Is Lord of the Rings Racist?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.ย. 2024
- A discussion of how Lord of the Rings ended up like this. | Buy Symphony of the Sojourn: www.amazon.com...
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Sources:
Branston, B. (1957). The Lost Gods of England. London: Thames and Hudson.
Chance, J. (1979). Tolkien’s Art: A ‘Mythology for England’. London & Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.
Hardman, G. trans. (2011). The Saga of Sorli the Strong. The Complete Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda. Available online at: www.germanicmy... [last accessed 08/04/2024].
Humphrey, C. (1977). Tolkien: a biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Shipley, T. (1982). The Road to Middle-Earth. Allen & Unwin.
Shippey, T. (2004). "Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel". In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
St Clair, G. (1996). "An Overview Of the Northern Influences on Tolkien's Works". Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, v. 21, no. 2, Article 13.
Stuart, R. (2022). Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth. Palgrave Macmillan.
Tolkien, J. (1932, 1934). "Sigelwara Land". Medium Aevum, v.1 no.3 & v.3 no.2.
See also:
Sinex, M. (2010). "Monsterized Saracens," Tolkien's Haradrim, and Other Medieval "Fantasy Products". Tolkien Studies, v. 7, no. 1, p 175-196.
Written and created by K Klein
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Omg is it an epistolary novel?
@@beckyginger3432 Certainly part of it is! If you’ve read Hyperion by Dan Simmons, it borrows some framing ideas from it. One of the characters’ stories is a series of journal entries. I hope you give it a shot!
Never knew that videos could be sponsored by books
TIL
This is interesting
I actually didnt skip this sponsor, unlike nearly all others, which should tell you a lot
Not a big reader, but this still interested me more than some random ass company / service ever could
@@Xnoob545 That means a lot that you didn’t skip it! I really hope you give it a shot.
while the worldbuilding itself is undeniably inspired by england and norse mythology, i always got the impression that the actual storytelling in lotr was heavily influenced by tolkiens experiences as a ww1 soldier. you can see it in the way sauron, the ultimate bad guy in the story, doesnt even show up at any point, the heroes never ever see him just like how ww1 never actually got to see the ultimate bad guy leading the enemy nation. likewise, while the heros do get to see the enemy army up close, they only get to see them as this massive wave of evil soldiers, they cant know them as individuals, they cant make friends with them, they cant think of them as anything other than an massive wave of evil soldiers. only sometimes will they allow themselves to look at a fallen soldier and wonder what the mans name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather stayed there in peace.
thank you for making this btw, loved the video!!!
I feel that the opposite is the case. Tolkien was absolutely uninterested in a modern world, even his descriptions of war are probably taken from the descriptions of ancient battles like Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.
His strict dualism of good and evil also perfectly reflect his Catholic worldview, I would go as far as to say that Gollum is a parody of a more psychologically driven literature, because in Tolkien's opinion humans are not that complicated.
I'd argue that while the world wars had no influence on lotr's plot, it definitely had one on the depiction of war itself. This is especially flagrant in The Fall of Gondolin, where industrialized war is shown as a force much more destructive and uncaring to the older ways.
@@daniel5730 Tolkien (like many of the Inklings) was explicitly and less explicitly very influenced by G. K. Chesterton, an older English Catholic writer, who was primarily a journalist. He was not disinterested in the Modern world, he was critical of modernity per se - and especially _Modernism_ - in the same way as Chesterton. Just because Tolkien asserts elements of myth and history in his storytelling doesn't create some binary where he can have nothing to do with the Modern world. It's true, his battles are very well-grounded in Classical and Medieval warfare- but look at Grond, which much more resembles the kind of Modern, industrialized, specialized weapon that appeared in WWI. I cannot emphasize enough that if you read Chesterton, you will see the discourse about Modernism versus what he might call "common sense" inherent to Tolkien's novels. Hell, Tolkien said that "Chestertonian fantasy" was a "means of recovery" to heal the _modern_ world. He was thinking about now!
And Catholicism, as Chesterton would say explicitly and Tolkien clearly agreed with, is not dualist. Tolkien's world isn't dualist, that interpretation comes from people imposing assumptions onto it because of their unfamiliarity with Tolkien's beliefs and influences. In Arda, as in Catholicism, evil is the privation of the good with no independent being or substance, a twisting of the natural order which is in some sense allowed to happen by the highest good. We _see_ complicated, "morally-grey" characters all throughout Tolkien's work, because - as a Catholic writer who consciously revised his work to emphasize his Catholicism - Tolkien's mortals "participate in creaturely free will" (to greater and lesser degrees), they are not categorically good nor evil.
@@Eronoc13
Let me elaborate, when I wrote that Tolkien was uninterested in modern world I've meant that he wasn't looking to explore it in his works as anything positive or remarkable. He is clearly critical of it - Sauron's force is clearly industrial and there's a whole chapter dedicated to forced industrialization of Shire, through little dialogue we have from orcs we understand that they know about moral laws but aren't following them since they are corrupted.
But I will remain convicted that despite being devote Catholic, Tolkien made Middle Earth much more pagan in spirit, than it is usually thought - all his positive heroes are descendants of noble bloodlines and their appearance always mirrors their inner nobility and power, something that doesn't jive with equalizing morals of Christianity.
And secondly - I still think that the world of Middle Earth is dualistic and that Tolkien wasn't interested in "Morally Grey Characters". It is clear that he valued devotion to duty and confidence in reality of good and evil. Compare the death of two kings - Theoden and Denethor; one overcame his slumber and died in a battle confident and content with his demise, while another gloated in his doubts until he was driven to madness. I think characters like Gollum and Denethor paint us a good picture of what Tolkien thought of morally grey characters.
And lastly - this is where I differ from the author of this channel. While I don't agree with Tolkien politically, I think his insistence on keeping his work anachronistic and maybe even anti-modern in spirit. While I can't say that I don't enjoy Ursula Le Guinn's writing, I found that fantasy that comes from "unproblematic" authors is always enlightenment wearing a fantasy outfit, her stories with fantasy elements could be told in any other setting, but when it comes to Middle Earth the form is crucial to the substance. And overall - it feels much more authentic.
@@daniel5730I'm pretty sure moral naivity isn't tied to any religion in particular. Also you're going quite wild with that gollum theory of yours, it's going to take a bit more then this to make it convincing
Edit: while I think that it's rather obvious that Tolkien was indeed willing to explore and discuss the modern times I agree he viewed them negatively. I remember being quite amused when I realised that while all characters talked in that peculiar pompous manner, the orcs spoke very much normally. But that is just a cherry on top, the more telling examples have already been listed in the main comment
I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don’t care what they tell you in school, Frodo was black.
This shit is one year old, everyone who still makes these jokes is definitely a closet racist
I... I´ll need you to walk me through this epic thing whatever it is
@@zeecaptain42"Oh my science my epic blackerinos ÖÖÖ"
The thing you're referencing is 1 year old now. I'm convinced everyone who still makes this "joke" is a closeted bigot at this point
I think it's okay even if Frodo is white.
Sam's compassion isn't 'modern', it's timeless.
sure, compassion is timeless, but Sam's existence as a compassionate character is really a product of the time of the novel. Odin never stops and thinks about the perspective of the jotuns, for instance.
One could say that the Hobbits have a "more modern" outlook than most people in Middle Earth, having been raised in comfort and rarely struggling, much like many of the people who espoused modern ideals at the time of Tolkien. I wouldn't include the Men of the West as "modern" people, as their values are extremely different from the Hobbits, more prone to resort to violence and dehumanization of the enemy.
We know little of elves, and distant lords of heaven - our gods are of war, and of famine, Gondorkin, and it is from the north and west it comes. - ‘The times of Eldarion’, A Ring of Far Harad. Probably.
@@kklein He did have sexual relations with them.
Plus, the Aesir and the Jötunn often get along. It is just some specific Jötunns which are dangerous (but not necessarily intentionally malevolent 😈).
@@kklein Why is the existence of a character embodying a timeless, universal, human concept somehow tied to our time when such descriptions and characters can be found most anywhere
I'm a little disappointed that this video essay doesn't mention the commentary in the books about how the orcs of Mordor loath their lord Sauron, nor of the conflicts between the orcs, which are described in the books.
because the orcs aren't the focus of the video?
@@MCArt25 Everything I just said pertains to the topic of the video essay you just watched, showing that Tolkien does *not* consider the orcs to be an evil monolith, contrary to what this video says.
This video does not mention orcs once.
You claim that orcs are the focus of the video and that this video says "orcs are an evil monolith" but like... literally what the fuck are you talking about?
This video is about the Haradrim. The Haradrim are humans, not orcs.
@@Ruminations09 You must be trolling. I never said the video focuses on orcs, though it does mention them multiple times.
@@MarshallTheArtist No, it literally doesn't mention orcs once. The transcript of the video is in the description. Press CTRL+F and type Orc, and you'll notice exactly zero results.
8:30 This bit about how we would interpret the same words differently as written by Tolkien vs some ancient Anglo-Saxon reminds me of Borges' short story of Don Quijote being rewritten word for word by a modern Frenchman and how that results in an entirely different work
Who rewrote it?
@xCorvus7x It was a fictional story by (real author) Jorge Luis Borges, about a (fictional) French author named Pierre Menard who rewrote Don Quijote. I believe the story by Borges is called "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quijote" or something similar.
@@stilltoomanyhats Ah, okay, thank you.
