Text & Image Alžbeta Szabová
This article will be on one of my favourite pieces of media of all time: The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien’s writing has been something that has influenced me in unforeseeable ways. I credit it as the reason why I became an avid reader at a young age, managed to learn English despite the awful education system in my home country and why I had decided to spend four years of my life in art school; mostly drawing hundreds, if not thousands of Tolkienesque elves. However, with growing up comes a reassessment of what we held dear as children. I have also spent a significant amount of time reevaluating the stories and worlds which have occupied a big place in my heart for more than a decade. I mention this because I could have easily written an essay about a piece of media which I despise and in which I see no value. Instead, I wanted to talk about something that I hold dear, but see as deeply flawed. I think it is easy to dismiss the fantasy genre when it is outside of someone’s taste, but I believe that - as the late Sir Terry Pratchett said - fantasy is the well from which all literature has sprung, and should not be left uncriticized simply because of its “unserious” aesthetics.
Tolkien is often credited to be the father of the modern fantasy genre, with his stories creating the blueprint of what a fantasy story could be. It is hard to find a fantasy series which is not in some way in conversation with Tolkien’s work, whether it’s copying it, expanding upon it, contrasting or criticising it. Because of this, this article is less about The Lord of the Rings and more about everything which has come after. This article is about racism.
J.R.R. Tolkien was a soldier in the First World War and had become a professor of philology after the fact. Unlike a lot of writers in the post-war period, Tolkien’s work has gone the opposite direction of his existentialist contemporaries. I would say that one of the reasons his stories resonate with people to this day is because they are filled with messages of hope, endurance, perseverance, and treat nihilism as an evil to be overcome in order for a better world to be possible. He wrote a story in which violence, death and destruction are justified for a greater end. War is only worth fighting in, if it is to protect and preserve that which is good in the world. Lord of the Rings is a story with a lot of love in it, a love without a trace of irony. Love for nature, for people, for Tolkien’s wife and also for linguistics. Born from his interest in Germanic languages and Old English, it is a world built around his attempts at creating a language of his own. The work put into his worldbuilding is unreplicable and remarkable, with myths, histories and cultures, all shaping the protagonists in different ways. There is a great depth to his world and his characters, but unfortunately, at the core of it all is a shallow conflict. With a justified war and a definite evil comes a black-and-white story.
Here is the problem: Tolkien has created a world in which race is real. There are superior races, made by the main god-creator of the universe, and the evil, corrupted races made by Melkor (Satan), the main antagonist responsible for almost every conflict of the entire world. This allows for enormous losses of life to happen without any guilt or reflection needed from the “good” side. This aspect of the story is not the interesting part of these books, it is not why people read them and it is not the message that made these series beloved worldwide. Nobody really cares about the humanity (or the lack of it) of the goblins, orcs or the uruk-hai. Nevertheless, there are one-dimensional enemy armies filled with expendable life, which are an inseparable part of what the bones of this world are made of. There are those who are born good, and those who deserve to die by the virtue of existing.
When casting for The Lord of the Rings prequel trilogy The Hobbit a decade ago, there was a controversy after an extra had been turned down for not being ” light-skinned enough” to play a hobbit. The Hobbit is far from the only movie production in recent years to spark a debate about the lack of diversity in Hollywood and the need for positive representation. I think that the reasoning given for having a full-white cast is that “this is how the characters are described in the source material”, is a weak reasoning. I also believe in looking at authors as the products of their time, and that it is unfair to judge Tolkien by our standards. People’s skin colour is often up for interpretation, and changing it has little to no impact on the story, so clinging to a one-line description given by Tolkien seems ridiculous. I do not wish to delve deeper into the diversity debate, however, because I do not think this is where the problem lies. If the entirety of The Lord of the Rings cast was black, it would still be a world in which one’s race determines their character and their value. The problem with this diversity debate is that sometimes we are adapting stories that cannot be fixed by a switch of actors because the story is fundamentally flawed. To see the relevance of this supremacist worldbuilding and why I think it is worth talking about, I want to move away from Tolkien’s work into the fantasy genre, which has often taken his storytelling, reduced it to its aesthetic, and then ran an extra mile with the concept of fantasy races into some truly awful depictions.
There is probably nowhere else where the problems of fantasy races and racism are as obvious as in the most popular table-top RPG Dungeons and Dragons. Before the players can go and play D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) together, they must create their characters. There is a wide range of options a person has in who they can be - they choose their class (Are they a fighter with a big sword or a wizard who loves casting spells?), background (Were they born amongst the aristocracy? Have they spent their life participating in organised crime?) and a lot of other small details. They also choose their race, which amongst other things determines their alignment, which ranges from good to evil and lawful to chaotic. If they are a human, they get to choose how good or evil they want to be. Everyone else, however, has it prescribed for them. It is a fascinating mechanic mostly because it is restrictive in a role-playing game and makes things way less fun if the players follow it. It also makes the world a place where it is people’s biological traits and not culture or society that determine their behaviour. The Player’s Handbook describes elves as a race that “trusts in diplomacy and compromise to resolve differences before they escalate to violence” - except for the dark-skinned dark elves, which are “depraved”, “universally reviled” and evil. There are the yuan-ti snake jungle people, who are “devious” and “devoid of compassion”. The goblins are naturally evil, malicious and delight in torment. They are greedy, obsessed with gold and have big crooked noses. Do not google antisemitic posters from nazi Germany and compare them with goblin depictions. I’m sure there’s nothing problematic about these depictions. You’re reading into it. Most of these “races” were not invented by either Tolkien or Gary Gygax (the creator of D&D), but come from folklore and then have been canonised as fantasy races. This does not absolve or justify them. Surprisingly, people have been prejudiced even before the 20th century.
The Tolkien-inspired elves, dwarves, halflings and goblins are now a staple of the genre, and they keep on being reproduced again and again without a second thought. Usually, the fantasy world also uses them to make a point about real-world racism or discrimination, but in the most ham-fisted simplistic way possible. “Here in the dwarf kingdom we hate the elves and call them “sharp-ear”, which is a slur. This says something about our real world!”
Media with a sci-fi aesthetic is often guilty of this too. Look at all of these humans in the far-off future being prejudiced against the blue alien people. Look how silly it is when they discriminate based on inconsequential physical features. As silly as real-world racism! They have not realised that the blue people are just like them, only blue! It is infantile and shallow, which then also makes criticisms of the actual harmful tropes harder. How could the house-elves in Harry Potter be antisemitic? They’re just little weird guys! Don’t take it so seriously.
With modern fantasy being so deeply rooted in Tolkien’s work, how can one be a fantasy writer and escape from this? A part of me wants to say: come up with something new! If a story is doing nothing else but mindlessly reproducing the same aesthetic, why does it even need to exist? The writings of Robin Hobb or Susana Clarke are spectacular works of modern fantasy, and yet there is not a single elf in them. But I am not necessarily arguing for a world without elves or goblins. It is possible to adopt this world-building and its narratives and then be critical of them.
In his 2011 Discworld novel Snuff, Pratchett asks the question: If these races are sentient, with their own language, society and culture, how righteous is the hero if he slaughters them? What does that tell us about the hero of this story, despite his shining armour and legendary sword? And how can we take this further and actually take the people (or orcs/elves/dwarves/gnomes/fairies/trolls/trains/whatever) in these stories seriously and treat them with dignity? The Discworld series is not without its flaws, but it manages to address the problems I have talked about, and then some, while also being light, fun, and silly, just like a lot of the genre is. There is no other sin except for treating people as things, Pratchett had said. I wish more fantasy writers would see the world in this way.
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