@@beckyginger3432 Certainly part of it is! If you’ve read Hyperion by Dan Simmons, it borrows some framing ideas from it. One of the characters’ stories is a series of journal entries. I hope you give it a shot!
Never knew that videos could be sponsored by books TIL This is interesting I actually didnt skip this sponsor, unlike nearly all others, which should tell you a lot Not a big reader, but this still interested me more than some random ass company / service ever could
Nobody in nomadic European warrior societies was obsessed with concepts like racial purity, which are a product of the modern era. They had no problem whatsoever absorbing and intermarrying with neighboring or subject peoples. Medieval people weren't as racist as they're often portrayed, either: Arthurian legends for example contain several Moorish knights. Medieval Europeans were far more concerned with religion than race.
@@MorrisJohn-vo2vn And? There's no historical continuity whatsoever between ancient religions and neopaganism. Your friend claiming to be an expert on ancient paganism would be like a Catholic claiming to be an expert on the Roman empire just because they're Catholic. Also, your friend just happens to be quite wrong about ancient societies' views on race. For one thing, they didn't have a concept of "race" like we do (that comes from the 19th century). For another, they made no bones about intermarrying with other peoples; the archaeology and genetics more than bear that out.
@valmarsiglia I would say a better comparison would be a seminary educted Catholic saying they know early church or a uni educted Hindu saying they know Vedic religion. This is being reconstructed using real modern reconstruction methods, a late modern tradition of reconstructions and actually being deeply motivated and interested in reconstructing it. They most definitely still bad a racial idea. Not the modern one but close enough to make comparisons and intermarriage was still rare btw "different race" people at the time.
@@MorrisJohn-vo2vn Given how little is actually known about ancient religious belief and practice, a more honest term would be "reconstructed" in scare quotes. There's a great amount of wishful thinking and modern biases and assumptions that go into all such efforts to "reconstruct" ancient religions, and such efforts say far more about the people and era in which they were made and very little to nothing about the religions they seek to emulate (just think of similar Victorian attempts to "reconstruct" ancient religions and how thoroughly Victorian they all were). And the difference between a Catholic seminarian and a neopagan is that the seminarian actually has a great deal of historical continuity with early Christianity to study, however much Catholic theology and practice has changed over the centuries.
@@MorrisJohn-vo2vnand your friend would be wrong, probably using fake history to justify their own beliefs. Tribalism existed, but it wasn't about race until the late middle ages. For a medieval English person an African or Arabian man was no more different to him than a Castilian or Polish man save from their religious beliefs. The first time something similar to a concept of race started forming in Europe was in the 12th century due to the first crusade, and it wasn't fully formed until way later, as a way to justify colonialism and establishing caste systems in colonies.
while the worldbuilding itself is undeniably inspired by england and norse mythology, i always got the impression that the actual storytelling in lotr was heavily influenced by tolkiens experiences as a ww1 soldier. you can see it in the way sauron, the ultimate bad guy in the story, doesnt even show up at any point, the heroes never ever see him just like how ww1 never actually got to see the ultimate bad guy leading the enemy nation. likewise, while the heros do get to see the enemy army up close, they only get to see them as this massive wave of evil soldiers, they cant know them as individuals, they cant make friends with them, they cant think of them as anything other than an massive wave of evil soldiers. only sometimes will they allow themselves to look at a fallen soldier and wonder what the mans name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather stayed there in peace. thank you for making this btw, loved the video!!!
I feel that the opposite is the case. Tolkien was absolutely uninterested in a modern world, even his descriptions of war are probably taken from the descriptions of ancient battles like Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. His strict dualism of good and evil also perfectly reflect his Catholic worldview, I would go as far as to say that Gollum is a parody of a more psychologically driven literature, because in Tolkien's opinion humans are not that complicated.
I'd argue that while the world wars had no influence on lotr's plot, it definitely had one on the depiction of war itself. This is especially flagrant in The Fall of Gondolin, where industrialized war is shown as a force much more destructive and uncaring to the older ways.
@@daniel5730 Tolkien (like many of the Inklings) was explicitly and less explicitly very influenced by G. K. Chesterton, an older English Catholic writer, who was primarily a journalist. He was not disinterested in the Modern world, he was critical of modernity per se - and especially _Modernism_ - in the same way as Chesterton. Just because Tolkien asserts elements of myth and history in his storytelling doesn't create some binary where he can have nothing to do with the Modern world. It's true, his battles are very well-grounded in Classical and Medieval warfare- but look at Grond, which much more resembles the kind of Modern, industrialized, specialized weapon that appeared in WWI. I cannot emphasize enough that if you read Chesterton, you will see the discourse about Modernism versus what he might call "common sense" inherent to Tolkien's novels. Hell, Tolkien said that "Chestertonian fantasy" was a "means of recovery" to heal the _modern_ world. He was thinking about now! And Catholicism, as Chesterton would say explicitly and Tolkien clearly agreed with, is not dualist. Tolkien's world isn't dualist, that interpretation comes from people imposing assumptions onto it because of their unfamiliarity with Tolkien's beliefs and influences. In Arda, as in Catholicism, evil is the privation of the good with no independent being or substance, a twisting of the natural order which is in some sense allowed to happen by the highest good. We _see_ complicated, "morally-grey" characters all throughout Tolkien's work, because - as a Catholic writer who consciously revised his work to emphasize his Catholicism - Tolkien's mortals "participate in creaturely free will" (to greater and lesser degrees), they are not categorically good nor evil.