Yes! I love Borges
I would like to point out, not to dismiss your point but to add to it another perspective, that Tolkien also borrowed a lot from Finnish mythology and language (everyone knows the Evlish language borrowed a lot from Finnish, and Gandalf for instance has clear parables to Väinämöinen), but when Tolkien wrote his books, Finns were seen as "oriental", and a common slur for Finnish people was "China Swedes" up until the early 1940s. So although one of the antagonist groups got their influence from asiatic people, there are "asiatic" (as seen at the time) influences on "the good" side as well. I think this gives more credence to the idea that Tolkien wasn't personally racist, though that doesn't mean that his work couldn't be, and his work has been used to push racist ideas (though this in itself doesn't mean that a work is racist, racist are idiots and don't necessarily understand the works they are co-opting).
Is there any reason why Findland was seen as oriental? In my mind Finland is Nordic and thus very much European. Were there specific cultural similarities between Finland and "the East"?
@@Jack93885 Why Finns were seen as non-white? Racism has never been about anything concrete, and like with Italians and Irish people, determining who is white revolves mostly around who are seen as problematic and "lesser people". Finns were seen so in all over the world. In US it was because of the assosiation with labor union and striking and friendlyness with American Indians. In Sweden it was because of many things, including the worse social status of Finns in Sweden and Swedish ideals for race purity.
Why oriental specifically? Finns share some similarities in facial structures with other Asian groups with things like narrower eyes from Finnish ansestry being a mix of germanic and uralic peoples. Another insult was "mongoloid" because of this (also used for idiots in general and for people with Down syndrome specifically). You can read more on this on Wikipedia: "Anti-Finnish sentiment"
@@The.RaxingThe Sami people and the language being Ugric makes for this perception on the Finnish.
@@nathaniel3323 And also, the words "Finn", "Finnish" and "Finland" as applied to a group of people were at one point racist slurs referring to the Sámi peoples (who were definitely seen as "other" from a Nordic perspective) and their lands rather than to the more predominantly Baltic people they reference today.
"The land of mostly people who are more or less like us but also some different people" doesn't catch on as easily as "the land of the different people".
@@IaCthulhuFthagn Please site a source for that claim, cant find any result for the word Finn as a slur anywhere. Also Finnish people are quite separate from the Sámi people.
At least for me I've always found it important to look at the intent of someones work. When you read the passage in a modern context, sure it *can* be read as racist simply due to the skin colour but you have to ask if that is the intent to Tolkien writing it.
My first thought that comes to mind are svartalfr from norse mythology, literally called black elves and are almost categorically evil in all appearances yet most people can agree that its probably not born from a racist intent but rather a way for a skald or poet to inject some mystery and otherness in their story.
Another important note is the perspective the book is written in which is that of the men of the west. In universe they would lack sufficient knowledge of the haaradrim (or how its spelt sorry) to have more than a almost mythical image of them. I dont think the men of the east are ment as a literal people of pitch black skin etc as we see pther characters with ambiguous skin colour in the west (Aragorn being a prime example), but rather as a skewed retelling similar to the romans describing the brittons as "slow people who live in lakes of mud".
Sorry rant over
Haradrims are basically the Arabs or berbers of northern Africa with the more darker skinned ones being the sub-saharan people of central africa
Do you not think there is some racism in using black skin to inject mystery and otherness?
@@lowcostfish not inherently no. It could be read as racist but I dont think that such a inclusion has to be intended as racist by default.
What I'm trying to say is that it could be interpreted as racist but I dont think that Tolkien had a racist intent when writing it. Dark and light being representative of good and evil has been a literary staple for literal centuries and I think it's only perceived as a racist dynamic when viewed through modern thinking (once again svart alfs being a prime example).
Unintentional bigotry is a thing; internalized bigotry is a thing. I'm not saying that's necessarily Tolkien's case, but ones' intentions are, at most, helpful in contextualizing, but not a silver bullet that dispels all analysis.
@@ivanfloresvazquez7490 yeah thats fair, "the path to tragedy is lined with good intentions" and all that. But I feel like intent is still the main lens one should look through when it comes to things like this.
Its kinda like how women are portrayed in Tolkiens works; pretty poorly. But he was still more "radical" when compared to his peers at the time so despite the things he wrote being very backwards from our point of view, for his time its pretty darn good so calling him a "sexist author" by todays standards would not be fair.
A video with a sponsor that isn't just a random thing with no connection to the video; a video with an actual fitting sponsor?
Thanks! I really do value that K Klein was willing to take a sponsorship from me as an independent author; it’s something that I hope isn’t just unique to this channel.
@@rowanalexandriabennett honestly, writer to writer, putting ads for your book in TH-cam videos is v smart !! I hadn’t ever thought of that (tho I’m a screenwriter and songwriter so it’s not as cut and dry as books go). catching your intended audience where they usually prowl lol
@@rowanalexandriabennett At least I have never seen anything like that sponsorship before. And it certainly worked in my case: I'll remember your book. Maybe I'll pick it up after I'm done with my current read (One Hundred Years of Solitude).
@@kivadacosta Haha that's the idea! Hope you give it a shot. Any works of yours that I could check out? Shameless plugs encouraged!
@@lonestarr1490 Oh dear; I really dread being the book you READ after one of my favorites. But I'm glad to hear it, nonetheless!
IIRC there was a mention of the fact that Easterlings and Haradrim did not exactly *chose* the dark side. They were taken by force by leaders who were corrupted and given power by Sauron. I mean, two of the Mages (the unnamed blue ones) just fucking disappeared after they went to the East, so darkness must be kinda rampant in those places and since we know that ALL humans are good by nature we could assume that shit went south in the South and East.
I may or may not be pulling this out of my ass tho because for the love of God I can't remember where I heard that and was it even canon at all
i THINK this comes from a series of letters Tolkien wrote about the Blue Wizards after the publishing of LotR
@@kklein maybe? I feel really bad that I can't remember where I seen it.
Point being, even disregarding that, in the grand scheme of things, all of humans, heck, all of the world is inherently good in Tolkien's work. At the very least redeemable. Which Sam's line is pointing out, I think. It doesn't make those depiction non-racist but at least makes them bit more palatable, in my humble opinion.
Its maybe too "modern" as you said, but that way of thinking ("Yes, those people look ugly and fight on enemies' side, but they are still humans, therefore they are inherently good") is perfectly in-line with Tolkien's own beliefs. For a brief moment Sam became a vessel of an author. This line made me think for a good week when I first read the books back in the middle school and may or may not changed my world view entirely. Its beautiful. However, as you said, it definitely can be seen as a bit out of place.
Also, can we talk about orcs for a second? I think that the most problematic part of the Legendarium is them, not Harad or East, since, you know, those are still humans and therefore redeemable by definition, but orcs are just kinda... Evil. As far as I know, Tolkien himself had a huge back and forth with the question of "Who exactly are orcs and are they redeemable?" since he was devoted christian and believed that everyone can be redeemed but orcs aren't humans therefore should they be redeemable? If yes, then why we see exactly 0 "good" orcs? I mean, "Men of the East" at least got one humanizing line, while orcs are always bad without exception and THAT I find racist
@@VasiliyOgniovI think that's because what Orcs were to Tolkien, they were the people he fought against during world war 1, wielding machines and poisons, the same ones that caused him to be taken from his ideal pastoralism to a land destroyed by technology and war, if nothing else the trenches decorating the country side, not to even claim they were Germans. I think this is why they aren't humans in narative, why they wield the name of Orco, a destruktive Ogre from Italian folklore, ultimately deriving from Orcus, the god of the underworld and why they hold an italian name instead of the Germanic, he was drawing from.
As for the appearance issue, the "mongoloid" description he has in the book also has a basis in WW1, where the Germans were refered to as Huns, a mongol culture. Then again Tolkien was also the man of his time and he can't escape that.
Isn't this basically how reasonable people deal with these issues today? It's not the people, it's the political environment?
@@VasiliyOgniov I think the idea of orcs as inherrently evil is better understood through the lens of spiritual warfare, rather than race.
You mention his Christian (moreover, Catholic) faith and I think it's relevant here. That there are legions doing the work of corrupted/fallen beings, set against all that is good and holy, is a key idea in Catholicism. If Tolkein ever attended a Low Mass he would likely have recited the prayer to St. Michael as it was recited after such masses throughout near the entirity of his life. It finishes,
"by the power of God thrust Satan down to hell
and with him those other wicked spirits
who wander through the world for the ruin of souls."
These beings that in the Catholic faith are considered to be of a spiritual/(primarily) internal nature are represented in a more physical form in Arda. If you consider Melkor as an analogue of Satan then it is clear how his creations, the orcs, trolls, and dragons are ontoligically evil while the men and elves, known as the Children of Ilúvatar, are ontoligcally good. Eru giving blessing to the creation of the dwarves would also set them in the good camp too.
While I appreciate the intention, I find the idea of applying the lense of race to analyse a myth of ontological good and evil rather problematic in itself.
My only problem is that the idea of empathy is treated as modernistic. You can find all sorts of examples throughout history of people voicing sympaties for other peoples, even if it wasn't in the way we do now. Sam's thoughts are completely realistic for the time and culture he grew up in.
It’s honestly the same fallacy that gives way to moral relativism and saying “a product of their time” in defense against prejudices and violence like slavery and based on race, sexuality, gender, etc. While it’s a valid reason for someone doing what they do because others are doing it, that doesn’t make their actions any less objectively harmful and unempathetic. The victims of that society were opposed to it and so were others who were empathetic but couldn’t have a platform to say what they wanted to say. It’s “might makes right”, might in numbers.
The line about orcs looking like the "least-lovely mongol-types" doesn't really help either
To be fair, the full quote is
" They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types"
I feel like that is 1). Admiting it's an odd way to describe and that it's an exageration of the look 2) I've seen people say that that sounds like the propaganda cartoons they made. Seeing some of them... they look like goblins. And, in the books, orcs and goblins are the same thing
Interestingly, after the war in Ukraine started, Ukranians started to call Russians "orks" (орки). I wonder if this can be called racist
@felixgroove4016
Oh yeah, it’s racist given that the Ukrainians are overrun with Nazism, and actively pursue Nazi policies of dehumanization and extermination against their national minorities and beyond just their Russians, and have a stated goal of killing all Russians everywhere in the world.
