being black and Robin Hood being a foppish coward, so long as it's artistically justifiable. If Jackson's fantasy conception of Middle Earth had an all white elf race in alt-Europe (maybe other colours elsewhere? I don't know) I will not hold it against him any more than Crouching Tiger having all asian characters in a fantastical alt-China.

Now, what could the filmmakers have done to satisfy us? Well, they could have simply made Gondor multicultural rather than being solely white. This is something that is possible from the books, this is something that eliminates many of the problems within the context of the story, and best of all, it pisses the sort of person who would use terms like "PC minority reallocation table" off.

I'd be fine with that, by the way, I just don't think it's racist to have a city in that era and world full of white people.

Now, there are people who are married to the idea of Tolkien writing a mythology for northern Europe; but consider that he intended to publish all of his works to the general public. Was his audience the Germans of 745CE? No, it was the world of 1954CE, and the films are addressing the world of the 2000s CE. Further, in a world that presents dragons, magic rings, and elves, is it really so implausible to think that Gondor has had good enough relations with its neighbors for intermarriage?

What neighbours? Mordor and Harad? From all appearances in the films, Gondor was pretty isolationist due to being so close to Mordor the whole time, they had a mad custodian as their leader, the rangers weren't particularly cared about, they didn't even trust the Rohirrim to come and help them and had the cultural/social influence of inhabiting a huge defensive position.

Your final two sentences, meanwhile, are arrogant in the extreme; I can feel the condescension radiating from them. Just pretend for a moment that you don't regard your opponents as drooling vegetables and trust that we understand the connotations of black as a word within the English language. In fact, trusting that we understand the word "connotation" would be a marvelous start.

Did you not see this quote?

Besides, do you really want to push the Numenorean angle? The ones who turned to evil were called "Black Numenoreans", after all.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm, and another passage from a letter- following the whole German Mythology/Germanicphile thing, he hated Hitler, not only for what he did to the Jews, but for forever associating the "noble northern race" with racism. Granted, I'm not sure how you can have 'racial pride' without being racist. I suppose you could be proud of what your ancestors did, or something? I guess it'd be like being proud of one's country without being a nationalist douchebag?

Pretty much. The problem is that this is an attitude so foreign to our experience today that it's hard to grasp what it must have felt like to believe it. Sort of like trying to understand why there were women in the 1800s who thought women's suffrage was a bad idea. I mean, logically that doesn't make sense; we can imagine Evil Bastard Men who would not want women to be able to vote, but why would a woman not want themself to vote? So we tend to shrug it off as brainwashing and rewrite the historical narrative into something that makes more sense.

Or what about all the people in the American colonies who opposed the American Revolution, who wanted to stay British subjects? In the US, that concept no longer makes sense, and people don't really want to try to understand it. Why would anyone (they think to themselves) not want an independent America? So people tend to ignore that side of the story and pretend to themselves that the war was a bunch of American Patriots against Evil Foreigners. The idea of American non-Patriots who are jumping up and down saying "God save the King" while George Washington's ragtag band of guerillas seems so wrong, so jarring, that it gets thrown out of the narrative.*

The same thing has happened with pre-WWII concepts of race. Nobody really wants to try and understand how people could think that way, so the idea gets not only dropped as a bad idea (which it was), but shoved down the memory hole as something that should never have been, something we'd prefer to forget.

I think there was a split between the kind of racial claptrap someone like Tolkein went for and the kind that the Nazis went for. Tolkein's style was pretty much the way you describe it. The best analogy I can come up with today is the sort of minority-empowerment ideology you get in certain places, like African-Americans reviving traditional African culture as a way to assert "Yes, we're actually pretty awesome." There isn't really an overtone of "Yes, and you specific non-African people over there (say, Koreans), you are inferior to us because you don't have [cultural practice] or [character trait normally associated with "us"]. Or at least there doesn't have to be.

The problem is that this can very easily shade over into supremacist ideology, to the point where it's dangerous to even go down the "celebration" route when you're a dominant culture. Because some people will take the idea to its logical extreme and say "all these things that make us awesome make us better than you." That way, madness lies.

