Racialism in the Lord of the Rings

[Ixtab]

Lord of the Rings promotes racism, says University lecturer
Jennifer Murray
17/12/2002

"Tolkien prefers a mono-cultural ideal of a society that prefers not to ask questions about its past involvement in ethnic oppression."

17 December 2002 -- The Two Towers, Tolkien's second instalment of The Lord of the Rings, is rooted in racism and Middle Earth's mythology represents anxieties about the onset of immigration, says Dr Stephen Spapiro, an English Lecturer with the University of Warwick

For Dr Shapiro, Tolkien's novels make racial prejudice innocent by presenting bigotry though a fantasy world.

In The Lord of the Rings a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against the onset of a 'foreign' dark, unattractive, inartculate, and psychologically underdeveloped horde, which marks long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-European populations. While Tolkien describes the Hobbits and Elves as amazingly white, ethnically pure clans, their antagonists, the Orcs, are a motley dark-skinned mass, akin to Africans or Aborigines, The recent films amplify a 'fear of a Black planet' and exaggerate this difference by insisting on stark black-white colour codes.

Though Tolkien himself denounced the apartheid of his native South Africa, his writing, nonetheless, relies on a tale of racial war. Dr Shapiro asserts that rather than encourage his readers to celebrate a forward-looking Britain at ease with modern cultural exchanges, Tolkien urges his audience to lament the loss of a past time, when Britain did not have to imagine foreigners as their equals.

"Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because he believed England's original culture and mythology was destroyed by the Norman invasion, and thought his story-cycle would recreate the world of pre-invasion Britian. The concern for a fictional past quickly decends into portraying the encounter with racial and cultural others as an event of terror and apocalyptic threat. For today's film fans, this older racial anxiety fuses with a current fear and hatred of Islam that supports a crusading war in the Middle East," said Dr Shapiro.

The trilogy was written on the cusp of decolonisation, when the first mass waves of immigrants from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan came to Britain. The Midlands, Tolkien's model for the Shire, was quickly becoming one of England's most multi-cultural regions. For the first set of his readers, Tolkien's tale of how the small isolated culture of the Hobbits, becomes threatened by the arrival of distant barbarian populations, the Orcs, reinforces the racial hatred in the Britian of the Rings' publication.

"Tolkien prefers a mono-cultural ideal of a society that prefers not to ask questions about its past involvement in ethnic oppression", added Dr Shapiro.

For more information contact: Dr Stephen Shapiro, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Tel: 02476 523317 Email: s.shapiro@warwick.ac.uk or Jenny Murray, Assistant Press Officer, Tel: 02476 574255 Mobile: 078769 217740

http://www.blink.org.uk/pdescription.asp?key=1486&mid=&grp=1&cat=150

[Felix the Cat]

Yeah, I remember this. Rants like this just make Jews look foolish and paranoid

[Felix the Cat]

Wraiths and race (http://film.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4558916-110242,00.html)

It was the same with The Phantom Menace - I had no choice. When part of your childhood is playing down the road on a big screen with surround sound and popcorn, there's no escape. But as the wonder of discovering that there was more to New Zealand than sheep wore off, something began to worry me.

Maybe it was the way that all the baddies were dressed in black, or maybe it was the way that the fighting uruk-hai had dreadlocks, but I began to suspect that there was something rotten in the state of Middle Earth.

Perhaps Dubya's war on terror is making me a bit uneasy, or maybe it's just good old-fashioned Guardian-reading imperial guilt, but there was something about watching a bunch of pale faces setting off into the east to hack some guys with dark faces into little bits that made me feel a little queasy.

When I got home I dug out my copy of The Lord of the Rings from a box somewhere - okay, so I pulled it straight off the shelf - and found there was worse to come. The Two Towers is the story of the battle between Isengard and Rohan. In the good corner, the riders of Rohan, aka the "Whiteskins": "Yellow is their hair, and bright are their spears. Their leader is very tall." In the evil corner, the orcs of Isengard: "A grim, dark band... swart, slant-eyed" and the "dark" wild men of the hills. So the good guys are white and the bad guys are, erm... black.