Go back to prior 100 years. It’s basically the same as the Hun Panic complete with “stop this brute” ape imagery of the Germans during the First World War.
Both campaigns relied upon mostly exaggeration of a limited number of actual crimes, and a certain number of fictional hysterias to create an image of an inhuman, alien, rampaging monster army.
I was wounded out of the war, a long time ago, and the orc label did bother me at first, but I’ve since learned to adopted affectionally, especially for the strong and martial connotations.
@@felixgroove4016dehumanizing? Ye that sounds racist
Not justifying it, but it is quite likely that it stems form WW1, where the Germans were refered to as Huns, who were a mongolic group. It could be a metafor we're too detached form to inherently know.
Just commenting on Sam’s line, what I always took away from the stories were that the big battles etc were based around big myths with a simple lens that represents the old mythology from one point of view. But Sam and Frodo are the non myths that aren’t simple, and eventually forgotten by the myths so they are more real. But 🤷🏻♂️
Way I saw it was that the Haradrim are seen from the perspective of the men of the northern areas. They are deemed evil and dark because they side with Sauron, but this doesn't mean they actually ARE evil. They are, much as you said in the video, seen through the sort of eyes an Anglo-Saxon would have looked through when thinking of Africa, or China. Strange, unknowable, foreign and usually subversive. This, however, does not make this view true, and indeed, to my mind at least, the scene with Sam, where he looks on the body of the dead Harad man, proved as much. In that scene, we are struck by the realization that these are men, human beings just like us, and that they have been brought here, likely coerced in some fashion, or tricked, into servitude. We do not know whether the Haradrim hate their master, whether they rebel against him, and while I think a Haradrim character would have been awesome, we do not get this in the story since, as you stated, it ultimately has nothing to do with the story as a whole. It could just be me, and my reading of the book, but to me, Tolkien proved himself not to be a racist by that beautiful scene. That he even took the time to write it, to make the reader feel for what could have easily been left a faceless evil thrall, to me speaks volumes.
I will premise this, though, with the statement that Tolkien's world was different from our own, and he was a product of that world, and thus, even if he had not intended any hateful message, it is possible that he was influenced by the prevailing views of the time. I am not trying to say that Tolkien, as much as I love his works, was a perfect man, indeed no human ever can be, but I honestly do not agree with views of him being racist.
Rhey were once colonized by Numenorians who extracted resources. Too bad most people don't read the appendix or books like the silmarillion because of oversimplification
This is something I really wish the Rings of Power show had the actual creativity to explore. Maybe the men of Harad Are just tricked or coerced into Sauron's service/alliance, or maybe they have some real legitimate grievances with the Gondorians and their Numenorian ancestors (who did colonize all over the world and did, thru the later 2nd Age, become ruthless imperialists). Perhaps the people of Harad would even be offended that the Gondorians assume they're misled or tricked into siding with the strongman who promises them revenge against those proud men of the West who lorded over them before (even if Sauron would, sooner or later, prove a nastier master). That's the kind of racism I feel in Tolkien's writing: not a personal, virulent mouth-foaming hatred, but more of a disinterested, early 20th c. English attitude that, for instance, takes the existence of the British Empire as a baseline good, that doesn't think much about or interrogate what life is like for the people who aren't English under that system (sorta like Churchill's outlook in his writings on Empire and history).
@@johnstajduhar9617 it is stated explicitly that the numenorians just extracted resources without care, so it's implied why
Even knowing that Lovecraft was in fact racist even by the standards of his time (though he often wrote characters to be even more racist than himself, which is wacky, and conversely sometimes revealed through his writing a reverence for Asian culture and ethnicities, whether through "sloe-eyed" goddess of beauty Nathicana or the "exotic yet familiar" surroundings in the Crawling Chaos), this is how I prefer to read his works, too- Not as revealing the real author's obscene bigotry, but as reflecting the stodgy white New England attitudes of the characters, which works well with the irony that those characters often turn out to have "bad blood" in the form of ancestors who were cannibals, evil sorcerers, devil worshipers or fish.
@@johnstajduhar9617 I'm pretty sure that it's mentioned somewhere that Haradrim joined Sauron exactly because Gondorians had oppressed them in the past to the point that Sauron seemed the better option, and also that a good number of them still rejected Sauron and instead joined with the Blue Wizards (but obviously those are not the ones Sauron would send to invade middle earth, so they are not the ones that show up in LotR).
There seem to be a lot of people who end up at one of two extremes:
On the one hand, there are those who focus solely on their immediate experience as readers, so much so that they don't really seem to think of fictional characters and events as fictional constructs at all. "The Haradrim could have had civil wars," is a perfectly natural thought to have as you read, but those types of hypotheticals can't form the basis of an interpretation that's meaningful to anyone else but yourself, and so they are quite useless in discussions with others. To those who _only_ read stories like this, and never move on to a more distanced approach, it might not be very easy to see stories as part of the culture they're in. They're self-contained things, and that's it. But a literary work will always be part of a larger context, in several ways; it literally can't _not_ be.
On the other hand, there are those who contextualize stories not only to view a particular work in the context of its past or present culture, but also to label it as e.g. "dangerous," "decadent," categorically "problematic," etc. -- perhaps to promote the idea that literary works should be _in service of_ society somehow. This takes many forms, but all have in common a general failure to think of art as art, in favor of some more instrumental approach.
I think it's important to be aware of how you tend to read stories and then find a more constructive balance between different ways to approach them. It's crucial to acknowledge that even seemingly contradictory ideas and analyses can all be true or valid at once.
As Tolkien did call Sam the true hero in some letter, I think that one line is meant to imply that the rest of the portrayal of the Haradrim is wrong.
Sam is the purest of all characters, no hint of evil. So Sam thinking that the Haradrim might not be inherently evil is supposed to be seen as correct, while the further portrayal is not. Tolkien spoke out against Apartheid, against racists using his book and against Antisemitism. I would not say he was racist. Especially not as racist as some of his contemporaries (HP Lovecraft comes to mind).
He wrote it how the old myths were. But he still had to show that he did not fully agree with that portrayal, so he wrote in that line.
And the Blue Wizards in the east helping the Easterlings fight against Sauron is supposed to show that they aren't evil either. (Though that does create uncomfortable missionary parallels, as the wizards were essentially angels, so them converting the Easterlings is a bit icky)
Evil can't create, it only corrupts.
7:11 elephants are mentioned in the Old English poems.
Are they? I'd be interested to see an example of that.
@@ashwinnmyburgh9364 There is the poem "Wonders of the East", which talks about dragons and phoenixes, too.
Any time someone mentions elephants, all I can think of is Hannibal reaching Rome
and telling the troops "Actually, lets just go home, guys" LOL
Something of note is that Tolkien himself believed that the Blue Wizards might have helped out in the Eastern Lands and prevented the “dark” people from all falling to Sauron’s influence. In fact without their help there might have been a ton more Easterlings and Southerners the main characters would’ve had to contend with and their win likely wouldn’t have been possible.
Anyways this does imply he saw them as real people and redeemable. His entire viewpoint actually was that everyone was redeemable and it’s one of the reasons why he grappled so much with the origins of the Orcs, I don’t think he believed anything in the Legendarium was truly 100% evil or irredeemable. It’s for these reasons I don’t think Tolkien intended for it to be racist to be honest and I think even as you put, it’s quite a bit more complicated than black = bad = racism.
Interestingly, that version of the Blue Wizards is from later writings and musings iirc. The earlier versions had the Blue wizards falling like Saruman and becoming evil. His reevaluation of the Blue Wizards seems to occur alongside his reevaluation of the Orcs, and whether they are true Evil or perverted Good, and he never answered that definitively.
2:14 That analysis doesn't work because it's inaccurate and too reductive.
Aside from the struggle to be good being more fleshed out in the story than you give it credit here, The Lord of the Rings is not a story of fair, valiant, imposing men proving themselves as heroes but of those living in the shadow of such figures, common folk who happen to be tasked with a mission that asks of them not to be honourful warriors but perseverance. Their most important virtue is to endure and not give up, not to gather mythic armies and slay the evil hordes.
We cannot see the perspective of the foreign peoples because the story starts with and is about people who have barely ever heard of such peoples existing.
This insight isn't missing either because the story is not about finding brotherhood across nation lines but the divine challenge the protagonists face.
I always interpreted the people of Harad as more an analogue to Arab people than black people but I don't think that fundamentally changes much.
They seem like North African/Carthaginian references if anything, given his mythological bent and how he roughly maps Middle Earth onto Real Earth (by design).
@@johnstajduhar9617 ah so still a semitic people then
Perhaps more than one group, allied under a temporary banner. These sorts of things happened a lot.
The fact rhat Tolkien might be racist and in other ways conservative like that is something that i got the feeling for while reading the Silmarillion. After the first coming of Man upon Beleriand, in the first fight between elves, men and Morgoth (the big bad) it's only the Easterlings among the Men that betray the others and fight on the side of Morgoth (though not all Easterlings do) and the Easterlings are explicitly described as dark/yellow skinned.
There's that, and there's also the fact that in the Silmarillion basically all of the characters are either nobility or directly related to nobility. There's no hero that isn't from a regal bloodline, or at the very least the chief of its people.
