From: carl@class.gsfc.nasa.gov (Carl F. Hostetter)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.tolkien
Subject: Re: Tolkien a Racist?
Date: 16 Dec 92 14:31:50 GMT
Followup-To: alt.fan.tolkien
Organization: NASA/GSFC

In article <1992Dec15.092414.7348@leland.Stanford.EDU>,
jchokey@leland.Stanford.EDU (James Alexander Chokey) wrote:
> 
> In article <BzA78A.Duw@comp.vuw.ac.nz> Michael.Norrish@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Michael Norrish) writes:
> >>>>>> On Mon, 14 Dec 1992 14:16:40 GMT, carl@class.gsfc.nasa.gov (Carl F. Hostetter) said:
> >
> >Carl> <Insert favorite Anglo-Saxon epithet here>!!! Tolkien's entire
> >Carl> mythology is based on a dichotomy of light and dark, and the
> >Carl> gradations in between. Tolkien's races have the same gradation
> >Carl> because of this fundamental division; the division does not
> >Carl> exist because of Tolkien's view of the races. 
> >
> >So does this mean that you think Tolkien deliberately made his evil
> >races dark-skinned? That's far worse than any fault I was accusing
> >him of. 
> >
> >To my mind, Tolkien's faux pas in our eyes is merely the result of an
> >underlying, rather 'genteel' racism, (a previous poster used this
> >phrase; thank you) not anything more. You on the other hand, seem to
> >be saying that Tolkien had to make his races dark if they were also to
> >be evil. Yuck! I certainly wouldn't want to believe *that* of him.
> >
> 
> 	At the risk of putting words into Carl's mouth, I think he's
> saying that the whole dualist moral system that Tolkien uses (conflating
> the oppositions good vs. evil, light vs. darkness, white vs. black) is
> what dictates the "racism" in LOTR.  Tolkien uses the common symbolism of 
> white=good and black=evil.  When this symbolism is applied to everything,
> including skin color, it necessarily leads to "racist" representations of 
> races regardless of what the author's own views on race are.  It was
> this symbolic system--  not Tolkien himself-- that dictated that the evil
> races in LOTR would be dark-skinned while the good ones would be fair-
> skinned.  It's as if the whole thing were beyond Tolkien's control once
> he decided that LOTR would be a story about conflict between good and evil.
> 
> 	(I hope I got that right, Carl.  Please accept my apology and
> correct me if I didn't.)
> 

That's pretty much it, Jim.

> 	As I've said before, I think there's something to this, but I
> do think there's more to it than that.  Earlier today, I made the claim
> that Tolkien's treatment of peoples and races in LOTR was also partly
> determined by his having bought into the colonialist and imperialist ideology
> of the age that he grew up in, and I won't repeat myself here.  (You might
> regard this to be "genteel racism," I suppose, although it does have specific 
> qualities and an identifiable history.)

I too think that there might be more to it than the fundamental
mythic dichotomy -- the dichotomy was the necessity that gave birth
to the invention, but it seems that Tolkien's own views may
have contributed to its sustenance.

Tolkien was a product of his age, and in fact he was
one of the last representatives of an earlier and far more
conservative/imperialistic age. I would not be surprised to learn
that Tolkien harbored a perception that the dark-skinned races of
earth were less developed -- technically, socially, and morally --
than the lighter skinned races. _However_, we must also remember
that although Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, he professed an
admiration for the Jewish people more than once. It does seem
that Tolkien was capable of transcending the prejudices of his
age.

|===================================================================|
|         Carl F. Hostetter      carl@class.gsfc.nasa.gov           |
|                                                                   |
|                    Ars longa, vita brevis.                        |
|          The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.            |
|  "I wish life was not so short," he thought.  "Languages take     |
|  such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about."  |
|===================================================================|
Newsgroups: alt.fan.tolkien