Thank you. - Edit 1
Before modification by nossy at 29/01/2012 11:14:11 PM
I agree with your distinction between him being racist and there being racist elements in the book; the author of that article does not. Or perhaps she does, and wouldn't even be wasting her time on writing an article if she thought Tolkien was an actual racist in the evident sense of the word.
Tolkien does include other races, though. The non-white men get very little attention - they fight on the evil side, though, even if Sam makes his famous comment at one point about how they are just ordinary people like them. But all the orcs and goblins...
You may be right about the orcs/goblins; we can't know. I, however, always thought of them as corrupted beings, much the same way angels were supposedly corrupted down into demons and devils - a process that takes them from pearly-shininess to grody, slimy darkness. Orcs/goblins don't give me racist feelings at all. I do agree about the men on Sauron's side, and almost mentioned that. Just because it is a historical connection (the main theme he seems to have featured in his novels) to centuries-long history between Europeans and more exotic races, doesn't mean it isn't racist in tone.
She also quotes a comment by Tolkien comparing his Dwarves to Jews, based on their being obsessed by gold and riches - which is indeed anti-semitism of a kind that would be normal in an author of a century earlier, but not so much post-WW2. Not that the Dwarves are depicted as bad guys (despite the blog author's attempt to suggest so by quoting the most negative passage about them, from early on in The Hobbit), but still.
I have never heard that, but I would say that it seems we're in that narrow area between not being politically correct and getting into actual racism. It would be much worse if he had turned the dwarves into evil characters, but they certainly are not, and he didn't repeatedly connect them to other Jewish stereotypes, unless I'm simply not aware of what/how. Yet again, it seems that he was less careful about using stereotypical definitions, not necessarily trying to make a racist statement - unless we're counting positive racism? "Hey, dwarves are Jews, BUT look how much we love them!"
She doesn't find anything more to complain about concerning Galadriel than that she is "placed on a pedestal". About Eowyn, she's more convincing... the end of that storyline, after all, is that Eowyn does go back to doing what she's supposed to do, and looks back at her desire to break free as being a silly thing.
Unfortunately, I feel like I look like I'm making excuses, but I am just telling you how I've interpreted these things while reading. I always thought Eowyn was stupidly impetuous when she didn't listen to Theoden telling her how much the people needed her. I thought that at the end, she lost her crush and met someone she could actually love (rather than being married off for convenience or ties) and realized that great people (she is more than just a woman) have certain responsibilities. It always seemed more like "growing up" to me than falling back into a "place." So anyway. Maybe I'm wrong, who knows.