An American academic, who teaches at the Warwick University in
the United Kingdom, has described J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the
Rings trilogy as an 'epic rooted in racism'.
Dr Stephen Shapiro, an expert in cultural studies, race and
slavery, said the author used his novels to present bigotry through
a fantasy world.
Following the release in UK of the film The Two Towers, the second
in the series, Dr Shapiro told rediff.com that the books represent
anxieties about immigration in mid-1950s Britain.
He said: "Put simply, Tolkien's good guys are white and the bad
guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a
psychologically undeveloped horde."
In the trilogy, a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against a
foreign horde and this reflects long-standing Anglo-European
anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-Europeans, he said.
This is consistent with Tolkien's Nordicist convictions. He thinks
the Northern races had a culture and it was carried in the blood,
Dr Shapiro said.
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 amplify a 'fear of a black planet' and exaggerate this
difference by insisting on stark white-black colour codes, Dr
Shapiro said.
He added: "Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because he wanted to
recreate a mythology for the English, which had been destroyed by
foreign invasion. He felt the Normans had destroyed organic English
culture. 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.
"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 uber-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, which began in the 1930s and
published in the 1950s, was written at the onset of
de-colonisation, when the first immigrants from the Caribbean and
Indian subcontinent came to Britain. The Midlands, Tolkien's model
for the Shire, was becoming a multicultural region.
A spokesman for Harper Collins, publisher of the trilogy, accused
Dr Shapiro of mixing up his dates: "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 you look hard enough at many great epics, you can extrapolate
what you like, particularly if you have academic kudos behind
you.
"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 sagas and mythology, and this was his version of one of
those sagas."
