➹If Tolkien is a Racist, Hello Kitty is a Power Ranger➷

An ongoing debate in the Tolkien universe: Does the author qualify as a white supremacist? While pitiful Orcs like to claim so, his portrayal of humanity, his careful inclusion of flaws with regard to every race, and his reasoning in selecting the Eastern portions of Middle-Earth to function in an evil role actually all support the opposite.

First and foremost, Tolkien puts each mortal—regardless of personal attributes like skin color—on an equal playing field, without prizing one ethnicity over another. Hence the general character failure intrinsic to mankind in its entirety: according to The Lord of the Rings, it receives nine deceptively powerful rings from the main villain, Sauron, rings covertly loyal to their creator, who wields the One Ring, the controlling ring—and proves collectively “doomed to die” (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings). Along the same lines, both virtuous and immoral Caucasians exist in his works; in the midst of his realm’s Second Age, the white Numenorean people, their kingdom corrupted from within by Sauron, split into two divisions: the noble Numenoreans—the founders of the Kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor—and those committed to Sauron, the group that settles in the East, in Umbar and the lands of Harad, to become his servants (Kovach). Consequently, hazy superficial categorizations—“whites” representing “good” forces with “blacks” comprising their “bad” counterparts—fail to work here, something reflected in one protagonist’s inner monologue.

When Samwise Gamgee, a naïve and bumbling Hobbit, experiences his first taste of war, he does not like it much. Seeing a Harad warrior from Sauron’s armies “crash … nearly on top of [him,] … [the fighter’s] corslet of overlapping brazen plates … rent … and … his black plaits of hair braided with gold drenched with blood [as] his brown hand … still clutch[es] the hilt of a broken sword” (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings), he feels deeply moved. The gruesome scene drives him to “wonder what the man’s name [is] and where he [comes] from; and if he [is] really evil of heart, or what lies or threats [have] led him on the long march from his home” (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings). Hardly an uncaring or impersonal perspective, Sam’s insight reveals that, while putting pen to paper, Tolkien considered every human individual in his legendarium unique and worth cherishing, no matter how he or she looked, and a skeptic need search no further than his worst representatives for verification.

The Hobbit—the child-oriented precursor to The Lord of the Rings trilogy—provides examples of impartial racial disasters…poor members of the perfectly bleached Elves, stalwartly bland Dwarves, and glaringly untanned Lakemen alike. Moreover, these less-than-impressive persons respectively stand as leaders of their separate coteries. Thranduil, an Elvish king, and Thorin, a Dwarvish monarch, quarrel greedily to such an extent that Bilbo, another innocent Hobbit figure, must intervene to solve the dispute (Tolkien 229). As for the Master of the Lake, his overwhelming greed brings him to his death (Tolkien 260). Clearly, the sunless components of the Tolkien universe suffer from some severe shortcomings, especially in relation to wealth. However, select critics, not satisfied with this obvious imperfection, continue to assert that the East’s alignment with Sauron in the series attests to Tolkien’s underlying racism.

Symbolism—a simple term explains what they deem a convoluted mess. Since the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West, placing Sauron in the East figuratively removes him as far as possible from a happy ending—from concluding his days bathed in endorphin-inducing sunshine. Simultaneously, it ensures they stay swelteringly, miserably hot during the afternoons. Beyond buoying a cruel authority’s destroy-the-world-and-promote-hatred agenda, the daily parched and nightly iced desert climate parallels plot devices: in literature, hotter temperatures correspond to more heated, more stressful or tension-aggravating events, which, of course, never cease where Sauron lives, torturing free peoples to get up-to-date on Gandalf and his pals, feeding annoying minions to his giant spider, and relaxing on his cozy iron throne (Foster 171-181). Representatively and literally awful, an Eastern desert rounds out his nastiness. Biology says the region’s two-legged inhabitants will possess darker coloring and utilize assistive cooling technologies and designs. Logic says they will likely attempt to appease—perhaps worship—their proximate dastardly overlord. Small wonder the Fellowship confronts an Eastern power, small wonder his underlings adopt cleverly adaptive Middle Eastern and African customs and dress, and small wonder they opt to help him out—most of them, anyway.

Anyone stubbornly refusing to acknowledge Tolkien’s open-mindedness can evaluate the story of Bór the Faithful. A die-hard Elven friend, he stuck with his democratic companions in spite of the warnings of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord—and he and his kin perished for it ("Bór"). Not everyone in the East wants to kill and hurt, and the Eastern masses readers observe engaging in bloodthirsty warfare do not know or trust anything other than their sadistic dictator’s bloodlust. Bór presents an extraordinarily rare case for a reason.

After analyzing Tolkien’s level depiction of mortals from varying backgrounds, egotistical Caucasian powerhouses, and symbolic considerations concerning Sauron’s location in the East and his unswerving—and heavily African- and Middle Eastern-influenced—followers there, his so-called injustices lose their divisive quality. Unless Sauron established residence across Middle-Earth, only a specific section of the map would immediately need to submit to his influence, and, due to light and darkness patterns, the East made literary sense.

Works Cited

"Bór." LOTR.wikia.com. Wikipedia, n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2017. <http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/B%C3%B3r>.

Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature Like a Professor: Revised Edition. N.p.: n.p., 2014. Kindle.

Kovach, Ciaran. "The Lord of the Rings Is Racist: A Counter-argument." Wordpress. Wordpress.com, 28 Jan. 2016. Web. 23 Apr. 2017. <https://interstate1965.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/the-lord-of-the-rings-is-racist-a-counter-argument/>.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. N.p.: HarperCollins, 1995. Kindle.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. N.p.: HarperCollins E-, 2005. Kindle.