The Lord Of The Rings is RACIST~!

[Guest Flyboy]

I got the URL from Snopes.com (their message board), and thought it would be good to discuss.

 

THE Lord of the Rings trilogy by JRR Tolkien has been denounced as "an epic rooted in racism" by a respected acadmic.

 

Dr Stephen Shapiro, an expert in cultural studies, race and slavery, accused the author of using the novels to make racial prejudice innocent - by presenting bigotry through a fantasy world.

 

Speaking just days before the film of The Two Towers, the second part of the classic series, opens across the UK, Dr Shapiro said the books represented anxieties about immigration in mid-1950s Britain.

 

The academic claimed: "Put simply, Tolkien’s good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde."

 

His comments were attacked by Harper Collins, publishers of the trilogy, and the Tolkien Society, who insisted the writer was not a racist.

 

Dr Shapiro said that in the trilogy, a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against the onset of a foreign horde. This reflected long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-European populations, he added.

 

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 tribal Africans or Aborigines. The recent films amplified a "fear of a black planet" and exaggerated this difference by insisting on stark white-black colour codes, Dr Shapiro insisted.

 

He said: "Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because he wanted to recreate a mythology for the English that had been destroyed by foreign invasion. He felt organic English culture had been destroyed by the Normans. There is the notion that foreigners destroy culture and there was also a fantasy that there was a solid homogeneous English culture there to begin with, which was not the case because there were Celts and Vikings and a host of other groups."

 

The trilogy even racially stereotypes the Scots, according to Dr Shapiro.

 

He added: "One can read the book as a kind of ideal of Great Britain. For instance, the dwarves were his notion of what Scots were like. It is like a southern England cliché of a dour, muscular race and that represents the Scots in the book.

 

"We have a pure village ideal which is being threatened by new technologies and groups coming in. I think the film has picked up on this by colour coding the characters in very stark ways.

 

"For instance, the fellowship is portrayed as über-Aryan, very white and there is the notion that they are a vanishing group under the advent of the other, evil ethnic groups.

 

"The Orcs are a black mass that doesn’t speak the languages and are desecrating the cathedrals.

 

"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. The mass appeal of The Lord of the Rings, and the recent movies, may well rest on racist codes."

 

Dr Shapiro said that the trilogy, begun in the 1930s and published in the 1950s, was written at the onset of decolonisation, when the first mass waves of immigrants from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent came to Britain. The Midlands, Tolkien’s model for the Shire, was becoming a multicultural region.

 

Barry Clarke, a spokesman for Harper Collins, said Dr Shapiro had got his dates mixed up.

 

He said: "The copyright for The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in the series, was 1954. Tolkien would have finished writing the book quite a bit before the mid-50s and certainly the idea would have come a number of years before, given the sheer size of the book - so I think the timing is out.

 

"A number of academics have commented on Tolkien’s work and this is the first time anybody has ever seen these issues in it. Of course, if one looks hard enough at many great epics, you can extrapolate what you like out of it, particularly if you have academic kudos behind you."

 

He added: "A number of people have said that they think The Lord of the Rings could be an allegory for the Second World War or indeed the first, as Tolkien fought in it, but it was never a view that he agreed with. His great abiding passion and interest came from the Icelandic saga’s and mythology, and this was his version of one of those sagas."

 

Richard Crawshaw, a trustee for the Tolkien Society said: "There was definitely no racial intent in his work. He detested racism."

 

The Two Towers opens in the UK next Wednesday.

 

Discuss.

[Guest C.H.U.D.]

The political correctness crowd won't be happy until they ruin everything. Yawn.

[Guest razazteca]

one of the cable channels like the History or TLC tried to link the books to WWI and WWII.

[Guest Flyboy]

LotR is basically "good vs. evil" and I know that's how people felt towards WWII so I can see where people could link the two.

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

LOTR is linked to the world wars in the way that every piece of fiction written by someone who experienced them is. It's an interesting literary curiosity, and made made me appreciate more just how much of an impact those wars had.

Saruman was evil and his title was "The White". That's contradictory to the racism argument.

[Guest LaParkaMarka]

Saruman started off as Saruman the White, but then he sort of turned on the good guys. As I vaguely recall from the books, he wanted to be Saruman the Multicoloured or somesuch. So once he became evil, he lost the title of "White" to someone else. So that actually kind of does fit in with the "racist" theory.

 

I actually thought this post was going to be about the evil army of men in Two Towers that really looked Indian/Arabic. I mean, they even had elephants.

 

I'm kind of suprised that all the elves are white though. I mean, wouldn't all the different races in Middle Earth have varying skin pigmentations among themselves, like the humans?

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

Interesting, I didn't remember any of that stuff about Saruman from the books at all. I guess I should read them again.

I've heard the racism claim before, but it was much less thought out than this, more a vague generalization about how the farther east you are, the more evil you are. I think that there might be a few racist undertones in the story, but they're there merely as a byproduct of the era in which it was written, like the comparisons with the war. Tolkien wasn't writing in a vacuum, things like that have to seep in whether he intended them to or not. On the whole, I think you can read and appreciate the books without it having much consequence.

[Guest Slapnuts00]

haha, I've never seen Lord Of The Rings but this reminds me of the Critic episode where he reviewed the new politically correct James Bond which discourages smoking and encourages abstinence from sex in James Bond: No Means No. lol.

[Guest Mole]

Plain and simple.