In general, Tolkien is well understood as being influenced both by his Catholicism and by old literature but.. he was also a monarchist. A monarchist but also an anarchist oddly enough. He liked escapism. He wanted his universe to be comforting. What he wrote, his simplistic morality between the Vala and Morgoth, it's something that made sense to him. His writings about noble races and bloodlines against the corrupting influence of evil, that's just what he believed in. If he has a more grounded story in LotR instead of the Silmarillion, it might be because the Silmarillion was inspired by older texts but... It could also be that LotR was where he felt he needed to meet the public halfway, where he needed to compromise. He didn't in the Silmarillion, he never even published it.
Seems more like the standard pop-USA-🦅-brand cultural supremacism. (Despite Tolkien being English.)
"Everyone has to conform to my way of thinking or they are evil 😈 and must be purged or forcibly indoctrinated. If they completely abandon their culture and accept mine, I will think of them as good, so I can't be racist."
@@katethegoat7507 "A monarchist but also an anarchist oddly enough" Can you talk more about that? Those are pretty diametrically opposed, it's like being a vegan game hunter
@@GavinBisesi honestly I can't because I haven't understood it myself either. Iirc he just said it himself. If I'd have to guess I'd say that it might have something to do with him disliking the idea of states. He didn't like how people associate themselves with abstract countries instead of being loyal to a specific person
@@GavinBisesi From what I understand, he wanted government to function very much like how it does in the good days of Numenor/Gondor. In other words, a "great man" kind leads mostly through example of upright moral character and by charismatic obligation, but without government really being involved with people's day-to-day.
In other words, you give your king a tithe because it is the right thing to do and see that he will use it to protect the kingdom, without there being tax collectors to force you to. You have a beautiful, stylistically consistent home with your community because it is right for the neighborhood, not because of a permitting board. You follow your King to war because he has made a speech explaining the battle's absolute necessity.
It's a completely fantastical political position, and I don't think Tolkien thought it would really work, but it is a comforting dream.
Tell me why I read the thumbnail to the tune of Uptown Funk
Because it’s vastly superior
An English man born un 1892 might have a problematic view of people from Africa and Asia. 🤯. I kid, but of course this is how would right about these people, but the fact he included such a line shows that he even knows his views are problematic.
Ok fair warning, REALLY long comment coming up! See, I love Tolkien's work dearly, but have often struggled with let's say, our differnt political and ideological views. Now, let's start:
-It is downright silly to expect an Englishman born and raised in colonial South Africa , and deeply indoctinated in christianity, to conform to 2024 standards of political correctness and sensibilities
-Tolkien often makes a point about "clean bloodlines" eg Aragorn's impeccable pedigree, but, at the same time, in the Gondor civil war I think his sympathies were clearly against the Castamiri who wanted a pure-blooded Numenorian on the throne
-There is absolutely no mention of the lineage of men who first turn to Morgoth being black or anything like that
-The black Numeroreans who worshipped Sauron were not called black because of any external physical characteristic
-The Southrons only turned to Sauron because of the threat of numenorian colonialism, which brings us to the next point...
-Tolkien wrote of his dislike of both the Roman and the British empires. By the standards of his day, such an anti-imperialist view was almost extreme! I think he deeply belived in the "civilising mission" of colonialism, that is first and foremost the spread of Christianity and maybe some basic infrastructure. He was deeply suspicious of technological progress, so I don't think he believed Africa missed out out on anything by not having any factories etc.
-His descriptions of other nations is more "exotic" or "orientalist" than racist. Of course the first time you saw a black person you would be shocked, just as much as a black person would be shocked upon encountering white skinned, blue-eyed European for the first time. There is nothing wrong with admitting that we cannot understand everyone and everything
-While racism takes many forms as time progresses (divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book), race as we understand it nowadays only appeared as late as the 16th century, as a justification for colonialism. Check out the History of England podcast, ep. 301 "Black Tudors" for some very intresting details
Theres also the elements of enviromentalism, which i would say are anti-colonial in nature because indigenous people tend to respect the land more than Anglo Saxons
Your thesis is wrong. Sam’s statement is not modern. It is Christian. And it also is a very common sentiment among combat veterans like Tolkien.
you're acting as if all of these are mutually exclusive.
I dare to say that no, you're wrong. Countless times in history of christianity people had been dehumanized, pointed as an enemy, an heretic, a wich, a devil's worshipper. Associating christianity to this perception of the other is Modern, the same way that the protestants are modern
@@azde4042it's certainly mutually exclusive from the concept being modern, if any anything I'd argue that most modern Christians (at least in the US) have begun to forget this very important part of the religion they claim to beleive
@@ultimate9056 i mean, it's not as if medieval christians were the kindest and most understanding either.
@@ultimate9056 really? Not too long ago the idea of a “white man’s burden” was used to justify imperialism for the sake of turning the “savage godless natives” to Christianity. It’s the main reason why so many African nation are Christian Nationalist now: Christian Imperialism.
morþor meant 'crime, violence, torment' in Old English, btw.
It's morþing time
@@burner555Morthing.
Now, it just means Murder...
Couldn't resist.
Despite the similarity, Mordor's name derives from Sindarin Mor(n)+(n)dor, which are, respectively "Black" and "Land". The elements Morn can be found in Moria ("Black Chasm"), while (N)dor in Gondor ("Stone Land")
@@merydoesstuff Yes, that is Tolkien's etymology, but his inspiration must've come form Old English
Im sure this video wont be any controversial at all. And that the comments will be completely in good faith :)
Flame War in 3...2...1...
Can't wait for K Klein to be dogpiled on Twitter and TH-cam
I mean, while I may disagree with some of his points, I at least can at least understand that this is his, subjective, opinion on the piece. It is an interesting debate to have. Besides, I cannot in good faith hate on a video which was clearly created with a good amount of research and effort such as this.
You can't "in good faith" think that LotR is racist either so reap what you sow.
@@junfour you can. Why do you think that you can't? You might want to explore that
This video makes compelling arguments that fall flat with the conclusion because it assumes that Tolkien has to stay within the rigid structure of old myths, rather than letting him construct something of a hybrid.
Tolkien literally makes Haradrim a dark-skinned human race who sided with evil
Meanwhile Tolkien fans: That's not racist and that's not offensive. I decided it for all of you.
@@ahmadqazi2648Being that superficial is the reason why Tolkien fans (which are not, as they digged much deeper into his work) defend him of petty attacks like that
If we do not criticize the past, we never learn from it
"BuTt iT wAs DifFErenT bACk tHeN"
@@burner555I mean they were, but to claim that we must consume them noncritically, or that we should throw it away as it doesn't tolerante our sensibilities is dumb.
It's not about excusing, or condemning, it's about understanding it, so we hopefully don't make the same mistakes.
If we condemn the past for every little thing we interpret into it, we will destroy history, and not actually learn anything...
@@Tasorius Who is condemning anything? The first minute of this video is straight up gushing about how much he loves Lord of the Rings. If you are unable to be critical of things you love, that is that ACTUAL way you won't learn anything.
I think you over-interpreted Sam's thought. Nothing would've been worse than Tolkien actually giving a voice to the Haradrim, his imaginary representation of a real life people he knew nothing about. Tolkien writes about what he knows, we see the story through the lives of characters Tolkien himself could relate to because they draw from the same cultural source, something that would've been impossible to do with characters from the far south. Literally the most racist thing he could've done is to project (even if they were positive) preconceptions that he had about those peoples and cultures without knowing them, without having lived with them, without having experienced their everyday lives. What he did through Sam is remind all those who meet such strangers from far away lands, whatever the circumstances, to remember that they are human too, to relate to them in some kind of way, to empathise even if they happen to be your enemies.
Edit : Thinking about it even more, I'm wondering if there's actually anything LESS racist than to describe people so different to you in appearance, even terrifyingly so, but to still encourage others to empathise and relate to them.
This was a really interesting analysis. I love looking at the works of past authors and seeing what that work says about them and their time. I don't think Tolkien intended to be racist at any point writing LOTR, but it definitely does reflect how the world around him was at that time, and how attempts at escaping societal norms often come up futile. It will be very interesting to see how the authors of today, writing books with subtle choices that no one would bat an eye to nowadays, will be regarded by people 100 years from now. Perhaps they will live at a time past climate catastrophy and newfound scarcity, where our current careless approach to consumerism will be seen as (for the lack of a more refined term) evil.
Love your videos, keep making them
I am gonna write a book and explicitly gonna say ''This book is definitely meant to be RACIST to every nations under the sun''.
Thoughful video, but I have to disagree with both the conclusion and the arguments.
At no point does one need to bring race into the picture for a complete reading of LoTR.
Sauron and Saruman recruiting foreign armies/mercenaries does not make those people, ontologically evil. In constrast to Sauron and Saruman who *are* ontologically evil, and not racially othered.
And by the exact same Sam-quote you brought up, it is unambiguous to me that Tolkien intends to frame these foreigners as not ontologically evil or even different, which to me is essential to racism.
Racism to me is the believe that different groups of people are different in their essence, that their souls so to say are different.
As far as I know this is the only scene where one of these people is considered individually, and in that scene, they are humanized and empathised with.
If LoTR were racist, it would bother to racially other these foreigners. It would depict how they're supposedly bad, smelly, inferior, aggressive, weak, uncivillised etc, but it doesn't do that.
These people aren't antagonized because of what or who they are but soley because they're serving under Sauron.
The assertion that "modern" necessitates a racialized perspective is also one that I find questionable. Regardless of if Sams quote precludes LoTR from being pre-modern, why should a modern work necessarily divide the different peoples in a story into separate races? Why must it necessarily be viewed through that lense?
I feel like that that is more indicative of the readers world-view than that of the work or its author.
Thanks. I really needed to read that.