This genetic determinism drives the plot in the most brutal manner. White men are good, "dark" men are bad, orcs are worst of all. While 10,000 orcs are massacred with a kind of Dungeons and Dragons version of biological warfare, the wild men left standing at the end of the battle are packed off back to their homes with nothing more than slapped wrists.

We also get a sneak preview of the army that's going to be representing the forces of darkness in part three. Guess what: "Dark faces... black eyes and long black hair, and gold rings in their ears... very cruel wicked men they look". They come from the east and the south. They wield scimitars and ride elephants.

Perhaps I'd better come right out and say it. The Lord of the Rings is racist. It is soaked in the logic that race determines behaviour. Orcs are bred to be bad, they have no choice. The evil wizard Saruman even tells us that they are screwed-up elves. Elves made bad by a kind of devilish genetic modification programme. They deserve no mercy.

To cap it all, the races that Tolkien has put on the side of evil are then given a rag-bag of non-white characteristics that could have been copied straight from a BNP leaflet. Dark, slant-eyed, swarthy, broad-faced - it's amazing he doesn't go the whole hog and give them a natural sense of rhythm.

Scratch the surface of Tolkien's world and you'll find a curiously 20th-century myth. Begun in the 1930s, published in the 1950s, it's shot through with the preoccupations and prejudices of its time. This is no clash of noble adversaries like the Iliad, no story of our common humanity like the Epic of Gilgamesh. It's a fake, a forgery, a dodgy copy. Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain.

But it's the same with The Attack of the Clones - I've got no choice. Maybe the fizzy pop will go to my head, maybe the Pearl and Dean music will be able to work its magic, but I'm worried that the popcorn is going to taste a bit wrong - I'm worried that childhood isn't going to be quite so much fun the second time around.

[Felix the Cat]

Tolkien, Hitler, and Nordic Heroism (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=4127)

A SHADOWY, evil overlord hides himself amid an unmapped mountain range. There he wields absolute power over fanatics and slaves, scheming for domination over the free peoples of the world. He sends forth assassins into peaceful lands and cities, spreading terror among civilians.

A capsule history of the past six months? No, that’s the plot of the movie I’m going to see tonight—The Lord of the Rings. Director Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures, 1994) could not have known how timely its release would prove—coming as it does as America hunts down a terror network built on a theology of evil, a perversion of Islam which promises eternal sensual reward for the reckless slaughter of civilians. The Lord of the Rings speaks to current events. It also touches on the most important themes of Western civilization—freedom, faith, and what it means to be a hero.

The Birth of Middle Earth

As a teenager, J.R.R. Tolkien neglected his Latin and Greek to study Norse. And Finnish. And Anglo-Saxon. Tolkien thrilled at studying medieval eddas and sagas, and mastering dusty grammars to decode half-forgotten tales. At Oxford, he made himself the university’s expert in Nordic literature, and won a prestigious chair which he’d hold for the next four decades.

What attracted Tolkien to these tales was their unique, heroic ethos. Written down by recently Christianized barbarians, stories such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight intertwined the old, pagan values of individualism, courage and promise-keeping with Biblical themes of self-sacrifice, defense of the helpless, and piety towards the One God. Thus were the warriors of the North civilized, and urged to restrain their swords by the codes of Hebrew prophets and Christian theologians. The grandsons of the Viking raiders began to bind themselves to the Ten Commandments and Augustine’s "just war" theory.

Tolkien saw in this literature a great, unsung moment in the birth of the West. Like the Baron de Montesquieu, Tolkien saw as specifically "Nordic" the individualism and hatred for tyranny that pervades these sagas, which set medieval and modern man apart from the obedient subjects of Rome and Byzantium. (See David Gress’ From Plato to NATO for more on this fascinating connection.)