[Jade Falcon]

Quick question here, but what does anyone think the Dunlendings were an analogue of?

They seemed to be celtic/caledonian analogues to me. Rural folk without cities often used as mercenaries or boogeymen. They were 'swarthy' half-cousins to the dunedain.

Reason I asked was that the Iron Crown Enterprises RPG 2nd edition especially made them out to be like that in appearance. Not that I'm taking any offence being Scots, but its been a while since I read the books and I never remember much of a description of the Dunlendings beyond some of the men of Bree being distant cousins, and that they hated the Rohirrim for pushing them off their lands.

[Bakustra]

So you don't disagree at all, but are upset over the labeling used? Because the argument we are using is not that the work is purposefully racist, but that the set-up of the plot and setting create racist implications. The idea of monochromic West versus multicultural East is something that does carry racist implications if the West are heroes and the East villains, because this associates multiculturalism with evil. The only speaking non-white characters are either horrendous stereotypes, or one-note villains. Saying, "well white guys are villainous too" ignores several factors a) the concept of a "race traitor" which is surely something you are aware of, and b) there still are no non-white characters on the same level as the other heroes, and indeed only one nonwhite heroic character at all.

Where was Saruman (for instance) treated as a "race traitor" and not just a powerful individual corrupted by a magic enemy and his own designs on power? And so what if there's no non-white characters on the same level as other heroes? How many Norse sagas have non-white people in as heroes? This is "incidentally racist," but not actively so like much of classical hollywood, and arguably less than the saccharine opposite of modern hollywood (which as other people have noted, rarely goes outside of certain stereotypes and romantic segregation) since it accepts the audience is mature enough to deal with "incidental racism" like the heroes being all white as a product of the setting.

It's not that he's treated as a "race traitor" but rather than declaring "can't be racist because white villains" is a false statement, because of the existence of the term. Furthermore, you are presuming that LOTR and Norse sagas are equivalent. Another false statement. How many non-white people are within Norse sagas period? Why not use Greek myth- oh, wait, that would tear your argument into feeble shreds, because mysteriously enough, Greek and Roman myths incorporate non-white heroic characters. So do many other myths from areas that had extended contact with people of other races. I wonder why that could be... Of course, LOTR was written by someone who would have had contact with people of other skin tones, unlike the anonymous writers of the Norse Sagas, and indeed such individuals are included in LOTR.

Meanwhile, I find your backhanded insults quite amusing. It's maturity to blithely ignore racism within fiction, as long as it's implied? Ah, well, whatever helps you get through the day, good fellow!

Of course, rather than have a discussion about this, you decide to condemn the tone of the argument in such a way as to aggravate the other person. Curious method of conversation you've got.

Then again, I'm a smug white guy LotR fanboy or something. Smug racial superiority is apparently my schtick.

Your passive-aggressive "Who me?" bitching would be more convincing if you weren't smug about your "maturity" in blithely ignoring racism. You only validate that characterization in your attempts to condemn it.

If you are unwilling to use the word "racism" to describe this, then that's all well and good. This becomes merely a matter of semantics then, which is something that I would prefer not to spend my time on.

It's about as racist as old Kurosawa films or a typical modern Nigerian film, albeit without the budgetary concerns. For a medievalist fantasy setting, it's not unreasonable to have ethnically monolithic groups being the heroes. Likewise, if I watch a Nigerian film or one of Kurosawa's samurai films, I will not get annoyed that there's no white people involved. As an audience member, I can accept that human characters occur in all (human) races and I have no problem identifying with people of another race, even if the film is pretty monolithic.

Of course it's not unreasonable a priori, but it is racist if it's monochrome vs. multicultural, or white v. black, or any confrontation which associates one skin tone or feature with heroism and the others with villainy. (PS neither Kurosawa's films nor Nigerian films take place in a fantasy world, oddly enough).

The films don't actually address the heart of the matter, though, which is that there are no heroic non-white characters (indeed they excised the only one, though this was a major improvement). Blending the cultures together is frankly half-assed way to go about it, but I can understand why they did so, judging from what people are saying here.