Tolkien grew up in the Edwardian era. If you read pretty much anything from that time period you can get a glimpse into the world he lived in. Tolkien grew up reading books like King Solomon's Mines and She. It's hard to believe that his worldview wasn't racialized.
doesn't the video directly talk about the fact that lotr isn't racist in the way modern books are?
it also talks about the fact that the book is only as racist as you read it
and it never asserts that there is a necessity to look at it through the modern lens of race, only that there is a tension there, for the creator of the video.
it feels like you didn't engage with the video at all.
@bahaman19901 The Lord of the Rings is a modern book. Tolkien is definitely trying to emulate older works, but he is still writing it in the 20th century. If I wrote a book today in the style of Shakespeare, that doesn't mean my book is not modern.
Tolkien's grew up in a world with very different views on race than today. Vastly different. Today racism is a social problem and generally considered to be evil. But when Tolkien was growing up racism was considered scientific fact. It was taught at universities including Oxford where he worked.
The stories he read growing up like King Solomon's Mines and She are examples of the general attitudes of the time he lived.
Don't forget the smackdown he laid on the Nazis when they asked whether he was Aryan or Jewish.
I can't agree that the Saxon's didn't understand racism. Most white supremacy movements today are based around the elevation of Anglo-Saxons above all other ethnic groups. Modern 'western' racism was essentially created by the Catholic church's doctrine of divine right and dividing the races of the world into three lineages descended from the sons of Noah.
The Lord of the Rings is pretty much based on Catholic crusade propaganda and Tolkien's weird Catholic royalist sympathies. I've never seen anyone talk about how weird it is both that no one really questions Aragorn's claims to kingship, and that the stewards wouldn't just take the throne of Gondor after centuries of waiting.
the crusades don't occur for another 100 to 200 years after the time period we're talking about, under Norman England. I agree that white supremacy as it presents itself in the United States puts anglo-saxons above all ethnic groups, but this is a kind of retroactive racism that doesn't prove anything about the time period itself. racists tend to know very little about the times and traditions they want to retvrn to.
i disagree that MODERN western racism was created by the catholic church's ideas of noah's lineages - which also isn't really a catholic doctrine btw it is quite important in a lot of Jewish and Christian thought. these lineages were absolutely used alongside ideas like the divine right to rule - and here we see the parallel to aragorn (which I DO agree with), but that's not racism. it's weird royalism that i disagree with, but all pro-inequality stances are not racist.
i think western racism has its ORIGINS in crusade propaganda, though it's shifted and changed a lot since then, and i would still call the colonial period the genesis of MODERN western racism. but again, we're a little bit off that time period yet.
@@kklein I'm talking the Saxons from what was/would become the Holy Roman empire and their norse cousins. Divine right wasn't what created 'western' racism but the new mythology created to support it was. Peoples such as Slavs and the Irish put in the Hamitic category to justify their treatment as a slave race.
And sure it was kicked up a notch with the crusades, but you can still see a direct line to anti-semitism, colonialism, eugenics and so on. If you haven't yet, read Charles Mills's 'The Wretched of Middle Earth: An Orkish Manifesto'. It talks a bit about this stuff and how it ties into Tolkien and the Middle Earth project.
The short answer: NO
The long answer: NEIN
The longer answer: NI'PAL'CA
The thing is, reinterpreting myths for modern audiences is literally timeless. Lancelot's fling with Guinevere was added when it was considered a socially accepted, even ideal, form of love. It was then turned into a fatal flaw for the character when that social context faded back away and cheating was once more just considered bad, no caveats, ifs, buts, or maybes. Humans do this incessantly, repeatedly. So I can't really accept the idea that Tolkein HAD to do this in order for his story to be a valid entry as a myth woven in the modern day. He would have achieved this even if he had completely abandoned using metaphor and generalisations when it came to character's skin colours.
Racism suggests malice towards other groups.
Something which is categorically NOT present in tolkein's work.
However, it certainly does revere European culture & mythology. In an attempt to repair what tolkein believed the English people had lost through the years.
It is a work of LOVE for his group. NOT an attack on other groups.
Racism doesn't imply malice it implies a lack of care about the other's humanity. A reduction of the other to the simplest most convenient form be it the helper, the animal or the enemy. The racist person does not have to hate the other to be racist they just need to be careless.
@@grandsome1 No... it implies hate. . . period. Modern wokies will tell you anything that is 100% White is racist because of a lack of inclusion, they conveniently leave out that other races have works centered around their own race 100% and it's not considered racist lol.
It's double standard bs, and it's subversive drivel.
@@grandsome1 Tolkien spoke up against apartheid and against various racist ideologies.
.. And even if we didn't knew that, we cannot say that lack of care means someone is racist, because it means that _for some reason_ racism is "default". That's a flawed reasoning.
@@grandsome1 That's bullshit actually!
A completely brainrot take!
Racism is a belief!
To be racist you have to think that one race (Any race) is supperior (Generally/As a whole) than others!
That's it!
More pure, more human, chosen..... stuff like that!
And that it should be separated from the rest or dominating/controlling the rest.....
@@grandsome1 "a lack of care" 🤦🏻♂️
Dude!
Most of the society are careless about other people!
In all countries!
People are not so empathetic like you would like to believe!
But it's not because of racism.....
Also many modern readers see the relationship between Frodo and Sam as romantic, but that wasn't Tolkien's intend as far as I know
Sureeeee it wasn't 😉😉
This isn't really relevant?
"Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend."
I feel like part of the reason why modern readers like to view relationships such as Sam and Frodo's as romantic is because there's so few actual gay representation in media. But at the same time, it's like they're unable to even imagine that two men can love each other deeply without it being romantic, which is just kinda sad? And paradoxically, it's also a pretty conservative worldview if you think about it. It's like saying "straight men can't be emotional and affectionate with each other, so if two guys are doing that, they must be gay".
Honestly Sam and Frodo having a romantic relationship never really made sense to me, But Legolas and Gimli I can see more, But at the same time, It doesn't really matter: They had a close relationship, they were clearly very close to eachother, In my opinion it doesn't really affect the story at all if that close relationship was romantic or platonic. Although, Perhaps, This opinion is based on my own views, of Romantic and Platonic love as being different, closely-linked, facets of the same thing, rather than completely separate things.
Excellent video! Really got the gears in my head turning.
No fictional work can escape the reality in which it was written. We are forever trapped in our respective present. In terms of racism, I can only imagine what it must be like to come across a caricature and get the hunch that one belongs to the group of people it was based on.
I've been rewriting and deleting paragraphs from this comment multiple times, trying to anticipate what the reader will make of it, and I have come to the conclusion that being an author of anything sounds like hell.
I feel like you've glossed over a lot of important things. One thing about the men of the east and south is that although their collectively referred to as Easterlings and Haradrim respectively as if they were singular cultures, they were actually umbrella terms used by the men of the west to describe the numerous peoples of these foreign lands who were not related to the Edain, like how the Romans initially viewed the Celts and Germans or how medieval Europeans collectively called all nomadic steppe tribes (Turks, Mongols, Khazars etc) as Tatars. In addition, you claim that Tolkien painted black people in a negative light when the Haradrim we see invading Gondor are much more arabic based. I don't think we've actually seen black people in Tolkien's works. The Haradrim allying with Sauron was probably much more than just them being evil. They had been subject to conquest and colonization by Gondor and its predecessors. After spending generations under the thumb of the Dunedain, it makes sense why the Haradrim would join Sauron, not because they actually liked him but to finally win their freedom. A really interesting event involving the men of Harad and Rhun were the rebellions instigated by the blue wizards against Sauron in the Second Age. This conflict is only mentioned briefly, but it saw the two blue wizards travel to the East and South respectively where they rallied the Easterlings and Haradrim who refused to serve Sauron against him. Despite only being mentioned in passing, this event was actually quite crucial, as it prevented Sauron from amassing as many forces as he initially hoped and delayed his invasion of the west for a full 90 years, which allowed the elves and their Allies time to prepare for war.
Edit: ok woah, I really went overboard with this comment and it was really pompous and dickish of me to basically open with "well your not a true fan like me" in the original response. It's just I've seen so many people on the internet trying to slander Tolkien's name just for attention so when I saw your video I had a knee-jerk reaction. At the end of the day, the idea of the Haradrim and Easterlings being evil by nature goes against the philosophy of Tolkien. While I still disagree with your statement, your video has actually made me reflect on how black and white Lotr's depiction of the Men of East and South is when compared to their depiction the rest of the Legendarium.
bro we didn't need a full essay, especially one you open with "I feel like you're not that well versed in Tolkien"
@@Thermopolis11Your very reply suggests you did in fact need the full essay
smallest LOTR essay
Yeah I really overreacted with that comment. also looking back on it, yeah there are definitely are some pretty problematic things like the black trolls with red tongues.
I was honestly surprised how much more nuanced Tolkiens legendarium is than just "Evil brown people fighting the good people of the west", all people followed Morgoth from the beginning, and the only reason people of the West turned away from him was their proximity to the elves. We can see how righteous numenoreans become corrupted, and Tolkien makes it clear at multiple points in the books that there is nothing inherently evil about easterlings or haradrim. Indeed, there is the famous Tal Elmar tale told from the pov of Edain of Gondor who were a followers of Morgoth and who were subsequently driven out and subjugated by Numenoreans, it sure isn't as black and white as you'd expect from an allegory of Christianity
It's not an allegory of Christianity, at least according to Tolkien.
Why would Tolkien be thinking of black people? Creatives create their art based in their life and the other stories, in this case, myths that they consume.
The books are clearly based on european culture and myth that is used to re create a soldier's fantastical view of a world after fighting a great war.
Why would race be a source of inspiration of creation for him when religion, culture and personal lived experience is where he gets his inspiration.
I'd be suprise if Tolkine ever talked to a black man.
