The success of Peter Jackson’s film adaptations from the early 2000s of "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R. Tolkien has spawned an onscreen Tolkien Universe. Last year alone, there was an IMAX rerelease of Jackson’s trilogy, a second series on Amazon Prime of "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" and the Anime-style film "The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim." Moreover, there are other works currently in the pipeline.
A while back, I was asked by my Turkish niece whether I thought Tolkien was racist. I think it is a pertinent question, especially in this part of the world. For, in all the onscreen adaptations, save for The Rings of Power which uses multiethnic casting for its heroes, a viewer can almost always easily differentiate who is “good” and who is “evil” simply by their skin tone. Particularly relevant for viewers in Türkiye is that in The War of the Rohirrim, the “evil” Dunlendings look Eurasian, Turkic-like, whereas the “good” Rohirrim are of Teutonic appearance. I had not yet seen that particular film when I answered my niece, but neither it nor any subsequent textual discovery I have made has caused me to alter my opinion. My answer to her question is a qualified “no.” I feel that as we live in an era in which sensitivity to racial issues is rightly a key concern, the explication of my answer to my niece and the further investigation to which it led me in Tolkien’s work itself might prove to be of some wider interest. As there are two strands to my investigation, two pieces are needed to cover it, this being the first, with the second coming out on this day next week. There is so much to Tolkien’s work that it has not been possible for me to contextualize everything for a reader with no knowledge of it at all. Still, I have hopefully written the pieces in a way that can be followed by anyone who has not touched a Tolkien book and has only some familiarity with the onscreen adaptations of them.
I feel I am qualified to investigate the question of whether Tolkien’s work is racist as I am fairly familiar with Tolkien’s work itself. Yet, I am not one of his avid partisans who are so blinded by their love of his writings that they feel not only a need to defend him from all criticism but feel as if any criticism at all is akin to blasphemy. My familiarity with Tolkien’s work is due to my childhood discovery of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," books by which I was enthralled at the time. I read and reread them, and I was filled with dreams of Middle Earth. However, I have not carried that fervor over into adulthood. For instance, I feel there are many better options to devote reading time to than returning to "The Lord of the Rings," so I doubt I will ever read it again.
All the same, I retain a nostalgic fondness for Middle Earth, and I take a deep interest in the screen adaptations of Tolkien’s work as they require a much lower investment of time than rereading his work. Whatever fondness I do have does not make me feel a need to defend Tolkien against valid criticism, though. Hence, if I felt that an accusation of racism against Tolkien was justified, I would certainly back it. Especially seeing that racism is not simply an abstract evil to me.
I have read the biography of J.R.R. Tolkien by Humphrey Carpenter a few times, and I do not remember anything revealed concerning Tolkien and racism. That does not mean, however, that I rule out the possibility that he ever spoke or acted in a racially inappropriate manner, especially as he grew up in the heyday of the British Empire. This is part of my reason for qualifying my no. However, the focus of this investigation is on his work and not on his life.
As for that work, a great many new Tolkien books produced from the voluminous material he left behind have been published since the author died in 1976. I am not a Tolkien scholar, and it is also possible that there is evidence to contradict my argument within this vast body of writing. This also explains my qualifying my no. All the same, in terms of his main work, which I am familiar with, and by which I mean the books I have already named and The Silmarillion, I feel that if it is read in the spirit that I believe animates it, then not only is Tolkien not racist, but through his work, he actually undermines the foundations upon which racism is built. That is especially significant in that his work has, in recent times, come to be celebrated by the nativist hard right wing in Western politics.
Yet, the aforementioned screen adaptations of Tolkien’s work, save for The Rings of Power, feature exclusively white-skinned heroes, members of the so-called “Free Peoples of Middle Earth,” constituting Elves, Men, Dwarves and Hobbits on the side of good. On the other side, however, there are the evil dark-skinned Orcs, the Uruk Hai and the Men of Harad and Dunland. Moreover, I am certain that in making these adaptations this way, the filmmakers were pretty faithful to the conception of Tolkien himself. As such, Tolkien would appear racist. To counter the claim, though, I will here look at the creatures of Middle Earth, whilst in my next piece, I will focus exclusively on his depictions of Men.
