Tolkien : the only racism is what you take with you

How do we deal with artistic works that no longer represent accepted moral standards ? Context is everything - there is no one right answer to this. I've tried to cover this before a few times : for example with statues, with Bond movies, and most recently with Dune.

A key point is that audience interpretation can matter more than original artistic intent. Unless an author is really very explicit indeed, the moral message the audience takes away is dependent on their own preferences, conditioning, and subjective viewpoint. You can say Sean Connery's James Bond is a sexist pig (indeed, serial rapist) and you'll be right, but if you think this means the audience goes away feeling that this is something the character promotes, what he encourages the audience to emulate, you're on much thinner ice. No, what a movie actually manages to promote - if anything - is nowhere near as simple as what the author was trying to accomplish.

This has a multitude of consequences which I'm not going to fully explore here. Yes, there are definitely cases where a work can be said to be clearly and intentionally promoting hatred. Recently-erected statues to slave owners are abhorrent, and should be removed. But past works of fiction in which characters use denigrating language, or hold ideals which no longer accord with modern values... those I would not tamper with, or at the very most give a warning to the reader.  It's for me the consumer to decide if I think the characters were acting correctly or not. Indeed, I don't want everything to have moral messages I already agree with. I want to be challenged. I want characters doing complex things and making difficult and unpleasant choices. I don't want everything to be created from the same ideological world view as my own.

Inevitably this is a double-edged sword. If I see Darth Vader as a villain, someone themselves suitably villainous will see him as an unfairly oppressed victim. What I get from a work depends at least as much on my own inclinations as it does on the work itself. And there's nothing we can do about this. So while I'm wholeheartedly in favour of throwing Fake News and outright disinformation into the void, I think such a level of information management is fundamentally impossible when it comes to fiction. 

Excited by Amazon's Rings of Power, which so far I'm enjoying very much, I've been re-listening to the audiobook of The Silmarillion. I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow analysis of this, but I do want to mention a few main moral messages that I take away from it, in particular with regards the notion that it's potentially racist. Emphasis again on what I take away from it. What you get might be something different, but no-one can know which is the "right" message, because such a thing simply does not exist.

The whole, "is this racist ?" debacle is a of a bit lowest-common-denominator culture war, and I was tempted not to write this. Still, I do think the whole notion that you can't simply objectively state whether a work meets your moral standards or not is an important one, and I think The Silmarillion provides yet another nice example of this point. But expect a more interesting write-up in the future. 

Now I can see how you might get a racist reading of Tolkien. The darkness of the orcs, their black speech and black blood, the Men of the West against the power that is risen in the East... the fairness of the elves, the power of the Light of Earendil, the majesty of the Numenoreans. Yes, if you want to do the most superficial reading possible, you could come away thinking of it as the product of a freakin' White Supremacist. But this would be, I think, pretty silly : you'd either have to be a white supremacist yourself, or "woke" in the very worst sense of the word, of being the sort of hopelessly-insecure buffoon who wants to have enemies, who insists that anything that doesn't agree perfectly with their own mindset must be the result of the Nazis. At the extremes, you have people lambasting Tolkien for being racist versus those criticising modern retellings for not being racist enough...

With criticism from the usual suspects about the diversity in The Rings of Power in the back of my mind, I have to say my own views on fiction are even more strongly reinforced on this re-listening (I'm about halfway through as I write this). There are many different "races" (actually, species) in Middle Earth, and they do at times come into conflict with each other. But they always, always do better when they cooperate, and always come into severe difficulties when they clash. Nor do any except the orcs seek domination over each other. Indeed, tribes within each race spend far more time arguing with others of their own kind than they do even in communicating with other races, let alone trying to subdue them.

So in terms of how the races interact, I'm hard-put to see anything racist in the modern sense of the word here. Ultimately they're all individuals. Some are wise and some are stupid. Some are lordly and some are petty, even - especially - among the elves. Tolkien may describe them as especially wise but they rarely come across as such, and even the dwarves (who he describes as the most "unlovely") outclass the elves in metalwork. They are definitely different species - they have different physical characteristics - but individualism dominates their personalities.