The obsession of race is a product of our time, and when talking about an author you have to contextualize his writing with his life. Whatever moder interpretation based on how you see the world is irrelevant to him and how he saw the world. Wanna see race and call the orcs black people? Go ahead, but it was clear to me when you saw them rising from the ground and mud that they where symbologyof men going through hell and war represented as a creature, just how those soldiers turned into killing machines during the war.
If you ask me, ever comparing the orcs with with black people when there's nothing to link them outside of a color spectrum is insane. We even have the fact they are born of the elves, implying thematically that they where people that where took and turned to this beings forged for war.
It might be harsh now, but black people are quite irrelevant or unexistant in european folklore and culture, the generations that lived when european countries where 99% european are still alive, there is no lore of non-europen in europe, unlike the US, europeans didn't, you know, know about black people or care for them, for that matter, they where to ocupied living their lifes to give a relevant or long lasting thought about people from a diffrent culture far away with more melanin.
I had no idea where this was leading, but I’m really glad I watched til the end. You did an excellent job on this one.
As an aside, I really love your visual language of boxes for quotation, the different coloured text for annotations, and reboxing to building on even more ideas. As somebody who works with the structure of programming languages I’m constantly thinking of quotation, splicing and evaluation, and this pleases me greatly, matching up with a lot to my internal visual models. Also a links nicely to the idea of the frame narrative, which is ofc very relevant to Tolkien’s work (I’m sure this was not an accident). :)
I also love the books and am not looking to cancel anything. Saying that, there is another layer of complication to this analysis, especially given the idea of a pure study of mythology separating it/him from modern concerns. Tolkien was an establishment Oxford don writing at the height of the Empire, a time when academic study of classics, history and archeology was pushing to create a narrative and selective mythology of white empire. it doesn't doesn't have to be shown with nefarious or mustache twirling intent, as in works such as The Lair of the White Worm's early chapters, or with overt pseudo-scientific racism of the era, but it's the context. Also, talking of being a soldier during Empire, the Battle of Helm's Deep is so evocative of The Battle of Rourke's Drift that a friend of mine, who angrily rebuffed any of my observations on this topic, gasped "rourke's drift" out loud when we watched the battle in the Jackson films. Our modern reference being the film "Zulu". And that's when I realized that a lot of the context, culture, worldview and reference in LotR go unnoticed to younger fans because time has simply moved on, and less and less of those references now feature in other culture.
Best take I’ve ever seen in the matter. You put into words what I have personally struggled to do
It's been a while since I saw a video from this channel :)
Hi from Sweden, as I'm completing my Erasmus scholarship
I read LOTR while in primary school. As far as I remember, it was all quite abstract - the idea that orcs were being likened to actual human “races” would never have occurred to me.
“Complicated Racist” is another expression of “I have black friends.”
In the Prologue, on the third page of the book, it says, "The Harfoots were browner of skin..... They were the most normal and representative variety of Hobbit, and far the most numerous." The majority of hobbits had brown skin.
Good video. I find that that tension you discuss between the mythological style and the more modern characters is a lot of what gives the lord of the rings it’s charm. Because while the war of the ring is a mythological one, and many of the characters fit as mythological heroes (particularly Aragorn, but all the non-hobbits really) the central characters it’s all about are very much normal people you could meet in your day to day life.
I find this really makes the sort come alive today in a way that mythological epics struggle to.
Don't you think the Haradrim were simply based on the Muslim opponents of the Crusaders? CS Lewis did much the same with his 'baddies' in The Last Battle.
Exactly!
This is the issue I have with Tolkien. Yes, the racism, but I won't list all the examples. There's a whole Wikipedia page (Tolkien and race) for that. Rather, the whole "applicability" concept Tolkien came up with against allegations of allegory is what interests me. It is basically Death of the Author from the perspective of an author who buys into it.
DotA is just to say that readers now have to discuss and decide as a population what a text means, separate from what an author intended, which we cannot know. But DotA comes from a tradition where mostly old books like classics, scripture, and philosophical writings are concerned. Modern authors can very clearly indicate what they intended, and even demonstrate how obviously they are influenced by the context they exist in. For an example, see JK Rowling.
Now Tolkien was trying to combat accusations that his stories were allegorical, almost one-to-one symbols or representations of reality as we know it today ie. the modern world down to the geographic and ethnolinguistic borders. Instead, he came up with "applicability" which is when readers can read multiple meanings in a text. This is something normally belonging to ancient texts in civilizations which are not continuous...for example, Indian civilization is continuous, so we don't really need a "modern mythology for India" like Tolkien wanted for England, to be read like some ancient text whose original authors and first several generations of interpreters are lost to time.
So my point is, there is a little bit of arrogance and irresponsibility you could level at Tolkien. His stories are great! and they are classics in a sense. But you can't expect all authors in the modern day to achieve a classic on par with the likes of the Odyssey or Volsungs saga. So modern literature shouldn't be received in the same way. Authors shouldn't escape their responsibility to the interpretants and participants of the modern world, pretending they are some long-gone mysterious author. Especially when your stories are so popular and interpreted by many as fascist propaganda. This is what Tolkien's applicability allows for...Nazis use Tolkien for their propaganda today. Not even kidding, and hope no more authors go the route of Rowling.
PhD in yapping
@@vitornunes07 it's only a master's for now, I'm still working on my PhD in yapping
@@sskpspI agree with and liked your original comment, congratulations on your masters! 😅
So how would you break down the Silmarillion and the battle of Dagor dagrath and the easternlings that allied with the elven kingdoms and one king betrayed the alliance for Morgoth and one choose the alliance?
I think to remember another passage, where Sam just entered to Mordor to try to save Frodo in the Return of the King. An explanation is given to the Blackgate, which is not as much used to impede the entrance of enemies to Mordor, as it is for avoiding "slaves of Sauron" to escape its domains
I think a welcome addition to this video would have been to mention Kirill Eskov's novel *The Last Ringbearer*, which turns the story of *The Lord of the Rings* on its head by retelling it from the perspective of the orcs.
i think a good way to look at it is in that it’s racist because the world that created it is racist, in the same way that even trans people can hold transphobic thoughts because the world that they live in is transphobic. it doesn’t degrade the work itself, but its an interesting part of the metatextual discussion of the work
I think so many people think that if tolkien had some racist ideas/influences (for crying out loud hes a brit born in 19th century) you cant like the books. Im maybe what some people might refer to as a radical leftist, even a radical feminist. But I find that most people who think like me absolutely adore LOTR even though they might see problematic sides of it
I think one of the main reasosn for this is that Tolkiens world is so vast and had so many different underlying themes and thoughtfull discussions that we all recognize the depth and care that went into it. It is not easily reduced to those worst inclinations it might have
1:43 ok you're just setting yourself up at this point
Title: "Lord of the Rings is racist." Content: "Ok fine it's a bit more complicated than that. But at least you clicked on the video!"
The title doesn’t make that claim, it asks the question
@@hogndog2339 Yeah ok guess what the title used to be, "Lord of the Rings is racist (and why that's interesting)" if memory doesn't fail. You came to the party too late it seems. Here we had another example where a youtuber uploads with a clickbaity title and then changes it later either because of the backlash or for plausible deniability. But you were not to know that.
Why the snark? Like I understand a dislike of click-baity titles on the internet (I feel the same).
But you know what's more exhausting?the constant snarky, sarcastic tone, everything has to be delivered in.
Also the original title was not that click baity, it did not mislead you in any fundamental way. The most you can say is that it was annoying (hopefully in some insignificant way).
Also the most common reason I've heard for changing a videos title is it not initially doing well in the algorithm. The immediate assumption that this act was done with nefarious intent without any evidence, well to be honest it's pathetic.
Sorry for coming of as overly invested in this comment but it just annoyed me similar to how you were annoyed by the click-baity title of this video , it's an encapsulation of a lot of what I dislike about internet discourse.
Also also the video expanding upon what is within the title is....like.....normal?
Why is it in the original comment being described as a bad thing ?
Yeah, Sam isn't Human.
Tolkein was a man of his times; a cultured Englishman born in the 19th C. and who fought in WW 1. He was a traditionalist and a conservative. Is there "unconcious bias" in LOTR? Maybe, you could definitely make that case; but so what. I don't care. Its just a story, just a book after all. I don't think anyone is making policy based on LOTR.
Nice Video,
There is also the other possibility, that Tolkien either didn't want to make the story morally grey or that it was outside his skillset.
This one line with Sam is great, but he isn't able or doesn't want to give us this depth. And this depth is almost everywhere lacking in the book. Wormtongue get's the chance to redeem himself in the end, but Tolkien doesn't allow it, he kills Saruman and is killed afterwards. Just like Saruman himself. They're evil and it seems, there is no way back from that.
Very good video about an interesting subject. The racism card has been used and abused in media and pop culture way too much for some years now. And although I agree with the video's conclusion, I m not sure it aims at the right direction.
I m not a Tolkien expert, I m just a fan of Tolkien's books (and Jackson's amazing trilogy of course). But from what I ve read, his perceived "racism" wasn't mainly against black or brown people, but against the "easterners". The classic division in Tolkien's work that you touched on in the video, the good-evil and light-dark duality, geograpihcally and culturally isn't translated in West vs South or North vs South, but in West vs East. That is a very important distinction for many reasons. Yes, Haradrim specifically are a broad representation of Africans or Middle Eastern people compared to the good westerners, but I would argue that Orcs who are the main "evil race" in Tolkien's universe are much more of a representation of east Slavs or Mongols of the real world. The great threat from the East, a concept deep embeded in the western mind, psyche and folklore: the barbarian eastern hordes, the emperor warlords and tyrants that want to invade, conquer and subjugate the good peaceful and civilised West (Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, the Ottomans etc). Those that have nothing in common with us (they speak different tongues, they worship different gods, they are the nomadic people of the steppes, they re not farmers like the Shire and Gondor, or woodland dwellers like the Elves etc).