Orcs are known as goblins in "The Hobbit," where they make their first appearance. There, they are introduced as “ugly-looking” and “cruel, wicked and bad-hearted.” Although there is no mention of their skin color here, there are so many appearances of Orcs in Tolkien’s work that rather than interminably attempt to investigate them all, I defer to the Tolkien expert Robert Foster. In his "A Guide to Middle Earth," published in 1971 while Tolkien was still alive and thus before he might have felt any need to reinvent Tolkien for 21st-century sensibilities, Foster reveals that while not all Orcs are identical, they tend “to be short, squat and bow-legged, with long arms, dark faces, squinty eyes and fangs.” As for the Uruk Hai of The Lord of the Rings, Foster tells us they are “a strain of Orcs” but are “unlike other Orcs” in being straight-legged and “almost as tall as Men.” In appearance, Foster states that Uruk Hai are “black and slanty-eyed.”
These descriptions would seem to prove that Tolkien in his depiction of his Orcs and Uruk Hai is racist. For his standard, evil creatures have certain racial features of nonwhite people, with Foster even using some racially pejorative language in describing them.
The key to understanding the Orcs is that, as Foster puts it, they “were bred in mockery of the Elves.” As such, their development into Uruk Hai could, therefore, be seen as the creation of anti-Men. That is, compared to the Free Peoples of Middle Earth, the Orks and Uruk Hai are not only morally opposite in being evil, but they are physically opposite as well. So, if the heroes of Tolkien’s tales are white-skinned, their opposites are not. As such, the whole image of the Orcs and Uruk Hai might rightly be viewed as racist. Yet, if it is, it should be qualified, as I have qualified it. For if the point is taken too far, it accords to the Orcs and the Uruk Hai a false status. They are fantastical creatures and meant to be nothing else. That is, if they were intended as racist portrayals, then they should be identifiable with real people living today. For even if Tolkien’s work is a work of fantasy, some of his creatures closely correlate with real peoples of our world, with, for instance, the "Hobbits" being identifiable as English country people, their home area even being called “the Shire.” Also, the Haradrim, whom I will deal with in my next piece, are effectively a composite of people from the Middle East and South Asia.
Yet, there is nothing about the character of the Orcs and Uruk Hai that associates them with any people or place on Earth. The reason they are not identifiable is clear. For though they are humanoid, they are not supposed to be taken as human-like creatures at all. They are simply stock forms of the two-dimensional evil creatures of traditional fairy tales, and their sole purpose in Tolkien’s work is to cause trials and tribulations for his heroes. As such, they are not to be regarded as of more significance than the wholly material tribulations undergone by these heroes, such as the difficult passes of the Misty Mountains. Moreover, Tolkien clearly wishes us to see his characters of Legolas and Gimli as virtuous beings. Yet, the light-hearted competition in which they engage at Helms Deep is a contest as to who can slaughter the most Orcs. If the Orcs were meant to be even slightly humanized creatures, then this would give a very different tone to this picture. Thus, reading too much into Orc and Uruk Hai pigmentation would be as erroneous as, in another context, making an issue with the typical depiction of ghosts as being of white color.
Then there is the issue of the “Free Peoples of Middle Earth.” According to Foster, this term refers to “the ‘good’ races of Middle-earth” made up of “Men . . . Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits” and “used specifically to refer to those races which were in opposition to Sauron.” This allows for a possible further charge of racism to be laid against Tolkien, in that the Free Peoples of Middle Earth are all understood to be white.
