With the U.S. premiere of “Lord of the Rings” only days away, the muddleheaded and muckspouts are crawling out from under the rocks like an army of spittle-spewing orcs, throwing criticisms and slander more fiercely than evil lord Sauron himself.
One calumny that takes the adjective “asinine” to new heights of absurdity is that J.R.R Tolkien’s timeworn classic is, at bottom, little more than bigot fodder.
“The appeal of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ is fundamentally racist,” writes Chris Henning in the Dec. 13 Sydney Morning Herald. “Middle Earth is inhabited by races of creature deeply marked off from one another by language, physical appearance, and behavior. It is almost a parody of a Hitlerian vision: orcs are ugly, disgusting, brutal, violent – without exception; elves are a beautiful, lordly, cultured elite; in between are hobbits, short, hairy, ordinary, a bit limited, but lovable and loyal and brave when they have to be.”
When did crack become a breakfast staple in Australia? Perhaps this guy’s Vegemite turned on him.
Harry Potter is a tool of the devil and Frodo is a separatist. What’s next? “The Princess Bride” is too harsh toward Sicilians and Aslan growls too much?
Henning taps this racist idea from a spigot of pure causal stupidity. “Tolkien’s entrancing vision has long been extraordinarily popular, not least with the far Right,” says Henning, thinking to bolster his argument. “If you have doubts, call up a few white supremacist sites on the Web. Tolkien is recommended reading for families hoping to bring up their children in a wholesome, racialist atmosphere.”
Yeah, and don’t forget that the Unabomber owned a copy of Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance.” Does that mean Al wants to blow up forestry lobbyists and other enemies of the green? Give me a break. Authors cannot be held responsible for how readers may twist their words, any more than Ford is liable when a drunk driver runs over your grandmother in a Mustang.
To tar Tolkien with this brush is to read into “Lord of the Rings” things Tolkien never would have dreamed modern witch hunters would or even could. After the publication of the novels comprising “Rings,” Tolkien had to fend off critics attempting to cast the story in terms of the Nazi rise and World War II (notice here, quickly, that if that view were correct, then the story would be anti-racist, not the reverse – funny how 50 years can twist a critic’s view 180 degrees).
Tolkien was adamant that his world, Middle Earth, was a mythic creation with its own distinctives, history and laws. Said “Rings” director Peter Jackson, “Tolkien himself was horrified at modern analogies being placed on his work. … He was working in a mythic realm of storytelling, and I think to apply modern political thinking on a story that is essentially 50 years old is a little bit inappropriate. …”
Just as Harry Potter critics attempt to slam the “sorcery” therein by ignoring that J.K. Rowling’s magic is bound by rules created in the “counterfactual history” of her fictional world and is not supposed to have anything to do with the real world, so Tolkien attackers try to apply rules of this world and its racialist fetishes to Tolkien’s imaginary world.
But Henning objects by saying that because Tolkien’s world is packed with cookie-cutter people, it reflects a racist view. “Individuals within races don’t vary from the pattern,” he says. “To know one is to know all. The races are either dangerous or they are benign. An orc – any orc – is without question an enemy. A hobbit would never side with an orc.”
It’s not a stretch to say that Henning is thinking with his armpit – or maybe reading with it. Tolkien never uses his “races” to show unmitigated, unmixed evil or good. One Middle Earth expert at GreenBooks.com addresses this issue pointblank and shows how truly one-dimensional the racialist view is:
[T]o fans of LOTR, the most sensitive issue is how Sauron, the hated Enemy, had such sway over the Easterlings, Wainriders, and Haradrim. Why were all these ethnic people under the control of the Dark Lord? Why are the white people portrayed as noble and heroic while the blacks are a misguided lot underneath Sauron? Well, it’s not that one-sided. Nothing ever is.
In truth, Men had been corrupted by Sauron’s guile for thousands of years, white- and dark-skinned alike. Everybody is an open target for Evil. Just look what happened to the N?menoreans. Even the Elves of Eregion listened to Sauron (while in pleasant form) and forged the Rings of Power. There are tremendous examples of Sauron bringing moral weakness and destruction to many races. Tolkien never suggests that only the black Southrons were prone to evil.
In fact, as Peter Jackson recounts, in one scene the reader is presented with one of the Haradrim (bad guys) falling dead at the feet of Sam (good guy). Instead of spitting on the corpse and saying, “Dirty, black bastard,” he says in Jackson’s paraphrase, “I wonder where he came from, I wonder if he really wanted to come and fight here, I wonder whether he would have rather stayed at home in peace.” Says Jackson, “[T]here’s nothing racist about that, it’s humanity. And so I think this is a story where its mythic qualities and its humanity shines through beyond any political beliefs that could be assigned to it.”
And let’s not forget the author himself. Attacking any perceived cues to racism like flesh-frenzied sharks lunging at a fisher’s horsemeat-baited traps, these racialist critics tend to skip any sort of fact-checking beyond their clouded first-reactions. If they had looked a tad further than their upturned noses, they might have stumbled across the fact that Tolkien was adamantly opposed to Nazism’s racist dogmas.
And to show that his objection was no mere low-cost, “I don’t really think that Jews are all that bad” sort of anti-racism talked in casual pub blather between puffs on his pipe, Tolkien went to the mat for his views. Jeopardizing the German edition of “The Hobbit” in 1938, Tolkien refused to provide proof to the Hun publisher that in his veins coursed no Jewish blood, as explained in a letter he wrote to his British publisher, Stanley Unwin:
Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Best?tigung [“confirmation”] … and let a German translation go hang. … I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.
Hang Hitler. Heil Tolkien!
There are some people in this world that want to see bigots behind every shrub, racists and pillowcase-headed goons hiding under every porch. Lacking enough genuine burning crosses, however, they have to imagine, fabricate and fantasize the flaming edifices instead. Back in the day, Freudians had their own clever twists on Hobbit Bilbo Baggins’ name and residence (an interestingly warm and womb-like place, they argued), and we should be just as quick to scuttle this racist claptrap as quick as the views of Oedipus-giddy psychoanalysts.
“Lord of the Rings” is not a fictionalized “Mein Kampf.” It’s a great tale, written by a man with a scope of storytelling far broader than Henning’s wild-goose hunt for racist bugaboos.
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The devils are here
Ben Shapiro