It's no coincidence of course that the orc languages and the Black Speech (the languages of evil) don't derive from african lagnuages but from eastern languages like the Hurrian language (mesopotamian). And of course in contrast the "good" languages like the Westron (English) is part of the germanic language family and the Elven languages (Sindarin, Quenya etc) derive from celtic languages like Welsh, or from Finnish (although ironically Finnish is closer to the mongolian language family than to the germanic).
Also many people tend to view Orcs as black, but they re not. The Uruk-hai are depicted as black. Orcs are mostly shown as pale grey skinned, a colour that is neither white nor black, but in fact is closer to white. It's almost like they are a sick and twisted version of white, which fits perfectly with their origin story: they were elves and men who where taken by the dark powers and tortured, altered etc to make an "evil" race loyal to the dark lord, be it Morgoth or later Sauron.
Something that adds another layer of complexity on to this it the idea of a "mythology of England." A country having a strong mythological narrative can often serve as a foundation for nationalism - this is not to say that making a mythology about a country is necessarily inherently nationalist, just that if you want to increase nationalism, establishing a mythology is helpful for bringing the people of a country together, telling them that their country is special or uniquely good or superior or whatever. I think it's pretty clear that Tolkien was not constructing his mythology for this purpose. For one, you mentioned his anti-racism. For another, if you wanted to spark nationalist sentiment, a pro-war message would probably be very helpful in achieving that, which his books don't have.
Having said that, I do think it's still worth looking at some historical context related to the kind of stuff Tolkien was writing about. In the 1870s - before Tolkien's time, but not by so much that it would have been out of the cultural consciousness - Wagner made his Ring cycle (that's not the actual translation of the German name, that's just how it's commonly referred to). Wagner was of course a brilliant composer, though also a noted antisemite. Like Tolkien, he had a general interest in Germanic mythology, especially (but not exclusively) Norse mythology. For an example more contemporary to Tolkien, the Nazis also used Norse mythology, along with the idea of the Aryan (though the two aren't related - the actual irl Aryans lived in the middle east and India) to establish a national identity for the Germans to rally behind. This was after Tolkien published The Hobbit and before he published LotR.
To re-emphasize, I'm not saying that Tolkien's work falls in to the same category as the two examples I gave (which I realize were both specifically in the country of Germany - fear not, I know that Germanic doesn't mean German lol). I'm just saying that that's the landscape of Germanic folk tales around the time, so there are bound to be some similarities, and some of them will be a little uncomfortable. Whether or not his allegation that he read the Völsunga Saga in Old Norse as a kid are true, it's clear that he was fascinated by Germanic mythology from a young age, so it's likely (if not certain) that he chose to write about Germanic myths because they're Really Freaking Cool(tm) and had been obsessed with them for along time, not because of any sort of ulterior motive related to the usage of said myths at the time.
Ultimately this really doesn't change your conclusion at all, it's just some interesting stuff that I was reminded of while watching this video, and I feel like it sort of fits along with the vibe, even if it's not exactly the same vibe. Vibe-tangential, I guess?
The men of the west (Gonrod, Rohan, men of Eriador) are NOT "white", or more specifically not our ancestors. They are the "original" inhabitants of Europe which were replaced and/or absorbed by PIE people, whose in-universe equivalent are the Easterlings.
1. lord of the rings is not racist
2. compound sentences are not run off sentences
yeah that sums out pretty well...
one of the more interesting "racism in tolkien's writing" videos.
I can't wait to read the comments on this TH-cam video, I sure hope everyone is arguing in good faith and that nobody's analysis is being misrepresented either deliberately or otherwise.
Old English people's actual view of the world is unrecoverable, and so Tolkien could put us imaginatively in the Old English mindset as far as he understood it. Sure, Tolkien was an expert on Old English and how they saw the world, but most readers knew very little and it would have been difficult to make that leap. So the ancient/modern split is itself entirely modern anyway, between Modern English and Modern Old English, if that makes any sense. Readers are only ever *looking* at the world rather than seeing it through their own eyes. I suppose the best analogy would be like this: Old English people may have literally believed in dragons, so you can put dragons in the story as real things with real consequences. But we can't ever escape the fact that dragons don't exist, while an Old English person didn't have to suspend their disbelief. A story about dragons distracts us from the every day world; a story about dragons would have distracted an Old English person *in* their everyday world.
Thus the same with racism. We live in an age where race worries us in our world, so we worry about it in imagined worlds too. Discussions of race would have not worried the Old English and so they can talk about it wildly and exotically. Tolkien---who definitely knew about race and its worries---was being very cakeist and should have known better.
The passages about how the Numenoreans weakened their bloodlines by mingling with lesser Men always bothered me. It reminds me of similar arguments against interracial marriage.
It does have an explanation behind it, but yeah it’s still a strange description
Its only strange when you put a modern sense into it. The "lesser men" aren't inherrently lesser in a genetic sense, although they were shorter and had shorter life, it's implied they lost the culture and morals of the elves@@BrisbaneBroncosfan67
well they were stronger and wiser than ordinary men and lived much longer, they were simply “better”
I think a part you might have missed is the argument that if its a visual illustration of Good vs. Evil then having Gondor be centered around a white tree and mordor being the shadow land makes sense. It keeps things simple and easily recognizable, a trait not often found in some of his writings. Having a dark skinned folk from the south and them going along with Sauron makes sense when you think of it as a visual summary. It's similar to good characters using Light Magic and bad ones using Black magic. Doesn't mean he thought that of all humans but it does go along with what the story has been saying up to this point.
I get your point, but personally I don't see any good basis for a racist accusation. The archaic description of the southerners is just realistic world building to me, helping set the period to our real-world counterpart, And Sam's thoughts on the dead soldier strikes me as a reaction any reasonably kind person would have, and even as a kid I always got the implication form this moment that plenty of the Southerners would have had the same kind of thought as Sam.
short hawser... no
and if you say otherwise... go study more
who cares
Racist or not, the phrase "black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues" has a truly beautiful rhythm.
I strongly disagree with the thesis of this video, and critiquing Tolkien in our modern and developing and frankly shallow considerations of race is extremely disrespectful to his work. Just because the book is focus on the perspective of Western Middle Earth, does not make it inherently racist. There are many books that exclude the perspective of other people groups and that doesn't make said works problematic. If you believe the implications of The Lord of the Rings is racist, then you don't understand racism. You also neglect a lot of detail about the forces of evil in the books to promote your narrative. Overall the editing is good and your script is engaging, but I would not have been proud of this conclusion.
no, just focusing on the perspective of one group does not make a work racist. nor do i say so. in fact, i give a pretty big defence of the idea that it does not, that this can be used as a defence against accusations of racism.
but the thing is, Tolkien wasn't writing in a long and distant past as you seem to suggest - in fact, he grew up with modern and frankly shallow considerations of race in a post colonial world. and it is THIS that seeps into his work, and gives it racist undertones.
Great video, and so glad you mentioned Le Guin! She's an incredible writer, I hope you return to this topic and explore some of her work, especially Earthsea (which has, as you know, interesting views of race itself).
Two minor considerations please. One is that I wonder if when those with literary training approach certain books, do they apply a bit too much of the present upon those texts. This feels like that kind of content. Not what is in text, but what can we extrapolate from the text for our claims. A second minor oddity I find. Tolkien never wrote run on sentences. Now as a literary tool, the compound sentence may be a product of the past that we don't use much these days, but nonetheless as a philologist this man well understands sentence composition, which I think we don't always appreciate from just a language comprehension. Perhaps just me.
daaaaman, those twists and turns. I was soo ready to disagree haha
...lol, what? I'm so sorry but I might have missed the point being made in this video.
Thoughtful introspection is not a modern phenomenon. Nor is giving an antagonist group features/descriptions distinctly different from the heros an archaic technique. Tolkien giving Sam an awareness of the fallen enemy soldier's experience or perspective doesn't make LotR particularly more modern or less folklore-like. And it really works against the notion of LotR being racist; if Tolkien intended any prejudice towards other ethnic groups, Sam's sentiment seems quite contradictory to that ideal. So maybe racism was *not* what Tolkien was getting at.
Or at least, that's how I choose to interpret it from a black, female, 21st-centurian perspective. 🤷🏾♀️
so giving the protagonist introspection is not what i'm talking about here. i'm comparing literary techniques, _how_ that introspection is communicated. this kind of limited third person narrative with a pause in the story for a moment of introspection is something one finds in novels, not in the texts of the old Germanic epics. what i talk about there is literary technique, that's why i have the whole section about comparing the literary techniques of epics and novels.
i also don't think an author's intention is the be all and end all when it comes to interpreting their work. i never in the video call _tolkien_ racist, i'm not interested in investigating that claim here. i'm examining the piece of literature, and yeah, i think it has racism woven into its narrative - analysing it with this kind of lens can tell us about more subtle things than just whether or not tolkien personally was a racist, it can help build a picture of the attitude and conscious or unconscious biases of the society of his time, and by how we react and engage with this media in the modern day, how we've changed (or not changed) as a society.
finally, tolkien is absolutely creating a modern myth, and the way he presents "the distant other" is absolutely part of that. the way he writes about Harad is reminiscent of the way Africa is written about in Germanic mythology... like I say in the video.
@@kklein "Blah blah blah, White people bahd, Blah"
A lot of my family were miners, before my time but my Grandparents would tell stories. Anyway I always thought of the Orcs and Goblins as miners, skin black from coal, everything else (mouth, teeth, eyes) thrown into contrast. When I saw the representation of demons in Indian and other eastern religions as black skinned, that seemed to match Tolkien.