To defend Tolkien from the charge, the question of why needs to be looked at. This is found in Tolkien’s motivation for writing his works. Tolkien believed, and I believe that he is right, that, unlike many other people, the English people have no mythology. Their Celtic neighbors and their Germanic cousins have a deep mythological tradition, but the English lack one. What Tolkien set out to do is provide them with one. Although he intended a mythology for the English, the scope of Middle Earth is wider. Tolkien himself declared that “Middle Earth is Europe.” It would, though, appear to be really Western Europe. Yet, this explains the complexion of his characters. In making a mythological past for England and Western Europe, Tolkien, in seeing the Indigenous peoples of this area as white-skinned, makes his free peoples appear the same.
It would seem that the skin color of his Free People could only be seen as racist if Tolkien set out to denigrate the people outside of this area and/or promote the idea of a master race. That is an issue I wish to look at in my next piece, which focuses exclusively on men in Tolkien’s mythology. Here, I would like to close this piece on the races of Middle Earth by showing that, by having four Free Peoples rather than one, Tolkien has created a mythology whose spirit is at least emphatically anti-racist.
The term “race” is used in Tolkien’s world not to refer to human beings with different skin colors but rather to the four aforementioned Free Peoples. In one sense, his four Free Peoples are all human beings. In a letter, Tolkien revealed that “Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, etc.” are, in reality, “Men” who are “transfigured or partially represented.” That is, his “Free Peoples” are all to be understood as representing human beings in one aspect or another. In making them in some sense human, Tolkien, unlike the Orcs and Uruk Hai, allows his readers to recognize something of themselves in each one, rendering them beings that can be empathized with. Even so, his actual “Men” are to be taken as the direct ancestors of human beings today, whilst the other three are still markedly different.
As the onscreen adaptations show, the different races have different physical traits that make them easily identifiable on sight, and they also have more or less exclusive types of characters. In general, in Tolkien’s work, there is also an antagonistic relationship between these different races. This is best illustrated in The Hobbit by the treatment of the Dwarves by Elves of Mirkwood, followed later by these Elves actually marching to war against them. This antagonism has been brought about through the force of evil that is advanced first through Morgoth and then through his successor, Sauron. Evil is the greatest threat to the "Free Peoples of Middle Earth," yet all the races are themselves infected by it to some extent.
Tolkien’s depiction of evil has a moral message for his readers. That is, in looking at the question of evil in his work, Tolkien is not so much interested in powerful evil forces as represented by huge armies of two-dimensional Orcs but rather in the way in which free people can become evil. His free beings are led into evil through moral flaws that we may find the seeds of in ourselves. Hubris marks the fall of the Elf Fëanor, while an inappropriate passion causes that of Maeglin, a lust for riches brings about evil for the Dwarf Thorin and the attraction of evil through the lust for the ring turns the Hobbit-like Smeagol into the evil Gollum. Then, misdirected loyalty brings about the fall of Fëanor’s sons, as well as the Men Isildur and Boromir.
Tolkien’s moral message contains the idea that we, on a personal level, should strive to resist evil. Nevertheless, it is broader than this. In each major case of success against evil that Tolkien presents in his work, there is cooperation. In The Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit Frodo could not reach Mount Doom without the collaboration of the Fellowship and his trusted companion, Sam. Another of the key images of that work is the lasting cooperation of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, a Man, Elf and Dwarf, respectively. Without this cooperation, which is expanded with the cooperation of others, there would not have been a free world for Frodo to save by the time he reaches Mount Doom.
Moreover, it is through large-scale multiracial cooperation that Morgoth is defeated at the end of the First Age, and it is through multiracial cooperation that Sauron is temporarily defeated at the end of the Second Age and permanently at the end of the Third Age. In short, evil is defeated in Tolkien’s work when these mutually antagonistic races work together.
Tolkien’s message is, therefore, that to battle the evil that all of us are susceptible to, we must cooperate with others, and that cooperation must not be limited to groups with whom we share a common or kin identity. Rather, we must cooperate with those outside these familiar circles to succeed. Even if this message is expressed through stories concerning white-skinned beings, the spirit of this message, understood in our real world, is the antithesis of the exclusivism that underlies racist and nativist ideologies.