The nearest thing I've been able to find is that the elves decide that humans should have their own rulers. Separate but equal ? Perhaps, but maybe instead actually a wise choice on the part of the elves : we, with our greater strength and skills and immortality, cannot rule you on your behalf. Or would you want alien invaders to come down and rule us as benevolent overlords ? Remember, we're talking different species here - Tolkien may call them races but they're not really.

And again, cooperation between elves and humans is far more desirable than domination of the one by the other. Framing it through the lens of a choice between conquest and liberty, the decision of the elves to leave the humans alone is a laudable one. If you want to frame it as a choice for the elves to keep themselves apart from the lowly humans, well, I suspect you can. That probably would be a valid reading of the text as well, though I don't think that's how it was intended.

But while there are local political choices, there is no species-wide resentment of the part of the elves that forbid them for intermingling with men. Perhaps it would have been nicer to have societies in which all were merged, but narratively this would be problematic, and ultimately Tolkien doesn't actually say whether this decision for elves and men to remain separate was good or bad. It's just a thing that happened. And we should also remember that some of the great romances are between elves and men, achievements which are celebrated precisely because they defy convention. Love conquers all; racist tendencies are again seen as undesirable. It feels forced indeed to me to say that the inherent racism is in any way promoted; rather the message seems more, "look what we can accomplish when we put our differences aside." Yes, we have natural tendencies to a distrust of anything perceived to be "other", but this is something we can and should strive to overcome. At worst, to me, Tolkien could be said to acknowledge racism, but never to endorse it.

All the main races - elves, men, and dwarves - are highly patriarchal, tribal, and prone to falling for strongmen. For some absolutely unclear reason, they all love kings and the idea of kingship, even though a very great many of their kings are a load of absolute douchebags (especially among the elves ! elven kings are a big bag of dicks). What's the message here ? Hard to say. Tolkien might come across on the surface as pro-monarchy, but that he has so many of the kings leading their people to disaster as a result of petty squabbles speaks otherwise.

And all the races are highly factionalised. Now this does sometimes fall along racial lines. But the "dark elves" and "green elves" aren't especially different from one another. Their is some evidence here and there for differences of skin colour, but Tolkien seems to concentrate much more on hair and eye colour. True, there is discord between the factions, but this is always portrayed in a negative light, something that ought to be avoided, never sought. Depicting racism is not itself an inherently racist act. This is much like criticism of sexual violence : if you think that Game of Thrones actually glorifies this in some way, I worry for you... the violence therein is powerful precisely because it is shocking and abhorrent, not because it's in some sick way titillating. That, I would have a very big problem with indeed.

There are also a lot more female characters than in The Lord of the Rings. They're still significantly fewer in number than the male characters, but every single damn one of them without exception is an extremely strong figure - and they're usually a lot smarter than the menfolk. Yes, their societies are patriarchal, but they do have female leaders : as with kings, it appears to be male-dominated but this ignores a lot of complexity when you look into details.

As to the orcs, yes, they are black : but I would say literally black, not dark brown. Tolkien uses darkness as a metaphor for evil because it shrouds and conceals and deceives. This is the darkness of the haunted forest, of the caves, of the deepest abyss, not the darkness of mere skin. I find it very interesting indeed that Morgoth's primary power is not his military or magical might, but his talent for lies that cloud the hearts of Men and Elves, stoking division among them. That's what the darkness is a metaphor for, and it has nothing much to do with the skin colour of real human beings at all. East versus West ? Yes, but this is happenstance : in the earlier ages it was North versus South, which doesn't really fit with any "clash of civilisations" narrative.

For my part, I am perfectly content with Peter Jackson's movies having an all-white cast. I see no need to alter them. But I'm also equally content with Rings of Power having a diverse cast; indeed, I think this adds something to the richness of Middle Earth. I think it's pretty stupid and self-destructive to totally reject previous art because some small part of it doesn't fit your moral vision of how the world should be; what's done is done. Ultimately, only by confronting past mistakes, not hiding them away, can we learn from them.

Which is why if you want a prime set of contrasting examples of how to do diversity and inclusiveness correctly versus badly, you could do worse than to take Amazon's Rings of Power and the current UK Tory government. But that's another story.