Warrior posted:
The very idea that
Tolkien even has a smidgen of racism is absoultely, not true, I mean sowhat, the 'heros' are fair skinned whereas the '
evil ones' are dark skinned. He, IMO is using light vs. dark to get his poing accross, therefore defining the line between good vs. evil.
That is not a good way to distinguish good from evil unless you want white racists to nod their heads and take refreshment from such symbolism. Some of them do. They
know that Tolkien was really one of them from this despite what he wrote outside his fiction about his rejection of racial theories.
I recall as a child possessing an old Oz-type book called
Toodles of Treasure-town (probably orginally my mother's or grandmother's). In it some of the
villains were black savages dressed in traditional clichéd black-African fashion. At the end of the tale they repented and were rewarded by the Glinda-the-Good clone by being given white skins.
The symbolism is horrible.
I mean, I cannot believe that there are some who see more into the color angle then there really is, Because that's all it is: COLOR.
If that is all it is, then it is
wrong to make more out of it: wrong to symbolise virtue or greater ability by lighter skin and wrong to symbolise vice or lesser ability by darker skin. That becomes strong racist imagery.
But I don't see Tolkien using light skin and dark skin symbolically in that way. His use is more complex. The browner and shorter non-Númenorean folk of
Eriador and the Wild probably come imaginatively from a common depiction in adventure historical
novels and in popularized racial theories portraying white skinned "Aryans" imposing superior civilization on darker skinned aboriginal European aboriginals. Picts were generally imagined as shorter and darker skinned. Robert E. Howard purposely protrayed them in the style of American Indians.
There is no evidence for this at all ... but light skinned Europeans liked to believe that light skin indicated superiority. Spanish nobility mostly attempted to trace their ancestry to Gothic origin rather than aboriginal origin.
In medieval
tales peasants were usually portrayed as shorter, darker and uglier than the nobility. Tolkien's Númenoreans, good or bad, are deemed to be of more noble descent than other
men, somehow innately less savage and more civilized, descendants of those who most resisted
Melkor (aside from shepherd folk in the central lands who must be meant to be proto-Hebrews).
In his later writings Tolkien partly deconstructed this, declaring that despite what
Gondorians and
Faramir wished to believe, the
Dunlendings were more closely related to the people of
Gondor than were the
Rohirrim and their grudge against those of Númenorean descent not without foundation.
Tolkien himself had intellectually rejected racist theories and had probably rejected class theories based on nobility but old ideas still have power to move the imagination.
Writers often still prefer Robin Hood to be a wrongfully disinherited Earl of Hungtondon rather than a yeoman as he appears in the genuine ballads. The myth of nobility in bloodlines dies hard in story, even among those who in real life have no belief that those born to privilege are innately better than anyone else. Literary tropes used by an author may not be what the author believes in reality.
