22 Was Tolkien racist? Were his works?
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This article is from the Tolkien Newsgroups FAQ, by Steuard Jensen sbjensen@midway.uchicago.edu with numerous contributions by others.
22 Was Tolkien racist? Were his works?
A full discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of this FAQ.
Some people find what they consider to be clear indications of racist
attitudes in Tolkien's works. It is certainly possible that they are
right: racism is notoriously difficult to recognize accurately, and
most people harbor at least some level of racial mistrust.
On the other hand, most people who make such accusations seem to do
so primarily to stir up controversy and inspire flame wars. In fact,
much of the "evidence" presented to demonstrate Tolkien's racism is
flawed, and there is reason to believe that Tolkien was less racist
than many people of his day. For the sake of diffusing the issue a
little, I will mention a few of those mistaken arguments.
One occasional charge is that Tolkien was anti-semitic, presumably
because he occasionally compared his Dwarves to Jews. Those
comparisons seem to focus on history and language, however: in Letter
#176 he says, "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.....". And he seems
to have had a very positive view of the Jewish people in general. For
example, when discussing the origins of the name "Tolkien" in the final
footnote to Letter #325, he says, "It is not Jewish in origin, though I
should consider it an honour if it were." He made very similar comments
in a draft of a letter (#30) to a publisher in Nazi Germany who asked
about his race, and in Letter #29 he introduced that draft and told his
publisher, "I should regret giving any colour to the notion that I
subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine."
Another seemingly prejudiced statement comes in Letter #210, where
Tolkien describes the Orcs as "degraded and repulsive versions of the
(to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types". At first glance this looks
blatantly racist, but the qualifier "to Europeans" casts it in a very
different light: Tolkien explicitly recognized that different cultures
have different standards of beauty, and that his impressions did not
reflect any underlying superiority. Moreover, he made it clear that
the Orcs were not in any sense actual "Mongol-types", but "degraded and
repulsive versions" of humanoid stock. (Nevertheless, his comment
certainly falls short of modern standards of sensitivity.)
Many point to the "hierarchy" of the various groups of humans in the
books as clear evidence of cultural elitism or racism, but they seem to
forget that most of the Numenoreans (the "highest" humans) fell into
deepest evil and were destroyed by God, while the Woses (the "Wild Men"
of Druadan forest, who certainly would not represent "civilized"
Europeans) were among the most wise and resistant to evil of all
peoples (as well as having a complex culture and many skills other Men
lacked), to take two of many examples.
Finally, a few people have mistaken the symbolic conflict between
"darkness" and "light" in the books for a conflict between "black" and
"white", which they then interpret racially (which is already a
stretch). They seem to overlook the ghastly white corpse-light of
Minas Morgul, the White Hand of Saruman, and Isildur's black Stone of
Erech, to name a few exceptions.
As for specific claims that Tolkien linked skin color to good and
evil, there are simply too many exceptions for that to hold up. Light
skinned characters who did evil things include Saruman, Grima, Gollum,
Boromir, Denethor, and the Numenoreans as mentioned above. And it is
notable that Tolkien described Forlong's people of Gondor and even the
men of Bree as "swarthy", the same term he used for example of the
Southrons who were ambushed by Faramir (though to be fair, he may have
imagined different degrees of "swarthiness" for those groups). For
that matter, Sam's flash of empathy for the fallen Southron he saw
during the ambush indicates that many of Sauron's soldiers were likely
unwilling slaves, not evil at heart.
In short, while there are racially "suspicious" elements to be found
in Tolkien's writings if one hunts for them, closer examination
typically reveals the attitude behind them to be benign. That doesn't
mean that he was perfect, but it certainly doesn't seem that he should
be condemned for intolerance.
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