THE LEFT VS PROFESSOR TOLKIEN
Well of course this was
bound to happen. Some slope-browed troglodyte with a Masters in post-colonialist queer studies or some such vocationally-oriented subject has managed to get his cargo pants in a giant wad over "Lord of the Rings". This time it's racism.
And where is this exciting revelation that an elderly Oxford academic specialising in Scandanavian philology in the early and middle decades of the 20th century was not into post-modernist flapdoodle published? Only in the
Al-Guardian, that's where! Heigh ho...
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.
Do thay have some sort of computer programe at the editorial offices of the Al-Guardian churning this boilerplate gimcrackery out by the metric tonne or what? I have detected a pattern at work here:
1) Take example of popular culture
2) Find something in it that from a distance and in poor lighting conditions might be mistaken for something else
3) Use this "insight" as a means to denounce anything good
4) Wash, rinse, repeat as needed until all originality, creativity and spirit has been leached out of western culture and Ingsoc rules Airtstrip One!
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.
As Professor Tolkien said himself when actually addressing this question, LOTR is meant to be a sort of modern-day myth, and as such reaches back into the past. As a man of north-western Europe, it was into the common mythological heritage of that part of the world that he delved. The danger to North-western Europe has always come from the South and East, from dark-skinned people, so that's what happened in LOTR.
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.
Unacceptable to the sort of people who scratch a living at the editorial offices of the Al-Guardian, a newspaper whose chief policy is that Western culture and values are worthless, and that our policy must be to surrender to those who want to destroy us. Spare me their vision of "21st Century Britain", it sounds altogether too much like Airstrip One for my liking.
Lord of the Rings is a classic myth, and will be read and enjoyed by millions of readers for centuries to come, when Mr John Yatt and the staff of the Al-Guardian are long forgotten. And perhaps that's why they hate it. Like Smeagol, they hate the light, and hide in their cave of leftist twaddle, while the upper world continues on without them, they suppurate in their envy of things they cannot understand, but know to be better than they will ever be. Slowly but surely, leftist theoreticians are turning into life-hating Gollums.
The question of race is not, of course, completely out of bounds. The tensions between Men, Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits are very much part of the book. But how does Tolkien treat race? As something that pre-determines destiny and attitudes? Not at all. One of the key sub-plots in the book is the growing freindship between Legolas the Elf and Gimli the Dwarf, two races which are philosophically far apart. The two characters are able to transcend this tension. Hardly the work of a racist writer.
And nor is LOTR entirely immune from real-world comparisons, despite Tolkien's stated abhorrence of allegory. He himself
made the link between his portrayal of Dwarves and the image of Jews in the popular culture of his time. "The dwarves of course are quite obviously — wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic. The Hobbits are just rustic English people."
The Dwarves, of course, lust after gold and jewels - a weakness, and very reflective of popular attitudes of Jewish behaviour. But Tolkein also makes them extremely fierce and warlike - valuable allies in the War against Sauron. It's not at all a one-sided portrayal. And as to the charge (made by some weak-minded fools who no dobt take the Al-Guardian) that Professor Tolkein was an anti-semite - bullcrap.
When he was not doing terribly well financially in the 1930s, a German publisher wanted to put the book out. The Nazi government approached his publisher to disover if he was "of pure Aryan blood", and Tokein replied that if that's what they wanted he was inclined to let a German edition of the book "go hang".
"Thank you for your letter.... I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend," he wrote. "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 inquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people...."
On balance, perhaps this article on Tolkien and racism should not be fisked too heavily. Rather it should be towed out past the 12-mile limit and sunk by naval gunfire lest it become a hazard to navigation.
posted by Tom Paine at
