PrimeJunta

Actually yes, yes it does. Banging not required obviously, but "there is not a single black girl I would consider attractive" is pretty damn racist, now that you mention it. Edit: Unless it was a trick question and you're actually not into girls, of course.

All right. So demonstrate it. Attempts at sarcasm will only get you so far. Simplest thing. There is no evidence of Tolkien performing single racist act, nor the single racist statement of his. But again, I'm done with this conversation it's off topic and I lately done my share of talking to raging, politically corrected delusional people. OK. So, Orcs as "degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types" is not racist, because...?

No, we cannot. Because in fantasy world the author as the creator chooses what technology is available at given time. So, unless the source material is contradicting itself at some point we cannot say that something in fictional universe is anachronism even if people fight with actual forged swords in a space opera. You appear to have very low standards for your fiction.

Sheesh, I'm actually getting warmed up. Been a while since I was properly talking Tolkien. Here's another point for Sharp_One and Merlkir to consider: In all of Tolkien's corpus, the only good possibly not irredeemably evil Negro is a dead Negro. Discuss.

All right. So demonstrate it. Attempts at sarcasm will only get you so far.

You do know that "the Ku Klux Klan was EVEN MORE racist" doesn't do a thing to demonstrate that JRR was NOT racist, I'm sure? Thank you for your contribution. You will be missed. :waves:

Point 4: Sexism Thesis: Tolkien was a raging sexist. Tolkien's sexism was not the obviously nasty "women are evil creatures who must be kept in their place" kind. It was more the "women are beautiful things to be put on pedestals and admired from a distance, also prizes to be won by heroic men" kind. There are a quite a lot of women in Tolkien. There is, however, exactly one woman with any kind of agency that I can think of: Galadriel. Her original name was Nerwen, which means "Man-maiden." Haha. Funny that, no? And even she can't escape being pedestal-ized, of all people by Gimli. He. Worships. A. Hair! From her head! How freakin' objectifying is that? Every other woman in Tolkien -- every other one -- is purely and totally objectified. They have no agency. They're objects noted for their beauty (e.g. Arwen) who don't actually do anything much, or if they do do something, they do it solely for the benefit of the main hero, the guy they're supposed to be helping. Consider one of the rare cases where a woman has an actual speaking role that goes past a few lines of gossip (hello, Ioreth!): Eowyn. Now she's someone who could actually kick some ass. But does Tolkien let her? No! Instead, she finds fulfilment by... setting aside the sword and shield and becoming a happy little housewife for Faramir. The point of her entire story is that it's all well and good for girls to dream of heroism, but their real calling is to be good little housewives and helpmeets for the men who do the real hero-izing. I could go on, but instead I'll just make a short list, again from the top of my head. Thingol and Melian. Thingol is a run-of-the-mill elf. Melian is a freakin' maia. Yet Thingol calls the shots, all Melian does is make a border around their kingdom. Beren and Lúthien. Beren is thel hero. Lúthien is the prize to be won. This despite the fact that Lúthien is part Maia and therefore should be inherently miles ahead of Beren in power and majesty. Again, the man himself (letter 131, page 135), which describes really well how Tolkien sees men and women... with a nice little nod at those precious bloodlines of his, too: It is Beren the outlawed mortal who succeeds (with the help of Lúthien, a mere maiden even if an elf of royalty) where all the armies and warriors have failed: he penetrates the stronghold of the Enemy and wrests one of the Silmarilli from the Iron Crown. This he wins the hand of Lúthien and the first marriage of mortal and immortal is achieved. Note the phrasing. It's mentioned in passing that Lúthien 'helps,' but mostly she's a prize to be 'won.' Fëanor's mom whose name I even forget. She gives all her power to Fëanor and dies, although elves normally don't, and in Valinor certainly don't. 'Cuz, y'know, moms. Rosie Cotton. Besides being a nice set of b00bs to come back to for Sam, what, exactly is she? Does she ever say anything? If she does, is it anything remotely interesting? Ioreth. Look her up. Morwen. Lalaith/Nienor/Niniel. Finduilas. Aredhel and Eöl. And so on and so forth. Challenge: Pick one woman from Tolkien that you would like to be, rather than possess. Say, play as a character in a cRPG. Galadriel the Man-Maiden doesn't count. Edit: Annnd, I think that's about enough for today. Getting late, plus I need to walk the dog. Looking forward to your thoughts, Merlkir.

Genealogical trees is not in and of itself racist, of course. Let's keep the Bible etc. out of this discussion, shall we? In case you didn't notice, Middle Earth is fiction. Tolkien wrote it. The rules and logic there came from his imagination, his values, his politics, his religion, his views. As much as it at times appears to be so -- and this is for me the main appeal of the damn thing -- it is not real. Heroic Middle Earth bloodlines have to be pure because Tolkien decided they have to be pure. He wrote this at the time when someone else -- a little corporal from Austria -- was kinda obsessed about purity of bloodlines too. It is not coincidental, or irrelevant, or existed in a vacuum. It is very much in tune with one extremely nasty and extremely common way of thinking at the time. Your book about crows and eagles would have no such problems because crows and eagles have no such connection to real-world politics... unless, of course, your heroic crows were all named Alastair and Grimbold, and your villanous eagles were named Ahmed or Mohammed (or why not Moshe and Yitzhakh if you want to pick another flavor of racism) in which case it would be obviously racist.

