Not So Unintentional Racism

In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the antagonists and all evil creatures come from far-off lands in the East. The places from which evil comes in Middle Earth is also the same places from which generally despised people and ideas arrive to Medieval Europeans. In this way it is evident that although Tolkien did not necessarily intend to slander one specific race or religion, the enemies of Western Europe in the middle ages are used as a basis for evil.

            Although it is not obvious in the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in his letters Tolkien writes Orcs as, "...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). It is highly unlikely that Tolkien himself had a disposition against the Mongols that he would create these agreeably hideous creatures out of spite of them in his day, but it is not so far fetched that the Mongols are a good foundation for the antagonists in a world that is in some ways rather similar to medieval Europe.

Picture of a Mongol (maybe Guyuk Khan)

Uruk-Hai from Lord of the Rings

The Mongols conquered everything in their path and would not stop until it was unquestionably under the rule of the Khanate. To medieval Europeans, the Mongols were seen as a murderous, demonic race set on ruling the world and destroying the Western world. In 1241, the Mongols invaded Poland with an army of 150,000 men, and defeated the Poles at Leignitz with ease. They then went on to defeat the Hungarians at Mohi. The thought of a different race of people entering Europe and conquering it caused Europeans to be fearful of the conquerors and lead them to believe they were not quite human. This is not unlike the goal of Sauron and his army of Orcs in The Lord of the Rings” and his methods of gaining exactly what he desired. If he was not able to retrieve his Ring through deceit and temptation, he would tear the world apart by sheer force.

The Mongols are not the only enemy to Western Europe. The idea of Islam and the fear of Muslims gaining power was frightening to medieval Christians in western Europe. Their fear was out of a lack of understanding (and unwillingness to understand) of Islam and the Arab culture. Tolkien capitalizes on their fear by locating Mordor and its legions in the far east in a similar geographical position when compared to the “orient” as seen by the medieval western Europeans. Many people have criticized Tolkien for this far from coincidental placement of evil as a form of his inherent racism, but it is more probable that this intentional placement of Mordor is due to the perceptions of evil contained within Islam and the Muslims of the middle ages.

A map of Europe and Middle Earth compared in which Mordor is placed around Ottoman dominated Asia Minor

Other aspects of Sauron’s power have been attributed to the middle east such as: Sauron’s armies and the language and writing of Mordor. The depictions of the region in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy depict this.

The armies of Mordor used elephants, a tactic utilized by Asian and North African generals- most notable with Carthage’s Hannibal and his war against the Romans

While this is written in a fictional language, it does have some similarities to Arabic script

In The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Tolkien writes the enemies of the (relatively) peaceful world of the men as reminiscent of the people of the Asian steppes, Asia Minor and the Middle East. Undoubtedly these racial foundations for the antagonists are somewhat problematic, but it is not done out of Tolkien’s animosity towards the races or religions of those respective regions but out of the perceptions of those regions by Western Europeans during the Middle Ages. This is not to say that Tolkien’s works do not have other racial biases, but merely that through a historical lens, the racial stresses of Mordor are done out of the distorted perceptions of different religions and races in Western Europe.