This freeman’s spirit survived for centuries in the stubborn cantons of Switzerland, the "free cities" of the Holy Roman Empire, and the gentry of England; the privileges won by Anglo-Saxons from their kings formed the basis of English Common Law, and its great modern descendant—the U.S. Bill of Rights. (See Wilhelm Röpke’s The Social Crisis of Our Time and Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order for documentation and analysis.)

The work of Tolkien’s close friend C.S. Lewis also refers to "the North" as the source of individualism and resistance to unjust authority; in The Chronicles of Narnia, his heroes’ battle cry is "for Narnia and the North." In Narnia, as in The Lord of the Rings, the heroes were based on medieval, Northern European knights, who fought for free societies based on tradition, custom, and courage—against slave armies recruited from southern climes, who carried scimitars, lived in the desert, and cringed before Oriental despots. (Of course, that brings us back to current events...)

The Modern Barbarians

It is ironic that even as Tolkien wrote to immortalize the great synthesis of Northern heroism with Biblical morality, modern barbarians labored to reverse it. The proto-Nazi "Völkisch" movement, born in the blood and humiliation of Napoleon’s conquest of Germany, had for a century agitated against Judaeo-Christian "softness," in favor of pagan ruthlessness. (Peter Viereck’s Metapolitics [Capricorn, 1961] traces this re-barbarization of German thought in the 19th century.) Völkisch boosters of Nordic literature ignored its heroic individualism in favor of its residues of pagan tribalism, "deconstructing" the Judaeo-Christian elements as "inauthentic" overlays on the "pure" originals. The artistic pinnacle of this project appeared in Wagner’s grand operas, based on "pure" pagan sources. Its political apogee came with the victory of a Völkish-socialist demagogue in Germany.

While Adolf Hitler was careful at first to conceal his neo-pagan agenda, his followers were not: Heinrich Himmler created the SS explicitly as a pagan parody of the Society of Jesus, conducted extensive research attempting to rehabilitate medieval witchcraft, and held torchlit liturgies to Odin and other Norse gods. Hitler’s ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, issued tracts denouncing the Gospels. Josef Goebbels aspired to wipe out "after the last Jew, the last priest." Hitler’s ally, General Erich Ludendorff, called for the abolition of Christianity in Germany. By 1936, Hitler was suppressing Catholic trade unions, movements and schools, and forming amongst Protestants a militaristic "German Christian" church that would sanction the regime’s savage anti-Semitism. Hitler opined to Albert Speer that he wished Germany had been converted to Islam instead of Christianity, the better to suit it to ruthless warfare.

Fighting for the True North

As a fervent Catholic, a veteran of the Somme, and a genuine scholar of Nordic cultures, Tolkien was not blind to these events. In 1938, Tolkien denounced the Nazis’ "wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine." When German publishers Rütten and Loening wished to translate The Hobbit from English, they wrote him, inquiring whether his name was of "Aryan" origin. Tolkien’s reply dripped scorn:

I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is, Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.

As he would write his son, Michael, in 1941 (then a cadet training for the British army):

...I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler... Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble, northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor ever more early sanctified and Christianized.

We see in Tolkien’s life, opinions, and work an enduring rebuff to the totalitarian evils of his century. The moral key to The Lord of the Rings is the refusal of ruthlessness and the immutability of the moral law. The Ring is a mighty weapon of war—but profoundly tinged with evil. The Ring may not be used, even against the Dark Lord himself, lest its user be corrupted and become what he hates. Some means are so evil that no end can justify them. Some laws are so sacred that we must willingly die rather than violate them. We may never target the innocent in order to weaken the guilty. These lessons, which Tolkien drew from the Christian, heroic sagas of the North, should linger in our minds and restrain our passions—especially in time of war.

[Ixtab]

Yeah, I remember this. Rants like this just make Jews look foolish and paranoidThe man who wrote the article is an idiot, but he's quite right about the ethnic patriotism present in the book and the film.