Point 3: Racial stereotypes, part 2: Dwarves as Jews Dwarves are a stand-in for Jews, and embody many of the racist stereotypes associated with them. I'm sure Tolkien would have been extremely upset at being accused of anti-Semitism, and compared to a Joseph Mengele he certainly wasn't. However, he did hold some pretty stereotypical views of the Jews as money-grubbing legalistic insular types, and where he portrays dwarves as truly heroic -- the only real example of that I can think of is Gimli -- that heroism is presented as a story of how he overcomes the deficiencies of his people, in his friendship with Legolas, and later in the way he puts Galadriel on a pedestal and starts worshipping a freakin' hair from her head. (That's a subject for another post in this series, namely, sexism.) Evidence, exhibit A: The man himself, from letter 176 (Letters, p. 229): I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue. ... The ellipsis is the editor's, not mine. I wonder what he felt necessary to excise? Evidence, exhibit B: Primary characteristics associated with the Dwarves: greed and gold and insularity plus suspicious hostility towards everyone else (projecting much?). Thrór sat under the mountain and accumulated a freakin' mountain of gold. The Dwarves betrayed and slaughtered Thingol of Doriath over riches. The Dwarves draw up an insanely complex contract mostly involving payment and money matters when hiring Bilbo, and would've been perfectly at peace with letting him get himself et by a dragon. Thórin throws a fit when Bilbo tries to keep more than what he feels is his fair share of Smaug's treasure, and indeed the main concern of the Dwarves is always some piece of shiny, like the Arkenstone in The Hobbit. The Dwarves are also always an exiled people, their ancestral homeland coincidentally taken over by, surprise surprise, those sallow Turkish-Mongol-Arab stand-ins, the Orcs.

Point 2: Racial stereotypes, part 1: Orcs Thesis: Orcs/goblins are a transparent stand-in for Turks/Arabs/Mongols. Evidence: Orcish language, "Black Speech," is phonetically similar to Turkish. They wield scimitars. They come from the East. And here's the man himself on how they look: The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) 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. (Letter 210, paragraph 19, on page 274 of Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter, ed.) I don't know how you can get more explicitly racist than "least lovely Mongol-types." Seriously. Challenge: Name a single instance of a living non-white character, location, or culture being portrayed in a positive light. Never mind a protagonist, hero, or character with agency; we both know there isn't one anywhere to be found. Getting maudlin over a corpse doesn't count.

Very well. Proceeding. I'll make this a series, with one point per post, otherwise I think the quoting inside one post will get out of hand. I'll even make a mini-essay from each. Point 1. Racial purity and eugenics One of the most central recurring themes in Tolkien is that of bloodlines. These are so important that he actually provided family trees in the appendices to his work. Characters with "pure" bloodlines are longer-lived, better-looking (the word he significantly and characteristically uses is 'fairer', which of course also has a connotation of 'lighter-skinned or haired'). Case in point: Aragorn. He is explicitly described as a throwback to 'pure' Numenorean stock, with a lifespan far longer than ordinary humans. "Miscegenation" is everywhere portrayed as bad, e.g. in the way the Gondorean bloodlines lost their purity and the advantages thereof when the Numenorean descendants there bred with 'lesser Men.' One of the central plot points in LotR is the return of the rightful King -- rightful solely by virtue of carrying the right set of ancestors, which is also the very thing that makes him so obviously superior to Denethor and Boromir of the diluted Gondorean bloodline, both so easily corrupted by the wiles of the Enemy. The same thinking is found everywhere, right down to the characteristics ascribed to the various hobbit bloodlines. Pippin is adventurous and outgoing because he's a Took. Frodo and Bilbo get their unexpected courage and strength of character from the same bloodline. Every single 'heroic' character in Tolkien comes from a 'noble' bloodline... unless you count "heroically supporting your heroic master as a faithful servant or sidekick," as Sam Gamgee does. I could dig up more examples from elven bloodlines, but I think that would be belaboring the point. Challenge: Name a single heroic character from Tolkien who does not have noble blood, excluding the 'heroic servant/sidekick' role. Okay, moving on to the next one. Feel feel to reply to this one while I'm writing.

@AlO3 I'd certainly use them for reference, but if I expect to defend a list in debate, it would have to be something I put thought into myself. I'm generally not comfortable defending other people's ideas, even if I agree with them.

@Sharp_one yes we can. Guns in a fantasy setting with bronze-age technology would be obviously anachronistic, for example.

