Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity - Patrick Curry

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is racism. Now it is true that Tolkien’s evil creatures are frequently ‘swart, slant-eyed,’ and tend to come from the south (‘the cruel Haradrim’) and east (‘the wild Easterlings’) – both threatening directions in Tolkien’s ‘moral cartography.’ It is also true that black – as in Breath, Riders, Hand, Years, Land, Speech – is often a terrible colour, especially when contrasted with Gandalf the White, the White Rider, and so on. But the primary association of black here is with night and darkness, not race. And there are counter-examples: Saruman’s sign is a white hand; Aragorn’s standard is mostly black; the Black Riders were not actually black, except their outer robes; and the Black Stone of Erech is connected with Aragorn’s forebear, Isildur.

      Overall, Tolkien is drawing on centuries of such moral valuation, not unrelated to historical experience attached to his chosen setting in order to convey something immediately recognizable in the context of his story. As Kathleen Herbert noticed, Orcs sound very like the first horrified reports in Europe of the invading Huns in the fourth and fifth centuries: ‘broad-shouldered, bow-legged, devilishly effective fighters, moving fast, talking a language that sounds like no human speech (probably Turkic) and practising ghastly tortures with great relish.’ (Théoden may well have been modelled on Theodoric I, the aged Visigothic king who died leading his warriors in a charge against Attila’s Huns in the Battle of Chalons.)

      Perhaps the worst you could say is that Tolkien doesn’t actually go out of his way to forestall the possibility of a racist interpretation. (I say ‘possibility’ because it is ridiculous to assume that readers automatically transfer their feelings about Orcs to all the swart or slant-eyed people they encounter in the street.) But as Virginia Luling has pointed out, the appearance of racism is deceptive, ‘not only because Tolkien in his non-fictional writing several times repudiated racist ideas, but because … in his sub-creation the whole intellectual underpinning of racism is absent.’ In any case, such an interpretation, as the story in The Lord of the Rings proceeds, would get increasingly harder to maintain – and this relates to another common criticism, also voiced by Stimpson, that Tolkien’s characters divide neatly into ‘good and evil, nice and nasty.’ But as anyone who has really read it could tell you, the initial semi-tribal apportioning of moral probity increasingly breaks down, as evil emerges ‘among the kingly Gondorians, the blond Riders of Rohan, the seemingly incorruptible wizards, and even the thoroughly English hobbit-folk of the Shire.’ (Incidentally, hobbits appear to be brown-skinned, not white.) By the same token, Frodo, Gollum, Boromir and Denethor all experience intense inner struggles over what the right thing to do is, with widely varying outcomes; and as Le Guin has noted, several major characters have a ‘shadow.’ In Frodo’s case, there are arguably two: Sam and Gollum, who is himself doubled as Gollum/Stinker and Sméagol/Slinker, as Sam calls him.

      ‘If you want to write a tale of this sort,’ Tolkien once wrote, ‘you must consult your roots, and a man of the North-west of the Old World will set his heart and the action of his tale in an imaginary world of that air, and that situation: with the Shoreless Sea of his innumerable ancestors to the West, and the endless lands (out of which enemies mostly come) to the East.’

      Thus, as Clyde Kilby recounts, when Tolkien was asked what lay east and south of Middle-earth, he replied: ‘“Rhûn is the Elvish word for east. Asia, China, Japan, and all the things which people in the West regard as far away. And south of Harad is Africa, the hot countries.” Then Mr. Resnick asked, “That makes Middle-earth Europe, doesn’t it?” To which Tolkien replied, “Yes, of course – Northwestern Europe … where my imagination comes from”.’ (In which case, as Tolkien also agreed, Mordor ‘would be roughly in the Balkans.’)

      He reacted sharply to reading a description of Middle-earth as ‘Nordic,’ however: ‘Not Nordic, please! A word I personally dislike; it is associated, though of French origin, with racialist theories …’ He also contested Auden’s assertion that for him ‘the North is a sacred direction’: ‘That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man’s home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not “sacred,” nor does it exhaust my affections.’

      It is also striking that the races in Middle-earth are most striking in their variety and autonomy. I suppose that this could be seen as an unhealthy emphasis on ‘race’; it seems to me rather an assertion of the wonder of multicultural difference. And given that most of Middle-earth’s peoples are closely tied to a particular geography and ecology, and manage to live there without exploiting it to the point of destruction, isn’t this what is nowadays called bioregionalism? But no kind of apartheid is involved: one of the subplots of The Lord of the Rings concerns an enduring friendship between members of races traditionally estranged (Gimli and Legolas), and the most important union in the book, between Aragorn and Arwen, is an ‘interracial’ marriage. As usual, the picture is a great deal more complex than the critics, although not necessarily the public, seem to see.

      A major stream of hostile Tolkien criticism can be traced back to Raymond Williams, who fathered British cultural studies, and called his method ‘cultural materialism.’ In The Country and the City, Williams noted the ‘extraordinary development of country-based fantasy, from Barrie and Kenneth Grahame through J. C. Powys and T. H. White and now to Tolkien …’ and concluded, ‘It is then not only that the real land and its people were falsified; a traditional and surviving rural England was scribbled over and almost hidden from sight by what is really a suburban and half-educated scrawl.’

      Williams has been massively influential. One could produce many other commentators since who have lambasted pastoralism in the same way. One writes of ‘the ultimate, deeply conservative, ambition of pastoral’ that it ‘falsifies the actual relations of non-city communities just as much and for the same reason that it falsifies city communities.’ For another, ‘The Pastoral allows for a direct opposition to social change, a reactionary clinging to a static present, and an often desperate belief in future improvement.’ And it fades away with ‘the possibility of social mobility and of economic progress.’ (How dated this now sounds, as we face increasingly insurmountable problems as a direct result of ‘economic progress’!)

      Let us put cultural materialism to the test by seeing how well it applies to Tolkien. According to Williams, ‘In Britain, identifiably, there is a precarious but persistent rural-intellectual radicalism: genuinely and actively hostile to industrialism and capitalism; opposed to commercialism and the exploitation of the environment; attached to country ways and feelings, the literature and the lore.’ This sounds generous, until you get to the punch-line: ‘in every kind of radicalism the moment comes when any critique must choose its bearings, between past and future … We must begin differently: not in the idealizations of one order or another, but in the history to which they are only partial and misleading responses.’ By the same token, according to Williams, in our current crises myth and revolution are opposites rather than complementary: we must have ‘real history’ oriented to a revolutionary future, not ‘myth’ dreaming of the past.

      But this emperor now has no clothes, if indeed he ever had. The mythical ‘vs.’ the actual, the ideal ‘vs.’

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