Actually, I don't think it was half-assed. It was an intentional mixture to create something symbolically recognisable yet unique to the setting.

Half-assed in removing the racial overtones.

I find it interesting that you blithely declare any efforts to modernize a work as the "PC minority reallocation table". I bet you hated the Patrick Stewart version of Othello with all the races reversed, or indeed any version of Othello which doesn't feature one black actor and the rest white, since that would presumably be also the result of your "table".

I think if the director wanted to make a wider point, that's a good way to go about it, I have no issue with it. I also have no problem with Barrington in "Maid Marian" being black and Robin Hood being a foppish coward, so long as it's artistically justifiable. If Jackson's fantasy conception of Middle Earth had an all white elf race in alt-Europe (maybe other colours elsewhere? I don't know) I will not hold it against him any more than Crouching Tiger having all asian characters in a fantastical alt-China.

So you decide to ignore my actual point in favor of one which exists only in your head about having an all-light-skinned elves or monoracial casts as being racist. Well, feel free to claim victory over this largely imaginary adversary of yours, but it sure would be great if you would address my actual argument after you have done so. Meanwhile, why does such a proposal not contain artistic integrity (or at least why did you dismiss it as so)? This is why you're categorized as a LOTR fanboy, because you make arguments that revolve around a horror of any changes to the film and a denouncing of such changes. Of course, the particular changes you bitch about make me believe that you simply take up your cudgels against what you feel to be the malevolent force of "political correctness". Well, I think you'll find that those are windmills, not giants, if I do say so myself.

Now, what could the filmmakers have done to satisfy us? Well, they could have simply made Gondor multicultural rather than being solely white. This is something that is possible from the books, this is something that eliminates many of the problems within the context of the story, and best of all, it pisses the sort of person who would use terms like "PC minority reallocation table" off.

I'd be fine with that, by the way, I just don't think it's racist to have a city in that era and world full of white people.

That's not my actual argument, nor that of anybody else in this thread.

Now, there are people who are married to the idea of Tolkien writing a mythology for northern Europe; but consider that he intended to publish all of his works to the general public. Was his audience the Germans of 745CE? No, it was the world of 1954CE, and the films are addressing the world of the 2000s CE. Further, in a world that presents dragons, magic rings, and elves, is it really so implausible to think that Gondor has had good enough relations with its neighbors for intermarriage?

What neighbours? Mordor and Harad? From all appearances in the films, Gondor was pretty isolationist due to being so close to Mordor the whole time, they had a mad custodian as their leader, the rangers weren't particularly cared about, they didn't even trust the Rohirrim to come and help them and had the cultural/social influence of inhabiting a huge defensive position.

Yes, and consider that I was talking about altering the films. In this case we have to go to the books, where we see thousands of years passing between the founding of Gondor and the time of LOTR. Over nearly all of these thousands of years, Sauron had no presence in Mordor, and there is nothing to prevent Gondor from building good relations with Harad and Rhun, or for that matter intermarrying with the populations of conquered territories, if we wish to go with "Harad and Rhun/Gondor are imperialistic" instead. There is even aspects of this in the backstory explicitly identified, though only interbreeding with other white people to the north.

Your final two sentences, meanwhile, are arrogant in the extreme; I can feel the condescension radiating from them. Just pretend for a moment that you don't regard your opponents as drooling vegetables and trust that we understand the connotations of black as a word within the English language. In fact, trusting that we understand the word "connotation" would be a marvelous start.

Did you not see this quote?

Besides, do you really want to push the Numenorean angle? The ones who turned to evil were called "Black Numenoreans", after all.

Is "black metal" a pejorative? Black Numenorean is a pejorative, and creates unpleasant implications when you consider that the vast majority of Sauron's fellow servants are non-white, too. If "black metal" were a pejorative term, and used in the same breath as dismissing blues, jazz, R&B, rap, soul, and other traditionally black-dominated musical genres, then it would have similar racial implications. Of course, you didn't bother to consider that, but whatever.