Ok you've had time to watch the video now you can comment
Woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke woke
(This comment is satire, in case you're not sure)
@@klop4228 Every day i wake up
Nope
Moving on
welcome back kay klein
So good. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently (for some reason), so this video comes at the perfect time to articulate how I feel about it
Would be really cool to see a video from you on tones in swedish, I want to know how unique it is. You know, tomten vs tomten, stegen vs stegen.
Tolkein actually wrote an essay on the word you mention, called Sigelwara Land, in the 1930s. in it he speculates that Sigelwara Land could have originally referred to the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Muspelheim and thus the Sigelwara themselves would originally be a kind of soot-black demons, but that this original pagan understanding was obscured by Christianization and by the time the Exodus was composed in Old English, the word was understood and used more literally. he reconstructs the word as sigel ("sun") and *hearwa ("soot", "coal, "hearth", "roast") and so it could be understood as having a meaning similar to sun-burnt, and with this more literal understanding the term shifted to mean Ethiopia. however there's no widely accepted reconstruction of the second element (and unlike sigel it's unattested), and other scholars suggest other meanings such as "worshipper". regardless, the soot-black demons with flaming eyes likely influenced the Balrogs, while the word *hearwa itself likely influenced the name Harad.
Not shocking considering his attitudes towards Franco during WWII
Short answer: no. Long answer: also, no.
Actually it's: Yes and Yes
I have always view Sam's moment with the death haradrim a rare point of comparison with a person who has never seen conflict between humans, and soldiers that are used to violence. For Sam, that's a death human being in front of him, for the Ithilien rangers, it's just another moment in a conflict that has being going on for ages at that point
Not gonna lie you got me in the first half.
But yeah. I read LotR when I was young and unaware of any racism in the world, so the book never occurred to me as racist. And even now, I think that it describes ancient times where the concept of black racism was nonexistent so speaking of it is like arguing whether ancient Greeks were inclusive of trans people - it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Also, the haradrim and the easterlings were not portrayed as evil, in many of Tolkien's writings they were described as misguided, lied to by Sauron, there were many groups that opposed Sauron and got destroyed etc.
It's like Germans were antisemitic and racist etc but only because of Hitler, Germans were no different than Brits or Poles
Is the outro music available anywhere to listen to? It sounds really pleasant, I'd like to add it to my sleep playlist haha
I feel the need to point out that the Haradrim most likely draw more of their inspiration from southwest Asia than they do from Africa. While the use of war elephants is known from North Africa's history, their use in war persisted much longer in India. Combine that with the strong emphasis on cavalry the Haradrim field in the siege of Minis Tirith and Near Harad looks more to be a mix of southwest Asian and North African cultures. This would track with not only the historical events Tolkien alludes to at times but also his war time experiences. Gondor is sometimes compared to the Eastern Roman Empire which similarly lost eastern territories until their borders were pushed back almost to their capitol city. And the Ottoman Empire was one of the participants of WW1.
So...no it's not racist.
It is racist insofar that every mythological tradition is racist: to be the cultural understanding of a people, all but the most isolated of human groups have a human "other" that is bad because it is not the same. A lot of European names for American Indian tribes, for example, are exonyms by hostile tribes. However, I would not call LOTR or any mythological tradition racist because that carries a rightfully negative connotation that should not be applied to mythology.
Further I would strongly argue against Sam's view being "incredibly modern", in that there are parallels in truly ancient mythology of humanity crossing these cultural lines for brief moments or in dire situations: for example, the Epic of Gilgamesh is all about two people from different cultural backgrounds empathising with each other and overcoming a foe that they could not face alone. It would have been far more of Tolkien's time to include a "token good" Easterling, but he refused to do that because he wanted to keep the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint.
I very rarely dislike videos, but I felt this was much poorer than your usual work and calling this work racist does a disservice to Tolkien's work and life.
"Further I would strongly argue against Sam's view being "incredibly modern"" I don't think that's what's being claimed in the video? The way I understood it, It was not Sam's thoughts itself that made it feel modern, but the way in which they were written, as thoughts in Sam's head, Rather than facts or descriptions. I haven't read enough ancient works to say if that's an accurate dichotomy or not, but it's certainly a different thing than just saying what Sam thought is incredible modern.
There are two important elements about why Tolkien wrote things the way he did. Firstly, he had no compulsion of a modern fiction writers to second guess themselves about 'did I just wrote something racist?', 'did I internalize some racist viewpoints and it shows in my text?' and so on. It wasn't a problem to be addressed for him. He knew that he is not racist and he lived in an environment where he was unlikely to be challenged on that assumption.
Secondly, there is a simple issue of conservation of the narrative space. Yes, it was possible for the Lord of the Rings to include a minor viewpoints of Khandian, Haradrim or Easterling characters to humanize them further. Like I do not know GRR Martin does with ever increasing stable of PoVs that also stalls his writing to the stop apparently. But is there any real reason to include such PoVs beyond virtue signal that 'I'm not racist, see I have this brown-skinned character that does non-evil things'? And it feeds into the first point because Tolkien felt no need to virtue signal to anyone. He just wrote things he wanted and about people he wanted. It is just as simple.
And lastly, I kinda want to challenge one of your initial minor points about 'eastern' and 'southern' non-white people being more easily corruptible than white 'western' people. The first time we encounter culture of the 'Western' men in the Lord of the Rings, it presented as an antagonistic and evil one. What do you think Barrow Wights were if not corrupted 'Western' people? Third of Arnor sided with the Witch King and we see the consequences of that very early in the book before we ever encounter any evil 'non-white' people. Also there is always Umbar which is quite literally colony of EVIL Numenorians who probably played quite an important role of conquering the wider Harad for Sauron. Because Tolkien wrote about evils of the colonial Imperialism by an advanced 'white' civilization way before it became a part of mainstream political discourse.
One thing to note: the Dunedain of Arnor and Gondor were not "white" like Northern European, they were pretty much like Spaniards and Italians, they had pale faces but their skin was darker than that of the rohirrim.
except Anglo-Saxon writers didn’t call dark-skinned Africans “half trolls with white eyes and red tongues” they just commented on their skin being black and speculated it was from the heat of the sun. the idea of that implying immorality or ugliness or an inherent ontological opposition to a ‘White’ Europe isnt really from that period, it comes much more from early modern colonialism, and in a way came to a head with the events and thinking of the mid-20th century which Tolkien was also very heavily inspired by. Tolkien is as much trapped in his own present as we are, and as the Anglo-Saxons were
TL;DR: the Sigelwara were just *there* and barely at that in the Old English literature, no one made Tolkien write them as the servants of Sauron, plus all the other stuff like the orcs and the wood woses and the eastrons.
Tolkien did try to write about racialised people compassionately, and Sam’s paragraph there is some of his best work *because of that*, but he also fucked quite up a lot, and I dont care about whether that makes him a “bad person”, that’s between him and God. I care about the equally valuable lessons we can take away from his mistakes *if we’re willing to be honest with ourselves about them*
While I enjoyed the video, I do think you are applying to much of our modern perceptions on the symbolism in Tolkien’s world. As you pointed out, while there is no doubt a certain degree of subtle racism regarding phenotypes, it is more a product of the cultural positioning that the world of the Lord of the Rings is set than one of active value judgement against people with darker skin-tones.
As a fantasy world derived from northwestern European histore and mythology, the focus revilves around peoples who exhibit the kinds of traits most common of northwestern Europe, which rightfully positions such as their point from which other characteristics are contrasted.
Since the forces of Sauron are drawn from the lands furthest from western Middle Earth, it is unsurprising that many of such will appear in a manner which would be considered both strange and exotic (and thus, also potentially startling and/or croghtneing to the inhabitants to a certain degree). While it’s easy to interpret this as a direct commentary on the real-world peoples exhibiting dark skin tones, the lack of active value judgement in the Lord of the Rings suggests it is circumstantial rather than inherent or deliberate.
The equation of “black” as a color with “evil” predates the early modern period when Europeans had frequent contact with dark-skinned populations, and occurs cross-culturally in many languages. It is an unfortunate situation that such associations now carry an additional layer of cultural baggage, but in the case of the Lord of the Rings it is not actually a commentary on dark-skin as being inherently “evil” or bad in some way. This is because the world in which the story is set is one which is meant to resemble the post-classical and early medieval period of northwestern Europe, and so the cultural associations we see are a product of that period of time, rather than later eras.
(I know you mentioned this in the video, I’m merely reiterating)
The description of the Orcs or Easterlings is unfortunate, and probably does show a degree of soft bigotry towards east asian features (which is a product of the times Tolkien lived in), but there is also an argument to be made that it is reminiscent of early medieval authors hyperbolic descriptions of steppe peoples like the Huns, Avars, and Mongols, whom European states only ever experienced as aggressors.
It is probably a combination of both to be honest.
I disagree with your assertion that Samwise’s commentary regarding the Haradrim soldier requires a modern sense of reflection, or that it in someway tethers the story to modern conceptions. Sam’s statement is one which can occur regardless of time or place: genuine curiosity about someone who is both different and your enemy; and therefore isn’t necessarily a meta-textual commentary on the perspectives contained within it. It _could_ be interpreted that way, but that is a choice made at the discretion of the reader, not an inherent framing in and of itself.
Overall, interesting video even if I disagree with some of the minutiae.
The use of modern writing styles and techniques doesn't obligate one to work within a modern philosophical framework anymore than writing on a typewriter does, nor does the use of a typewriter or modern writing techniques make it appropriate to evaluate a work in a modernist framework. These are distinct categories that can be employed independently of each other.
I thought the "oliphants" were lifted straight from Kipling.