From: Michael.Norrish@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Michael Norrish)
Subject: Re: Tolkien a Racist?
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Victoria Uni. of Wellington, NZ.
	<BzA78A.Duw@comp.vuw.ac.nz> <1992Dec15.092414.7348@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 03:54:38 GMT

>>>>> On Tue, 15 Dec 92 09:24:14 GMT, jchokey@leland.Stanford.EDU
>>>>> (James Alexander Chokey) said:

James> 	At the risk of putting words into Carl's mouth, I think he's
James> saying that the whole dualist moral system that Tolkien uses
James> (conflating the oppositions good vs. evil, light vs. darkness,
James> white vs. black) is what dictates the "racism" in LOTR.
James> Tolkien uses the common symbolism of white=good and black=evil.
James> When this symbolism is applied to everything, including skin
James> color, it necessarily leads to "racist" representations of
James> races regardless of what the author's own views on race are.
James> It was this symbolic system-- not Tolkien himself-- that
James> dictated that the evil races in LOTR would be dark-skinned
James> while the good ones would be fair- skinned.  It's as if the
James> whole thing were beyond Tolkien's control once he decided that
James> LOTR would be a story about conflict between good and evil.

James> 	(I hope I got that right, Carl.  Please accept my apology and
James> correct me if I didn't.)

This sounds quite plausible, and re-expressed in this way, I feel a
bit happier about the fact that the expressed racism may have still
been happening subconsciously in Tolkien's mind. It's just that when I
first read Carl's post it sounded too much as if this symbolism was
something *consciously* constructed by Tolkien as he wrote. As if he
had sat down and thought, "Well, given my epic story about good and
evil, and things being what they are with my pseudo-European heroes,
I'm just going to have make those bad guys dark-skinned."

It's not as if he had to do this. The corrupted good guys, (Saruman,
Boromir and Gollum for example) are, if anything, more impressive in
the story than the more routine evildoers. This in itself is quite
interesting. Notice how the corruption of Saruman is a far scarier
thing than that of the Southrons? Those southerners had pretty slack
moral standards anyway I guess, but to get a good guy there had to be
a Ring of Power in the offing. Well, of course the three characters
above are far more important to the plot than the Southrons of course,
so this may well be pushing the concept a little.

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

Yes, and it's hardly genteel either! Tolkien was brought up in the
same era as the Social Darwinists and eugenists. These were coldly
'rational' philosophies that helped to justify imperialism. They only
really fell out of favour when it was seen what extremes they had led
to in Nazi Germany.

James> I wonder whether it might also be possible to think of
James> Tolkien's professional and personal interest in languages as
James> being a determining factor in his treatment of races and
James> peoples in LOTR.  That sounds kind of nutty, I admit, but there
James> might be something to it as well-- although I can't put my
James> finger on just why.  Any ideas?

I'm not sure about this, but didn't Tolkien tend to rank the various
languages that he was exposed to in much the same way as the races in
Middle-Earth are ranked? In this way a language might be noble or
aesthetically pleasing, and another, (French for example), might not.
This concept is certainly played with in LOTR, but is there any
reflection of it in Tolkien's real life?

Michael.
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