That person seems as full of hatred and as prejudiced as he/she accuses his targets of being, which totally defeat the purpose of such a rant, if you ask me.

Was Tolkien a racist? I'd say not really by the standards of his time and for someone of his background (a fairly sheltered conservative, and a fairly repressed catholic). In 2012 holding the same views would be seen by most as latent racism at best, but that's the point: Tolkien isn't living in 2012. You can hardly ask Tolkien to be J.K. Rowling. The author of the article doesn't seem aware, or chose to overlook, how much the world has changed since Tolkien's days. Most of Tolkien's opinions would not have been construed as "racist" by most people of his time, even less in the UK where the colonial mentalities were not even totally out of the picture by then. I think Sam's comment about the Easterling is very meaningful, all the more because it came from Sam. Tolkien was a reknown professor at the most reknown University, but he had a deep love and respect for the working class, and a deep nostalgia for the pre-industrial age that borders on idealization - the character of Sam is his homage to the working class people Tolkien thought were the true Englishmen. In any case, Tolkien in LOTR made Sam the carrier of "good English common sense" and of a popular wisdom Tolkien highly regarded. So Sam's words on the Easterlings has to be seen in this light, that it comes from the character who has little in way of education but conveys in his simple words deep, unadorned truths some others don't see. Through Sam, Tolkien was saying "those foreigners who appear to be so different from us aren't so different from us, and even though they're allied with Sauron, I doubt they're genuinely evil, just misguided and deceived. Coming from Bilbo or Frodo, it could have been more intellectual, rationalized (and PC before the letter), but coming from Sam, it's from the heart.

There's no deep racism (or real racism) in there, it's a mixture of post-Imperialist-yet-not-totally-modern British worldview and catholic/Jesuit vision of non-European non-catholics/christians still going in Tolkien's time. "Their ignorance makes them more easy prey for the devil and his snares, but for that they should not be mistaken for evil men". It's terribly patronizing, but it's not the same as racism in the modern sense.

The rest, IMO, has far more to do with geography than anything else. Tolkien was creating a mythology for England, set in mythological and then in epic times. Why exactly one should expect non-caucasians to play a role as a people in central middle-Earth? He already had the people from the North who had long ago fallen prey to Sauron and fought their brothers. He had Rohan nearly stand aside. That didn't leave him many options but people from the South to be Sauron's pawns, and this doesn't really come with a condemnation from Tolkien, but with excuses for these choices. Great people who should have known way better had fallen to Sauron. And for the people from the south-east, Tolkien seems to put it on their ignorance and their opportunism for the most part. As for depicting them as non-caucasians, I'm not sure there's much more to that than the area they come from. It sounds to me that he was aware having those "southerners" join Sauron could be construed as racist by people who read a parallel to the middle-east or northern africa into it, and Sam's comment comes as an attempt on his part to say it shouldn't be read this way. Perhaps Sam's comment on the Easterlings not being evil should also be seen in contrast to the way Tolkien depicted the Witch-King and the rest of the Nazgul - and those were not from the south nor were they foreign to the central cultures...

As for Orcs and Goblins, that's mostly nonsense. I'm convinced in Tolkien's mind they were simply the Devil's animalistic hordes, not to be associated to any human people.

As for the dwarves.... WW2 hardly erased overnight European prejudices regarding Jews (and it's not like they're gone today just because it's become anathema socially). Associating Jews with money isn't in itself antisemite anyway (they're the first to be proud of their aptitudes for finance... and to make fun of this in their humour), no more than associating Florence with banking is racist, just because antisemites built horrible edifices on the Jews's traditional ties to finance and banking. It's also a bit easy to jump to conclusions that Tolkien meant the parrallel to be entirely negative. His dwarves loved riches yes, and too much of a good thing here lead to the sin of greed, and they were manipulated through that greed, but Tolkien condemned the Elves of Feanor's line far more harshly than that. Not only that, but his dwarves are shown as fiercely loyal, resilent, industrious, brilliant at what they do. They were also, and that's a very positive trait in Tolkien, deeply attached to their past and traditions, and very proud of them. There's a great deal more to the race than their love of treasures, if one insist on comparing them to the Jews you have to take the positive into it as well as the negative...

His Elves were also deeply prejudiced against the dwarves - but not only did one of LOTR's storyarc showed this situation to be racist and prejudiced - and the endgame showed the Elven and Dwarf main players becoming the closest friends once they put those prejudices aside and really cared to get to know each other, but even in the Silmarillion this condescending and loathing attitude of the elves toward the dwarves put them in a bad light. So if Tolkien truly had the Jews in mind when he thought of the dwarves (but keeping in mind how much he hated allegories...), it seems he acknowledged them as different, but actually deeply condemned hatred of these differences as prejudices, ignorance and xenophobia. By nature, Tolkien disliked materialism and hated what industrialization had done to Britain. Those antipathies he transmitted to the Elves, but through the dwarves he sort of balanced things out a bit. He at least showed that there was also a love of nature and a similar respect for it, in their culture - different from the Elves but in their own way, as pure and elevated. The whole storyarc is an invitation to tolerance and getting to see things from other's POV rather than hate or judge.

