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I have no idea why it seems so impossible to locate racism in a fantasy setting - would the same logic make it impossible to detect misogyny in "Gor"?
I wasn't thinking of a fantasy setting in general - so I should have been more precise. The women in 'Gor' (never read it, seen the jackets, so I'll guess) are obviously women - more or less directly equivalent to women-women in our world. I'm a little less certain about the races in Tolkien's world(s).
So...let's see. You've got some obvious ones. People are stratified very severely according to race in LoTR; first by race - elves, dwarves, halflings, humans, orcs - then by genus - Wood Elf, man of Rohan, Dunedain - but that's a genericising process.
The first of these are refered to as races, but I would be inclined to think of them as 'species'. They don't share a common ancestry, they were created differently, at different times, and by different Gods, if I recall. It seems to me that to ignore this is to cherry-pick. I'd agree that the 'races of man' notion is troubling, but then again, these are peoples falling under the direct and tangible influences of different Gods. They are tampered with by divinity. That's not to suggest there isn't a clear segregation by race, but this segregation is imposed from without, not arising by political division from within.
If you're looking for "racist" in the sense of identifying "lesser" races, and specifically as representing non-white races as evil... well, you've got your orcs, of course - filthy dark-skinned creatures who eat human flesh - and your Uruk-Hai - demonstrations of the dangers of interbreeding between the white and dark races, savage creatures of incredible strength and savagery.
I see what you're saying, but it appears to me that you're jumping the gun here. If these are intended as portrayals of our world, then they're racist in inception - though not necessarily in reading, of course. But orcs are specifically mentioned as having been created 'in mockery of elves' by an evil deity. That could make them the shadow-counterparts of angels as much as a depiction of 'non-white races'. Likewise with your statement that Uruk-Hai are a warning about interbreeding - if that's demonstrable in some way, well and good, but just looking at the text, I don't see that it's clear.
Then there are the Haradrim; a bunch of orientalised blokes from the South, sun-toasted an brown, cowardly and treacherous. And Bill Ferney's representation as some sort of gypsy...
Yes, this stuff I'd agree with, though it's not perhaps notably more racist than the bulk of writing which notices race at all before nineteen fifty - of course, it makes the race-reading of the other species of Middle Earth more problematic for me, because non-white races are already represented; I realise that a duplication is hardly impossible, but all the same.
Increasing, to view LoTR as a book at all seems to me to be increasingly untenable, or perhaps more precisly *limited*.
And there you lose me. I just don't know what that means.
I don't feel strongly about this, exactly - it isn't unlikely to me that a man of Tolkien's time and place should write a text which makes race-based assumptions or even puts forward a racially-composed world view. I'm just curious as to how much actual evidence there is; and as I say, it seems to me that to pick part of the world picture out - "species as possessing alignment and character qualities" - and separate this from the cosmology which brings it about, putting it the context of our world to claim that the text is a racist portrayal - is bad critical practice. If the claim is that Tolkien asserts that our world is actually like Middle Earth in certain ways - for example, that there is a benign God which created the White Races and provides their morality, and a manicchean opposite which created the Dark Races and makes them wicked and deceiving... Well, that's another thing again. |
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