[Doomriser]

Norman Spinrad wrote The Iron Dream
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dream

to make fun of what he saw as white supremacist tropes in science fiction and fantasy. In his book, Adolph Hitler becomes a science fiction writer, and his work seems disturbingly familiar in a 20th century context.

I've always felt that the movies did nothing to tone down the 'Nordic/Aryan-style' mythology (IMHO) of Lord of the Rings, and perhaps made it more visible by putting it on-screen. The cartoons were less racist since the Orcs appeared to be a completely differently species from humans, with abilities and weaknesses motivations of their own, as opposed to being some kind of subhuman species.

[Samuel]

Or what about all the people in the American colonies who opposed the American Revolution, who wanted to stay British subjects? In the US, that concept no longer makes sense, and people don't really want to try to understand it. Why would anyone (they think to themselves) not want an independent America? So people tend to ignore that side of the story and pretend to themselves that the war was a bunch of American Patriots against Evil Foreigners. The idea of American non-Patriots who are jumping up and down saying "God save the King" while George Washington's ragtag band of guerillas seems so wrong, so jarring, that it gets thrown out of the narrative.*

It is really easy to understand their motivation- the founding fathers were traitors. Only a total moron would not get that- it would be the equivalent of people today wanting an independent Hawaii or Alaska. The other examples, by contrast, require a different way of thinking about the world.

[Simon_Jester]

It is really easy to understand their motivation- the founding fathers were traitors. Only a total moron would not get that- it would be the equivalent of people today wanting an independent Hawaii or Alaska. The other examples, by contrast, require a different way of thinking about the world.

You're missing my point. It is easy for you to understand the American Tories' motivation. It's easy for me. That does not mean it is easy or obvious in some abstract sense. Not everyone has a well developed sense of historical perspective.

To a modern American, the idea "It is good that the United States be an independent country" is a pretty basic assumption, one that is not often re-examined. Starting from that point, it takes a certain ability to step outside of one's own head to ask the question "In the context of 1775, should the US become an independent country?" as something separate from that assumption. Without that ability, the Tories of the American Revolution just look like a bunch of traitors, because instead of getting compared to state secessionists they get compared to a bunch of people trying to help a foreign enemy conquer the US.

Now, most intelligent Americans grasp the difference between the two questions, and so don't have a problem with this. But it's still an example of a historically inconvenient fact: it doesn't get emphasized in the schoolbooks that a third of our population opposed independence at the time, and another third was neutral. Independence is treated as the natural outcome of the Revolution, as something that "we" were working towards, and the narrative is "this is the story of how the American colonies won their independence."

I'd say it's the same basic problem: people have a hard time imagining people promoting views in good faith in the past that wouldn't fit into the worldview of the present, unless they have good historical perspective.

It takes relatively little historical perspective to see why so many colonial Americans opposed independence. It takes more to understand monarchism, or opposition to women's suffrage, or the kind of racism practiced in the 1800s and early 1900s... but that's a difference of degree, not of kind.

...Furthermore, you are presuming that LOTR and Norse sagas are equivalent. Another false statement. How many non-white people are within Norse sagas period?

Ah... you do remember that Tolkien was specifically inspired by Germanic, Norse, and Finnish mythology? So yes, Lord of the Rings and Norse sagas are equivalent in a very important way.

If someone writes a novel based on African mythology, just about all the characters on both sides will be black, except for mythical nonhumans. If someone writes a novel based on Chinese mythology, just about all the characters on both sides will be Asian, except for mythical nonhumans. And so on. And there are plenty of examples of this.

This really is impossible to avoid without doing violence to the source material that inspires the work. For example, introducing a random Viking main character into an Egyptian mythworld would be absurd, because the ancient Egyptians had effectively zero contact with Scandinavia, even leaving aside the millenium-sized anachronism that would be involved. it's equally absurd to do it the other way around.

So do many other myths from areas that had extended contact with people of other races. I wonder why that could be... Of course, LOTR was written by someone who would have had contact with people of other skin tones, unlike the anonymous writers of the Norse Sagas, and indeed such individuals are included in LOTR.

Should Tolkein have had to feature primary characters of a variety of races to avoid being racist?