Was Tolkien sexist? Hell yes, like most men in his time and background. Does this even surprise anyone? But one has to remember that Tolkien was writing a pseudo-mythology, and this wasn't the late 70s where a George Lucas could introduce a female character in a mythological context that could be construed as feminist (not that Princess Leia enjoyed that to the end - ANH and ESB were praised by some feminists - but Leia pretty much ended up like Eowyn in ROTJ, a not without some "fan service" exploitation in the early movie).

But Tolkien didn't write in the 70s. The women in his mythology still play terribly traditional roles, even Eowyn who's straight from Norse/Germanic mythology. An important nuance that has to be made is that for a catholic of Tolkien's generation, that was hardly negative or mysogynistic so much as going with traditional values, and in fact Tolkien held an extremely Marian and idealized vision of women (especially Arwen, but even Galadriel in LOTR, and to an extent even Eowyn), when a great deal of his catholic peers wouldn't have been nearly so kind as to give them this glorified if nearly absent role.

The thing also is, by all accounts Tolkien lived very much in a men's world, with very limited meaningful intellectual interactions with women (even his wife). Virtually all his meaningful relationships have been with his male friends and colleagues. The women of his life, Tolkien had put on pedestals and kept them at arm's length in his daily life, and pretty much out of everything but his quiet domestic life. By all accounts he adored his mother and his wife, and highly respected them - but he remained all his life terribly uneasy dealing with women, and for him they inhabited something like a world of their own where he didn't belong, and maybe they were the better half of humanity. This is reflected in his fiction (one just has to think of the Entwives). His wife he nicknamed Luthien, that says all. Again, that's hardly surprising of a very conservative, very prude catholic of his time - even though he seemed to have been especially represssed and a bit retrograde when it came to women. Most men in his position would have fully agreed that the end of Eowyn's storyline was all she could wish for. With Eowyn's, Tolkien had demonstrated that women could be as strong and brave as men (which he probably thought true, if you ask me), if not more than most men, but for men of Tolkien's generation, it didn't follow that Eowyn after she's made that point should reject the normal life of a woman as a wife and mother, which for men like Tolkien (and for the mythologies that inspired him as a writer) was after all the greatest, most heroic accomplishment for any woman. Tolkien lived most of his life following pre-feminist and ultra conservative values. Tolkien lived most of his adult life at times where his priest would have chastized him if he failed to get his wife pregnant regularly, and even more if he had dared let his wife work out of the home...


The article doesn't shy from assuming that "it's not for no reason the neo-nazi love Tolkien". Duh... Of course they would, much like the Nazi loved Wagner and for much the same reasons. It doesn't mean they're doing justice to Tolkien or don't read a lot in his work that isn't there. The white suprematists are hardly known for their subtle intellects.

In 2012, Tolkien's works stand with a lot of other works from the same period that show a worldview and sensibilities that are considered retrograde. Written today, it would at best be considered very politically incorrect. But the thing is, it wasn't written today, nor by someone who had yet lived through the end of colonianism, the anti-segregationist movements, the feminist movements, the PC days, nor for that matter through Vatican II. Tolkien's works don't even stand out so much among works from the same period. I suspect the "racism" and "sexism" are more visible in his case largely because his story is written in an intemporal imaginary world. People are much keener to overlook or forgive novelists who have written more realistic works, brushing off their worldviews far more easily as a reflect of their time and education. Part of the problem may be that Tolkien's work has endured so much as popular work, and it's mostly not read as a work from the 50s-60s.

For the most part, I think Tolkien remains pretty harmless. He's not a writer you turn to for shaping the values of children regarding women, no more than he would be a writer to turn to teach anti-racist values. But in the end, women are mostly absent, the book isn't actively sexist, mostly passively, and the book isn't actively racist either (and Tolkien's most virulent xenophobia was directed toward the French, and there are few traces of that in his work, at least no active ones). The bottomline is that it's pretty harmless to someone who's got or is getting a good education.

Personally, far more than his anglo/germanic/norse centrism (that I don't mind, in the context of his project), it's Tolkien's old school catholicism (which include his sexism and so on) as a whole that midly irks me when I re-read LOTR. I think his religious beliefs interferred quite a bit with his project of a "mythology for England", as if he had in the end produced the edulcorated, christianized version rather than the "real deal". Mind you in this he is nowhere as bad as his friend C.S. Lewis, whom I find purely unreadable (and that personally I would hesitate to put in the hands of my children if I had any - not that I would forbid it, but I certainly wouldn't recommend they read Narnia, and it would definitely come with a good discussion of its retrograde values afterward. I should note though that unlike anglo-saxons I didn't grow up with Narnia and read some of them only in my thirties - the books were deemed too "catho" and conservative by French publishers, they didn't get translated until the movie came out.).

The most damaging, perhaps, is not something to lay at Tolkien's feet but rather the influence of LOTR on a Fantasy, in which many of the same stereotypes haved endured among writers who no longer had the excuse of living in Tolkien's days.

It's no longer as true, however. Since the 80s, a lot of post-Tolkien fantasy has made big places for non-caucasians, women. Even to gays, nowadays. It took some time in the genre, but the evolution of mentalities/sensibilities/values have caught up in the end, to an extent (there's still a lot of stereotypes from some writers). Some writers like Erikson, Jordan, Monette and so on even clearly wrote in reaction to the early works, going out of their way at times.