Tokenism is painfully obvious too, and I guarantee it'll get you a bigger scolding from those so inclined than just leaving the token minority out. I just re-read this thread, and I didn't see any arguments you made. Just lots of incoherent rage and assertions without evidence, plus a link to an article that listed many of the obvious ways Tolkien's work is racist, followed by a laughable argument that it's not actually racist at all because hobbits and Christianity. Would you really like me to compile a list of obviously racist and sexist features in Tolkien? I can do that, but it's a bit of work. I'll do it if you promise me to address them point by point, with actual argument, in your own words, and without resorting to the kind of name-calling you've been doing so far.

Okay. Thanks for setting that straight.

@Sharp_one Are you saying that good stories can only be about white, straight, able-bodied men? If not, what are you saying, exactly?

No offense, Merlkir, but you're raging so hard I don't think you're receptive to an actual discussion. If you like, we can get back to this after you've calmed down a little.

@JFSOCC wrong pissing contest. Kveldulf was trying to prove the existence of God. Adhin was the one who thought 'colonial era' meant 18th c North America.

Heh, yeah, I actually gave up on the series at Toll the Hounds; I just skimmed through Dust of Dreams and The Crippled God to find out what happened to everybody. I think he just ran out of epic somewhere along the line. (Or, seriously... he got too successful and stopped listening to his editor. Plus he stupidly stuck with that "every volume has to be more epic than the previous one" thing.) That said, I prefer to judge authors by their best work rather than their worst, and at his best IMO he's very good. The story about the rise and fall of Rhulad Sengar was top-notch IMO. Edit: and also, I was mostly thinking of his world-building. His world feels lived-in in a way that most other fantasy worlds don't, including Miéville's and Moorcöck's, but Tolkien's does. I'm not sure I could even break down exactly where that feeling comes from, but he has it. Felix Gilman's Half-Made World, strangely, has it too, even though it really oughtn't.

True, dat. However it makes up for it in depth and breadth. All of his peoples have histories and fully fleshed-out languages, literatures, and mythologies. The world feels lived-in in a way that no other fantasy world I've read quite manages. IMO that's really the crux of it; he gets away with wooden writing, awful plot holes, and terrible pacing just because the world it all happens in is so vividly imagined in such depth and detail. It's almost like reading a ho-hum writer describe a place he's actually lived in and extensively studied. Miéville, Moorcöck, Felix Gilman, Steven Erickson etc. are brilliant but pretty thin by comparison. (I have an especial soft spot for Miéville actually; I wish he'd get back to the Bas-Lag books though as that world has a lot of still untapped promise IMO.) Erickson at his best has something of the same quality, but even so I can't help feeling that he's making it up as he goes along, as it were.

@Karkarov, of course he wasn't trying to make a political statement. However to argue that his political, racial, sexual, religious etc. attitudes somehow miraculously left no trace whatsoever in his work strikes me as frankly absurd. How could they not?

I agree 100%. That said, I do find it useful to acknowledge nasty undercurrents where they're present, rather than trying to prove they're not there just because you like something.

I don't actually have a problem with Tolkien at all. I've read LotR dozens of times (not exaggerating; I'm on my third set of copies because the previous two just fell to bits), The Silmarillion maybe a dozen times, and pretty much everything else except a few volumes of the increasingly tedious History of Middle Earth, most of it more than once. I love the hell out of Tolkien. Which doesn't change the fact that there are plenty of at least somewhat ugly undercurrents there. Eugenics. Racist and sexist stereotypes. Extreme conservatism in political ideas. That sort of thing. Still IMO in its own class as far as invented fantasy worlds go.

If a white Western European today wrote an epic about white Western European-types defending the West against Eastern hordes of dark, scimitar-wielding masses of pure evil, speaking a guttural language phonetically similar to Turkish, and included a poignant scene where one of the heroes wonders if their dead brown-skinned elephant-riding allies were born evil or just deluded, wouldn't you find it just a tiny bit racist?

I almost replied to Walsingham meself but didn't bother. Still, some specifics: check out the story of Fëanor and his sons, the Kinslaying, and the exile of the Noldor. That's some very serious elven dickishness there, and it's so fundamental to the mythos that without it there wouldn't have been a Ring. As to the racism and sexism bit... by modern standards, Tolkien certainly was, but by the standards of his time, no more than most and a good deal less than many. A great many of his contemporaries -- also in England, don't forget -- were raging antisemites, for example; he was not and said so. He was a raging Luddite and reactionary though, and it shows in his fiction. That said, like it or not, there is a pretty conspicuous undercurrent in the LotR especially which resonates with the "Eurabia" crowd. The Orcs are rather conspicuous stand-ins for Turks/Mongols/Arabs. Tolkien even said more or less as much in one of his letters. FWIW my wife's of Middle Eastern origin and she picks up on it, which detracts from her enjoyment of the book and films somewhat. But that was par for course for the time, too. My take? I don't see any problem with enjoying something while acknowledging its sometimes problematic aspects. I'm a massive fan of Wagner's operas, despite some rather poisonous undercurrents there too (not to mention that ol' Richard was a right old **** himself).