Is "black metal" a pejorative? Black Numenorean is a pejorative, and creates unpleasant implications when you consider that the vast majority of Sauron's fellow servants are non-white, too.

So Tolkein should not have used "black" to denote "sinister or evil" in the context of the... call them the corrupted Numenoreans, because that has racial overtones?

[Alyrium Denryle]

So Tolkein should not have used "black" to denote "sinister or evil" in the context of the... call them the corrupted Numenoreans, because that has racial overtones?

But here we run into a language issue. Now, bear in mind that some of the relevant books I have not read, but this I think is a false equivocation potentially. Black (not the skin tone, but the color of the dome of the heat lamp I have over my turtle tank) is a symbol in english literature denoting corruption and evil just as while entails the opposite. Much of Tolkien's symbolism was cast in terms of color symbols. Darkness, Blackness and Shadow denoting evil, White, Light, and Radiance denoting good.

This combined with the geography and the historical context (Namely that he was writing an epic mythology for Europe) would seem like racism. Perhaps it was racism by carelessness, but it is not racist in the sense we tend to think of it.

As for the orcs being an evil race, you have to remember as well that in this universe (as opposed to ours) concepts like good or evil are metaphysical properties. It is plausible that a group would in fact be intrinsically evil because of this.

[Bakustra]

...Furthermore, you are presuming that LOTR and Norse sagas are equivalent. Another false statement. How many non-white people are within Norse sagas period?

Ah... you do remember that Tolkien was specifically inspired by Germanic, Norse, and Finnish mythology? So yes, Lord of the Rings and Norse sagas are equivalent in a very important way.

If someone writes a novel based on African mythology, just about all the characters on both sides will be black, except for mythical nonhumans. If someone writes a novel based on Chinese mythology, just about all the characters on both sides will be Asian, except for mythical nonhumans. And so on. And there are plenty of examples of this.

This really is impossible to avoid without doing violence to the source material that inspires the work. For example, introducing a random Viking main character into an Egyptian mythworld would be absurd, because the ancient Egyptians had effectively zero contact with Scandinavia, even leaving aside the millenium-sized anachronism that would be involved. it's equally absurd to do it the other way around.

Sorry, but being inspired doesn't mean that they're equivalent, because LOTR does not take place solely within a faux-Germany or faux-Scandinavia. It incorporates other parts of the world, expanding its focus and making it different from the Norse sagas. Meanwhile, it seems that nobody is capable of reading the actual words. Let me say this clearly (in bold for the selectively literate in the audience):

I am not saying that a work that features a monoracial cast is necessarily racist. I am saying that having a monoracial group of heroes and a multiracial group of villains is racist.

Now, can we argue based on my actual words, and not the ones that you would prefer I was saying?

So do many other myths from areas that had extended contact with people of other races. I wonder why that could be... Of course, LOTR was written by someone who would have had contact with people of other skin tones, unlike the anonymous writers of the Norse Sagas, and indeed such individuals are included in LOTR.

Should Tolkein have had to feature primary characters of a variety of races to avoid being racist?

No. He should have avoided making all his heroes monoracial and making his villains multiracial to avoid racist implications in LOTR's background, and he should have altered the orcs, and the depiction of Ghan-buri-ghan, and a few other areas here and there.

Is "black metal" a pejorative? Black Numenorean is a pejorative, and creates unpleasant implications when you consider that the vast majority of Sauron's fellow servants are non-white, too.

So Tolkein should not have used "black" to denote "sinister or evil" in the context of the... call them the corrupted Numenoreans, because that has racial overtones?

No, it has overtones because of the fact that nigh-upon all Sauron's other servants are non-white, including all the black people within LOTR. Do you see how using black in its negative sense gains racial implications in this scenario, now? The pejorative wouldn't be a problem except for the context surrounding it.

[Oskuro]

He consciously intended it to serve as a mythology for western Europe, and his racist (by modern standards) attitudes influenced the result.

Fully agreeing here, heck, my original points on the reprehensible nature of Disney fairytales was also about how the standards of the original story were from a time period where they were not reprehensible, and even the sanitized modern translations have inherited some of those traits.

