Recovering Race in Middle-earth

CW: discussions of racism

On 28 May 2023, the official Magic: The Gathering Twitter account posted the following image by artist Irvin Rodriguez with the caption: “And Aragorn gave it a new name and called it Andúril, Flame of the West.”

If you’re interested in a handy list of Twitter users to block, I invite you to scroll through the replies and QRTs. You will find a lot of righteous indignation about “wokewashing” Tolkien and violating “canon.” If you’ve kept up with Tolkien fandom in the past couple years, this language will sound wearily familiar. There has been an unfortunately vocal backlash to racial and other kinds of diversity in the legendarium, whether that’s around casting decisions for Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power, cosplayers of color, or works of Tolkien scholarship that push against normative assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality in Middle-earth (Reid 2022).

Just this past week, Variety ran a story about how Amazon brought in an on-set therapist to help actors of color like Ismael Cruz Córdova, who plays the Silvan Elf Arondir, cope with racist harassment they received for the apparently unforgivable crime of portraying a Black Elf in Middle-earth. I won’t link to the ugly responses this article generated, but the signature rhetorical move from a certain subset of online Tolkien fans was to a) deny that racial harassment had taken place and b) accuse Amazon of hiding behind charges of racism to gin up engagement and protect a bad show from “valid criticisms.” Point A is nothing less than gaslighting. Point B may have a kernel of truth to it—Amazon is a savvy corporate behemoth that knows how to monetize controversy—but is hardly a justification for racist bullying.

I have already lodged several complaints regarding ROP elsewhere. I am not a fan of the show; there are many valid criticisms to be leveled against it. Decrying the existence of Black Elves as “noncanonical” is not one of them. It is a prime example of a nasty tendency that fan scholar Dawn Walls-Thumma has identified in Tolkien fanfiction communities:

Again and again, what some fans thought Tolkien meant or believed he intended was elevated to the status of canon where it was not open to question and where canonicity became a convenient diversion from discussions of sexism, racism, and homophobia in the legendarium and fandom. (2023, p. 95)

I lack the space to do a full rundown of race and racism as it relates to Tolkien; that’s a topic for an entire book, indeed many books. If you’re interested in diving into this issue, I’ll direct you to my colleague Robin A. Reid’s ongoing bibliography of scholarship on racisms and Tolkien. (Give her a follow too!) Philosopher Charles Mills’ posthumously-published essay “The Wretched of Middle-earth: An Orkish Manifesto” (2022) forcefully lays out the charges against the legendarium. I can highly recommend Dimitra Fimi’s exceptional book Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History (2008) as well, in which she explores how Tolkien’s work and worldview emerged from the times during which he lived and how it evolved over the course of his life. (This lecture sums up some of her major points well.) In this blog post, I want to focus on the particular question of portraying “White” characters as non-White.

I place “White” in scare quotes to signify not that a particular character is canonically White, but that they have been portrayed as such - or, even more to the point, that many readers have imagined them as such when reading Tolkien’s works. Some of this is signaled by in-text descriptions of raced physical characteristics, both positive (e.g., “fair” Elves) and negative (e.g., “swarthy” Easterlings). Much of it, however, is based in the assumptions we bring to reading. Though Tolkien at times disavowed simplistic readings of Middle-earth as an analogue of the Primary World (and at other times acknowledged certain parallels - see Letter #183 to W.H. Auden), the legendarium is quite obviously grounded in Western and Northern European language and folklore. Now, there have always been people of color living in Europe, even the “whitest” parts of it. But between descriptions of heroic pale-skinned warriors and troubling depictions of dark-skinned Haradrim, readers can be forgiven for reading Tolkien’s Euro-coded heroes as White. This is what the cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1999) calls a preferred reading: one which "makes sense” in terms of dominant maps of meaning. Our social imaginary maps premodern Europe as White; therefore Aragorn, as an inhabitant of a premodern world inspired by Europe, is also White. This is a good example of how ingrained cultural beliefs come to color (literally) the texts we read. It’s also a good example of how ingrained cultural beliefs color the texts we write, even the ones set in ostensibly fantastic secondary worlds. Tolkien is a complex figure, but he doesn’t always go out of his way to challenge racially problematic assumptions.

What Tolkien does do, however, is argue that fantasy has the power to show us that our assumptions about the way the world works are precisely that: assumptions. To see the world the way we have been trained to see it is not the same thing as seeing it the way it is; or rather, “‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them’ – as things apart from ourselves” (On Fairy-Stories [OFS], p. 67). This last point is the heart of what Tolkien calls Recovery, and it is one of the great gifts of fantasy:

We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention; perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of ‘appropriation’: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become, like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them. […]

Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you. (OFS, pp. 67-68)

Tolkien may have harbored many of the unexamined presuppositions of an Englishman of his time and social location, and these presuppositions in turn influenced the world he made. But he could also be sharply critical of imperialism and colonialism, and this passage helps explain why. For the colonizer is the ‘‘seeing man’ . . . he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess’,” motivated in his quest for gold and glory by “a colonizing mind-set in which the Western gaze described, classified, judged, and reduced the exoticized other” (Stanley 2019, p. 4). Seen thus, the world is an object to be manipulated for gain, and our fellow human beings—especially the non-White ones—are little better than commodities. Certainly not full persons, “made in the image and likeness of a Maker” (OFS, p. 66). By defamiliarizing the familiar and “play[ing] fantastic tricks” with common sense (which may be common but is seldom sense), fantasy can return us to the wonder of the world and the tremendous diversity of beings, human and otherwise, with whom we are called to share it. John Rosegrant (2017) puts it succinctly: “For Tolkien, ‘seeing’ is seeing with love” (p. 136).