[Atlas]

I remember about one actor of this movie saying that the increase of muslims and non-white in Europe was a disaster, because he like the culture and heritage of the White man and his civilization, that it's a beautiful one and worth to be saved. He was almost forced to apologize but he didn't and even repeated himself later. Great courage.

[Felix the Cat]

The man who wrote the article is an idiot, but he's quite right about the ethnic patriotism present in the book and the film.
These people see "ethnic patriotism" in poinsettia plants...

[Niko Bellic]

There is an entire sub-forum on Stormfront devoted to this lunacy.



It's just a story!

[Petr]

It's just a story!

And cigar is just a cigar...

Those guys are applying Jungian psychoanalysis, claiming that Tolkien was bringing forth hidden Aryan archetypes, even possibly against his own will or unconsciously. These archetypes then influence our own collective racial unconsciousness.


Petr

[Björn]

Ironic how after rationalists lose all restraint to their paranoia they begin to see threats in harmless fantasy. Anything that offers a point of view outside of mear laws and physics is an enemy. Dripping with NaZiSm!

I like LoTR for certain things but it's just a modern spin on ancient epics. A little Christian world view here, a little equality there. None the less, beggers can't be choosers and I will take what I can get as far as something resembling European culture. The first one had good atmosphere atleast.

I will say that this movie set has racial undertones but it seems to go no further than moderate. Nothing too radical imo. It doesn't surprise me one of the actors said it was bad the muzzies came to Europe.

[Vindex]

I think there is something to the type of people Lord of the Rings attracts, when I went and watched the movies in the local movie house. It was like something from another time, all White decently dressed, respectful people, no wiggers,niggers or other sub-people. I was more amazed by the people around me then the movie.

[Björn]

I think there is something to the type of people Lord of the Rings attracts, when I went and watched the movies in the local movie house. It was like something from another time, all White decently dressed, respectful people, no wiggers,niggers or other sub-people. I was more amazed by the people around me then the movie.

That's another good attraction to the movie. There is something predominantly white about the movie that has little displacement among the other races. I still have difficulty figuring out just exactly how they got away with making this film without a designated "black dude".

[Earl_Cerberus]

remember about one actor of this movie saying that the increase of muslims and non-white in Europe was a disaster, because he like the culture and heritage of the White man and his civilization, that it's a beautiful one and worth to be saved.

That would be John Rhys-Davies, more here:

The Lord of the Rings' GIMLI speaks up for the West (http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=1618)

A little Christian world view here, a little equality there. None the less, beggers can't be choosers and I will take what I can get as far as something resembling European culture.

Yes they can be choosers by rejecting ALL judeo-christianity and returning to The Old Ways (which some call Paganism).

Sadly Tolkien himself was never able to completely purge himself of this judeo-christianity and become a Pagan Overman, but his work does have alot of Pagan themes, rather the judeo-christians like it or not, and many are well written about in the following link:

Paganism: Part III - The One Ring By Varg Vikernes (http://www.burzum.org/eng/library/paganism03.shtml)

[Felix the Cat]

Tolkien’s Mythos (http://www.barnesreview.com/Tolkien/tolkien.html) (2002)

According to a survey by the Folio Society in 1997, as well as a poll by Waterstone’s, the booksellers, in January of that year The Lord of the Rings was voted readers’ “favorite book of all time.” J.R.R. Tolkien, a strong advocate of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, is described by many as the greatest writer of the 20th century. The filming of the book popularized it once more and stimulated speculation as to what fueled this extraordinary work. While many aficionados are content to treat The Lord of the Rings as merely an epic fantasy, some critics have detected deeper meanings, such as an underlying repugnance for the industrialization of the countryside and the carnage of war.

By Stephen Goodson, B.A., Lic.Germ.Phil.

In June 1997 Ross Shimmon, chief executive of the Library Association of Great Britain, commented: “It is astonishing that The Lord of the Rings has this impact. The idea of a parallel world . . . I wonder whether it’s something to do with trying to make sense of the world around us.”