Regarding LOTR, appart from Tolkien's own cultural perspective, lets keep in mind that he was basing his story on classical mythology, and that is full of the xenophobic bias prevalent in the ages that they were written, so it is reasonable to assume that some of that bias would have transfered to Tolkien's version (in addition to his own cultural bias), and then to the recent movies.

But, then again, something being inherently racist doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable, yet it can be reprehensible, particularly if it is intended for audiences that cannot understand it properly.


(And this post would have fit better on the original thread, but I really wanted to elaborate on the implications of Tolkien basing his writtings on the classical mythological model)

[DudeGuyMan]

Again, say it with me kids: "There's some racial stuff in there that's a bit off by modern standards, but I like the story anyway." It's not a big deal to find a story written in the past which incorporates themes that wouldn't fly today, but enjoy it regardless.

Once you go back more than a few decades, LOTS of very good literature is that way. Unless you're reading it with a total lack of perspective and take everything in it as being unconditionally awesome, it doesn't matter. People aren't picking on Lord of the Rings, they're just pointing out that it's not a total exception.

Edit: Hell, probably almost all literature written beyond a certain (but never static) point in the past. No one can be expected to just randomly predict the morals of future society. Most of what's being written today will seem off-kilter or questionable in places to people reading a hundred years from now.

[open_sketchbook]

But the whole point is that it doesn't fly today, which was more or less when Peter Jackson's movies were made. In said movies, we had a grand total of no people that weren't white, despite the historical perspective on racism we've gained since the books were written. In other words, the movies are even more disguistingly racist than the books, which are already unacceptable.

[Bakustra]

But the whole point is that it doesn't fly today, which was more or less when Peter Jackson's movies were made. In said movies, we had a grand total of no people that weren't white, despite the historical perspective on racism we've gained since the books were written. In other words, the movies are even more disguistingly racist than the books, which are already unacceptable.

That's not my point, and I doubt that it's Darth Wong's either. I enjoy LOTR despite the racism, much like reading Faulkner, or Dickens, or Wodehouse, or Lovecraft, or Shakespeare, or, in point of fact, virtually everything written before very recently. While you may find LOTR unacceptable for the racism, please do not presume to speak for other people in this. Also, you may want to read threads a little more closely before throwing yourself in.

[DudeGuyMan]

But the whole point is that it doesn't fly today, which was more or less when Peter Jackson's movies were made. In said movies, we had a grand total of no people that weren't white, despite the historical perspective on racism we've gained since the books were written. In other words, the movies are even more disguistingly racist than the books, which are already unacceptable.

If you're going to conclude that anything which doesn't hew to modern mores is unacceptable, then enjoy having almost nothing to read that wasn't written within the last thirty years. Don't get too attached to any of it either, because it will probably become unacceptable within the next thirty years.

The rest of us, those who are neither fanboys nor literary fascists, will simply read with a discerning mind and recognize that we need not accept every premise or theme of a story as moral or unobjectionable in order to enjoy it. I really like my Greek mythology, even though large chunks of it are screamingly misogynist.

[Alyrium Denryle]

But the whole point is that it doesn't fly today, which was more or less when Peter Jackson's movies were made. In said movies, we had a grand total of no people that weren't white, despite the historical perspective on racism we've gained since the books were written. In other words, the movies are even more disguistingly racist than the books, which are already unacceptable.

Except that the movies could not altered like that without doing violence to the subject material.

Are all works written prior to the 1970s to be considered unacceptable in terms of racist content? Are we for example to disparage works like Mutiny on the Bounty because they carry racist messages which were just par for the course at the time, and written by people who knew no better... and despite this are great literary works?

Acknowledging racism is one thing. Taking it out of its proper context is another.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I think the threat is that people today may take onboard such material as being somehow proper and A-OK, when in fact it isn't, but the usage today unabridged and edited is to simply keep the source clean and original. Given I've found a girl who claims The Wolfman ripped off the werewolves in Twilight: New Moon, I don't find this problem to be without merit.