Recently, I re-read The
Lord of the Rings. Tomorrow I will publish a fairly in-depth exploration of
what I found there, but first I’d like to address the charges that Tolkien was
a fascist (this link
is mostly about Michael Moorcock – you’ll have to scroll down for the relevant
part), and that the Lord of the Rings contains
elements that are racist.
Although the two suggestions could easily be conflated, I find it easier to
address them separately.
I do not think Tolkien was a fascist, but he (or at least
his work) is deeply conservative. The idea of a nobility that is naturally suited
to rule permeates the novel, but Tolkien is highly critical of those who misuse
their power. The closest we get to a description of a fascist society is in the
Scouring of the Shire, where a military police force brutalises the
countryside, reduces the population to a barely subsisting serfdom, and any
dissenting voice is locked up without trial or hope of release. This section of
the books can feel like an afterthought when compared to the grand scale of the
main narrative, but in its description of how ordinary hobbits get drawn into
working as Saruman’s sheriffs (some because of ‘badness’, but some out of a
desire for status and some just for the offer of steady employment) is perhaps
Tolkien’s most nuanced look at power and its misuses, and one of the few clear
links between the plot of the novel and the geo-political context of its
writing (after the Second World War, during the Cold War). In contrast, the
‘good’ characters are noted for their mercy, and Aragorn – the novel’s
archetypical king – shows, through his reluctance to enter Minas Tirith before
being invited by the stewards of the city, and through his refusal to force
unwilling men to follow him to a last stand at the gates of Mordor, an
understanding of the legal and moral limits of even monarchical power. It would
be difficult to say from this book alone whether Tolkien supported the idea of
absolute monarchy in real life – he only supplies us with three types of
government: the essentially self-governing pastoral feudalism of the shire,
monarchs (good unless corrupted by outside influences like Denathor or
Theoden), and tyrants. What can be said undeniably, is that he admires the
idealised version of feudal monarchy that he presents. This is not the place to
look for criticisms of feudal power structure, but Tolkien is at least critical
of the sort of impersonal, oppressive and militarised power found in fascism
and other forms of totalitarian regime.
On the other charge, that of racism, I must unfortunately
find Tolkien guilty by modern standards, even if his racial views were
relatively progressive among his contemporaries (according to his Wikipedia
page, Tolkien was critical of the British Empire’s treatment of its colonial
subjects, and he was critical of pre-war Germany’s anti-Semitism – let us not
forget that until the outbreak of war, Hitler had many supporters in the
Anglophone world). Even as a younger, less aware reader in a less PC world, I
found some of Tolkien’s portrayals of non-white people uncomfortable. At the
time, I thought that his one humanising description of a dead Southron soldier
in Ithilien made up for the rest, but it does little to counter-balance all of
the times that the Easterlings and the Haradrim are described as being cruel or
barbaric, even if he does go out of his way to point out that they have been
fooled by Sauron. The non-white humans of Middle Earth may not be naturally
inclined to evil, but they are exotic and gullible worshipers of a false god,
an ignoble ‘other’ to the fair skinned, noble people of the West. The best that
can be said in Tolkien’s defence here is that he is perhaps no worse than other
writers who grew up under the paternalistic vision of the British Empire, but
where someone like Agatha Christie, for example, whose novels are set in
roughly the time they were written, says something which seems backwards, it
can more easily be recognised as part of the attitudes of her time. In Tolkien,
whose setting is distant from his context, it is harder to see these attitudes
as being ‘of their time’. Worse, Tolkien magnifies this problem through setting
his story in an idealised past society where attitudes could have easily been
different, and by emphasising the idea of racial superiority in his use of the Elven
and Numenorean bloodlines. And it has to be said that while Christie might have
her supporting cast of rakes and cads tell the occasional racist joke, at least
she never penned a novel in which hordes of dark-skinned barbarians from a
continent to the south ally with goblins and demons to invade Europe.
We should take a moment to discuss those goblins. A
determined critic could argue that Tolkien’s orcs, while not as directly
offensive as his Southrons and his Easterlings because they do not map onto a
real world ethnicity, create an argument that evil is something which can be
inherent in a culture – that evil can be so deep in a people that it passes
through their DNA. When placed alongside his portray of non-European (and there
is no denying that the North West of Middle Earth is a stand in for Europe) human
characters, they draw attention to attitudes about race and moral strength that
were prevalent at the time of writing. However, I think this is to put the
wrong sort of emphasis on what is essentially a common storytelling technique.
Tolkien uses orcs in the same way that George Lucas uses his masked
Stormtroopers, or so many video games use zombies – as a faceless evil that can
be killed without diminishing the innocence of our protagonists. Beyond this,
they provide a counterpoint to the Early-Medieval societies that inspired
Tolkien. Tolkien dedicated his professional life to studying the literature of
warlike people, and his fictional cultures draw inspiration from them. While he
makes a point of not having his characters love war, it is still a source of
honour and glory for them. Weapons are treasured artefacts, and the great
war-leaders are remembered in song. The nature of the weapons might have
changed, but man’s warlike nature was just as evident as ever by the time
Tolkien was writing. He fought in the First World War himself, and lived
through the second. The orcs are a distorted mirror to Tolkien’s Elves, Dwarves
and Men, and to mankind throughout real history. They are a society in which
all but war has been stripped away – they write no songs and have no love of
beautiful things, either crafted or natural, despoiling the Earth in order to
create more means to kill. Fighting orcs neither allows for, nor requires much
moral complexity, but that is not the type of story Tolkien is trying to tell.
So, Tolkien is not a fascist, and his portrayal of Orcs is
not racist, but his portrayal of non-European people probably is. While this
made me a little uncomfortable in places, it did not ruin the book for me.
Again, I do not believe that Tolkien hated people of colour, he may not even
have had the same sort of ‘White Man’s Burden’ paternalistic views of his
contemporaries, but in this book he does present a dangerous non-European other
which is out of step with our times. However, this is far from being a central
element in the books, and I think it should be treated the same way we would
treat the racism of his contemporaries –
acknowledge it for what it is, then, so long as it is not the core argument,
move on to looking at other elements of the work. This post is my
acknowledgement – tomorrow I will begin a proper investigation of the novel.
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