A 20-year subscription to the journal Candour, and a faithful preservation of its volumes, may well provide clues as to what were J.R.R. Tolkien’s innermost thoughts, ideas and beliefs.

Candour was founded by A.K. Chesterton, a cousin of G.K. Chesterton, as a successor to Truth magazine, of which he had previously been deputy editor. Chesterton, a distinguished veteran of two world wars, had earlier edited the publications of the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, in the 1930s.

In 1954 he established the League of Empire Loyalists, whose antics and interventions at Conservative Party meetings proved to be a constant source of irritation and embarrassment to prime ministers Eden and Macmillan. In 1967 the League merged with the British National Party, the Greater Britain Movement and the Racial Preservation Society to form the National Front. Chesterton assumed the role of leader.

In 1973 Tolkien’s copies of Candour were sold out of his estate. In 1997 this writer inherited these newsletters from Chesterton’s secretary, Moyna Traill-Smith. The quotations from Candour that follow were all underlined by Tolkien with a red ballpoint pen.

The dissolution of the British Empire was viewed by Tolkien as a tragedy, which would have permanent negative consequences for its indigenous populations:

“Africa is not peopled by black Europeans, but is a continent full of tribes mentally and morally at the dawn of history. Self-government does not mean democracy. Liberia and Abyssinia are two warning lights. African hegemony would lead to the suicide of the white community in East and Central Africa and to the ruin of African hopes of sustained progress.” (August 3/10, 1956, 44)

Tolkien was disillusioned about the effectiveness of modern democracy and considered both the media and high finance to be inimical to its success:

“The concentration of the power of the press has long since made a mockery of whatever degree of informed democracy we may have once known.” (February 10, 1956, 50)

The true equation is “democracy” = government by world financiers:

The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or what is most important of all, the banker of the backer. Enthroned above all, in a manner without parallel in all past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic, and delivering oracles in a language not understanded [sic] of the people. (July 13, 1956, 12)

It was in the field of monetary reform that Tolkien displayed his most passionate concern. His indignation about the evil of usury—the creation of money out of nothing and then lending it out at interest—is reflected repeatedly:

There should only be one source of money; one fountainhead from which flows the nation’s blood to vitalize commerce and industry, ensure economic equity and justice and safeguard the welfare of the people. . . . In other words, it has always been and still is our contention that the prerogative of creating and issuing the money of the nation should be restored to the state. (August 3/10, 1956, page 48)

Utilizing the above background, a brief exegesis of Lord may be attempted. The center of all evil is the Dark Lord Sauron, who has enslaved the people of Middle-Earth through the rings of power. There are seven rings for the dwarf lords, five for the elf kings, nine for mortal men, and one to rule and bind them all in darkness and slavery forever. These gold rings were “forged” in the fires of Mount Doom and are symbolic of the central banks and their monopolistic powers, which enable them to create money out of nothing and lend it out at interest to the gullible people. With their unlimited financial power, they are able to control the mass media and spellbind the general public with their propaganda. Eventually good prevails over evil, and the Ring wraiths, the orcs and Uruk-Hai monsters are defeated.

So who was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien? Did he support the National Front? Probably not in any meaningful way, but indisputably he was sympathetic to its anti-immigration and anti-Common Market policies, having endorsed Chesterton’s views for over two decades.

There is little doubt that he was a patriot and that his conviction that the civilizing effects of the British Empire were a blessing to be enjoyed by all, has been proven correct, The torment of death, debt and destruction which Africa has subsequently endured, bears regrettable testimony to that fact.

Above everything else Tolkien may be judged as an ardent supporter of monetary reform. He understood that money is not a form of wealth but a medium for the exchange of goods and services, He sought social justice through the adoption of an honest money system, which would distribute the benefits of the technological age to all mankind, and provide a secure basis for a future of progress and prosperity.

Tolkien could have written a treatise on political economy, and if published, it would in all likelihood have achieved only a limited circulation. By employing a powerful allegory, he has subconsciously embraced and influenced the minds of untold millions with his mythos.