 

Good=White

Evil=Black

 

Besides, if the orcs were white, it wouldn't be that scary.

 

Actually, during Two Towers, when the Elves come to Helms Deep, my friend Kobi yells "It's the Jews."

 

And is kind of right if you think about it.

[Guest Flyboy]

I mean, wouldn't all the different races in Middle Earth have varying skin pigmentations among themselves, like the humans?

If you think about it... everyone in LotR is white. Not a single black, Hispanic, Asian, and <insert all other races here> on Middle Earth (I've only seen the movies. I have the books, just haven't read them).

 

I'm not going to side with the claims because I know Tolkien mean for his books to come out that way.

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

If you think about it... everyone in LotR is white. Not a single black, Hispanic, Asian, and <insert all other races here> on Middle Earth

Well, Tolkien was writing the books to serve as a kind of English mythology, since England really had no mythology of it's own, and the vast majority of English people are white.

[Guest Flyboy]

Ah, that explains it.

 

Thanks, IDRM.

[Guest kkktookmybabyaway]

Hmm, it makes sense now why Gandalf (sp?) is called "the WHITE." All that's missing is the hood...

 

Please. I want to bash this academic in the face w/ a shovel. Anyone remember some d*psh*t academic accuse the Lion King of being racist due to the hyenas?...

[Guest spiny norman]

White has always represented goodness and purity, black represents evil. While this generalisation almost certainly came from racist origins, it has stuck and is accepted in today's society.

 

So many villains have been black in appearance, the only exception to the rule I can think of are Stormtroopers, and even they had Darth Vader and the Emperor in black to control them.

 

So, in conclusion, it is racist indirectly, but so's about 90% of good v. evil stories, so it's nothing special and should be just accepted.

[Guest kkktookmybabyaway]

Yes but the Stormtroopers are cloned from Jango Fett, who is a person of color...

[Guest Youth N Asia]

The guys started writing the books in the very early 1900's...I mean at the beginning. They came out years later cause he spent so long with it. He took time to create an entire world and languages and everything.

 

So if there's any racism it was just the times.

 

Is it any worse then any Martin Lawrence movie where you get 4 I hate White People jokes just in the trailer alone?

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

White has always represented goodness and purity, black represents evil. While this generalisation almost certainly came from racist origins, it has stuck and is accepted in today's society.

I don't think it did come from racist origins, since white=good, black=evil has been around for a very, very long time. Before white people would have been in any kind of position to make that generalization. I don't know where it came from, but if I had to guess, I'd say it has to do with night and day. Evil doings best done under the cover of darkness and all that.

If anything, I think the racism would have been applied to it later, since black people aren't actually black, but have many different skin tones, and the same is true for white people.

[Guest Dr. Wrestlingphysics]

This argument seems to come around every time there is an epic good v evil film where so-called academics, who should have better things to do, look for "blackness" on the evil side, and "whiteness" on the good side just so they can cry "Racism" and get their 5 minutes of fame on some news website!

 

Dammit, if any race should complain it should be the British, as Brits always seem to be the bad guys in US films!

[Guest Lord of The Curry]

Believe it or not, the word "niggard" is used in the third book in the LOTR's series, Return of The King. Aragorn calls Faramir said word.......

[Guest Nevermortal]

Dear Mr. Shapiro,

 

You have more time on your hands than I do.

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

He should be free to say niggard, it isn't racial. In this day and age you probably shouldn't, but then LotR wasn't written in this day and age.

[Guest DrTom]

What an utter crock of shit. The PC crowd and so-called "academics" won't be happy until they've pissed on every classic ever published. The LOTR trilogy is an epic tale of good and evil, and there's no racism present in it. Funny that stupid claims like this weren't heard *before* the movie franchise basically began minting its own money.

 

The guys started writing the books in the very early 1900's...I mean at the beginning.

Tolkien was born in 1892. He started working on The Hobbit circa 1933, and that book was published in 1937. Around that time, he started working on "the sequels," and the LOTR trilogy was completed in 1948. The books were published in 1954 and 1955. Tolkien was very affected by WWII, which is why so many people see elements of it in the trilogy, particularly the first book.

[Guest bob_barron]

I thought LOTR was SILLY!~

 

Seriously- what the fuck?? I saw the movie today and ummmm yea- that guy should get laid instead or something

[Guest kkktookmybabyaway]

Speaking of niggard, years ago some aide to the D.C. mayor said "niggardly" in a memo and was forced to resign because a bunch of pinheads thought he was racist. God I love using that word...

[Guest CoreyLazarus416]

You really wanna get into it, "nigger" wasn't even originally a racial slur (as to what I've been told by a few, but my sources have been wrong before).

 

Just more proof that you can't say a damn thing if you're white without being called a racist.

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

I've thought that "nigger" was negro with a thick accent. So no, I guess that wouldn't be a slur.

[Guest J*ingus]

I do think the guy's argument contains a kernel of truth, the good guys are all white and the evil orcs are not, although I doubt Tolkien meant anything harmful by it. But it gets buried under his political agenda.

[Guest kkktookmybabyaway]

Poop contains kernals too, big deal...

[Guest Ram]

I've thought that "nigger" was negro with a thick accent. So no, I guess that wouldn't be a slur.

I'd think it's "niggard" with a thick accent.

 

I don't think it had any association with "negro" until..well, you know.

[Guest CoreyLazarus416]

Ram, you are correct. Hence why the song "Rock N' Roll Nigger" is not racist at all.