Following on that insight, Sonali Arvind Chunodkar (2023) argues that far from “disrespecting” Tolkien and the “canon” (a complicated term deserving of further consideration), greater racial diversity in Middle-earth can itself be seen as a practice of Tolkienian Recovery. Our tendency to fill in the indeterminate spaces in the text with culturally-constructed “givens” can actually blind us to the diversity which may already be there. In a late essay, Tolkien described the House of Bëor, one of the chief clans of Elf-Friends from whom the Númenóreans trace their descent, as exhibiting quite a bit of variation in skin-color (The Peoples of Middle-earth, pp. 306-316). In his letters, Tolkien compared Númenor and Gondor to ancient Meditteranean societies such as Rome, Byzantium, and especially Egypt (e.g., Letter #211 to Rhona Beare). These are places which have long played host to tremendous racial and ethnic diversity and parts of which have only recently and incompletely been included under the umbrella of “whiteness.” As Chunodkar points out, if we’re going by the text and the text alone, then Sam Gamgee should be canonically imagined and portrayed as brown-skinned:

[I]t is only when we recover his described skin colour, we become free to recognize the complicating and perhaps even promising implications and applications of Tolkien’s Sam, a member of a lower social order in the Shire, becoming its elected mayor—however ceremonial the position—and thereby discover yet another aspect of Tolkien’s still perilous realm. (Chunodkar 2023, p. 24)

Many of us (if we’re White, anyway) may never have thought to portray Aragorn as a Black man, or to cast a Black man as an Elf - and more’s the pity. Did Tolkien “intend” these characters to be portrayed in this way? I don’t have space to get into the thorny issue of “authorial” “intent” here; suffice it to say that I think that an author’s intent matters, but it is far from the only thing which does. Things like evolving ideas about race and Eurocentrism also matter. So does Recovery: fantasy’s potential—its calling—to startle us out of our too-easy certainties and confront us of the holy Otherness of our fellow-beings, especially those whom we have (mis)appropriated.

Black Aragorns and brown-skinned Sams and Elves of color are doing precisely that. They are what Una McCormack (2015) calls reparative readings: using creative fan-works to “perform acts of transformation, reparation, and radicalization” (p. 310) on the legendarium, opening up imaginative space for more readers to find a home in Middle-earth. Tolkien fandom and scholarship can only be enriched in the process.

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WORKS CITED

• Chunodkar, Sonali Arvind. “Desire of the Ring: An Indian Academic’s Adventures in Her Quest for the Perilous Realm.” In Tolkien and Diversity: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Summer Seminar 2021, edited by Will Sherwood, 7-28. Edinburgh: Luna Press Publishing, 2023.

• Fimi, Dimitra. “Revisiting Race in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Constructing Cultures and Ideologies in an Imaginary World.” Dimitra Fimi (blog). 2 December 2018. URL.

• Fimi, Dimitra. Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

• Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, 2^nd ed., edited by Simon During, 508-517. London: Routledge, 1999.

• McCormack, Una. “Finding Ourselves in the (Un)Mapped Lands: Women’s Reparative Readings of The Lord of the Rings.” In Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan, 309-326. Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 2015.

• Mills, Charles W. "The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto." The Southern Journal of Philosophy 60(1) (2022): 105-135.

• Reid, Robin A. “A Queer Atheist Feminist Autist Responds to Donald Williams’s ‘Keystone or Cornerstone? A Rejoinder to Verlyn Flieger on the Alleged ‘Conflicting Sides’ of Tolkien’s Singular Self.’” Mythlore 40(2) (Spring/Summer 2022): 196-220.

• —. “Scholarship on Racisms and ‘Tolkien’: An Ever-Expanding Bibliography.” Writing from Ithilien (blog). March 10, 2023. URL.

• Rosegrant, John. “From the Ineluctable Wave to the Realization of Imagined Wonder: Tolkien’s Transformation of Psychic Pain into Art.” Mythlore 35(2) (2017): 133-151.

• Stanley, Phiona. “Ethnography and Autoethnography in English Language Teaching.” In Second Handbook of English Language Teaching, edited Xuesong Gao (Ed.), 1-20. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019.

• Tolkien, J.R.R. On Fairy-Stories. Edited by Verlyn Flieger & Douglas A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins, 2014.

• —. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter & Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

• —. The Peoples of Middle-earth. The History of Middle-earth, Vol. 12. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

• Walls-Thumma, Dawn. “Stars Less Strange: An Analysis of Fanfiction and Representation within the Tolkien Fan Community.” In Tolkien and Diversity: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Summer Seminar 2021, edited by Will Sherwood, 86-106. Edinburgh: Luna Press Publishing, 2023.