@@Eronoc13 Let me elaborate, when I wrote that Tolkien was uninterested in modern world I've meant that he wasn't looking to explore it in his works as anything positive or remarkable. He is clearly critical of it - Sauron's force is clearly industrial and there's a whole chapter dedicated to forced industrialization of Shire, through little dialogue we have from orcs we understand that they know about moral laws but aren't following them since they are corrupted. But I will remain convicted that despite being devote Catholic, Tolkien made Middle Earth much more pagan in spirit, than it is usually thought - all his positive heroes are descendants of noble bloodlines and their appearance always mirrors their inner nobility and power, something that doesn't jive with equalizing morals of Christianity. And secondly - I still think that the world of Middle Earth is dualistic and that Tolkien wasn't interested in "Morally Grey Characters". It is clear that he valued devotion to duty and confidence in reality of good and evil. Compare the death of two kings - Theoden and Denethor; one overcame his slumber and died in a battle confident and content with his demise, while another gloated in his doubts until he was driven to madness. I think characters like Gollum and Denethor paint us a good picture of what Tolkien thought of morally grey characters. And lastly - this is where I differ from the author of this channel. While I don't agree with Tolkien politically, I think his insistence on keeping his work anachronistic and maybe even anti-modern in spirit. While I can't say that I don't enjoy Ursula Le Guinn's writing, I found that fantasy that comes from "unproblematic" authors is always enlightenment wearing a fantasy outfit, her stories with fantasy elements could be told in any other setting, but when it comes to Middle Earth the form is crucial to the substance. And overall - it feels much more authentic.
@@daniel5730I'm pretty sure moral naivity isn't tied to any religion in particular. Also you're going quite wild with that gollum theory of yours, it's going to take a bit more then this to make it convincing Edit: while I think that it's rather obvious that Tolkien was indeed willing to explore and discuss the modern times I agree he viewed them negatively. I remember being quite amused when I realised that while all characters talked in that peculiar pompous manner, the orcs spoke very much normally. But that is just a cherry on top, the more telling examples have already been listed in the main comment
My only problem is that the idea of empathy is treated as modernistic. You can find all sorts of examples throughout history of people voicing sympaties for other peoples, even if it wasn't in the way we do now. Sam's thoughts are completely realistic for the time and culture he grew up in.
It’s honestly the same fallacy that gives way to moral relativism and saying “a product of their time” in defense against prejudices and violence like slavery and based on race, sexuality, gender, etc. While it’s a valid reason for someone doing what they do because others are doing it, that doesn’t make their actions any less objectively harmful and unempathetic. The victims of that society were opposed to it and so were others who were empathetic but couldn’t have a platform to say what they wanted to say. It’s “might makes right”, might in numbers.
@@joelanderson5285 Yes I would. I would agree some wouldn't and that's cringe, but I hold a consistent worldview. Also, I don't even think this video is entirely fair towards Tolkien as it leaves out what he said about the controversy initially (although his late comments were problematic).
He doesn’t say Empathy is modernistic. He‘s saying this type of character-writing as well as this specific form of introspection are generally a product of modern literature, which is true.
@@joelanderson5285White people judge non-white cultures by that standard all the time, it is a broken record of colonisers highlighting negative aspects of cultures to justify the uncountable horrors we inflicted on them because "these people sacrifice women for not believing in their gods" while Europeans did the same to their own women, or "these people keep the heads of their enemies as trophies" when the British Museum held taxidermy heads of victims of colonisation well into the 20th/21st century. I cannot think of a single non-white culture that hasn't received dehumanizing levels of judgement from Europeans.
sure, compassion is timeless, but Sam's existence as a compassionate character is really a product of the time of the novel. Odin never stops and thinks about the perspective of the jotuns, for instance.
One could say that the Hobbits have a "more modern" outlook than most people in Middle Earth, having been raised in comfort and rarely struggling, much like many of the people who espoused modern ideals at the time of Tolkien. I wouldn't include the Men of the West as "modern" people, as their values are extremely different from the Hobbits, more prone to resort to violence and dehumanization of the enemy.
We know little of elves, and distant lords of heaven - our gods are of war, and of famine, Gondorkin, and it is from the north and west it comes. - ‘The times of Eldarion’, A Ring of Far Harad. Probably.
@@kklein He did have sexual relations with them. Plus, the Aesir and the Jötunn often get along. It is just some specific Jötunns which are dangerous (but not necessarily intentionally malevolent 😈).
@@kklein Why is the existence of a character embodying a timeless, universal, human concept somehow tied to our time when such descriptions and characters can be found most anywhere
I'm a little disappointed that this video essay doesn't mention the commentary in the books about how the orcs of Mordor loath their lord Sauron, nor of the conflicts between the orcs, which are described in the books.
@@MCArt25 Everything I just said pertains to the topic of the video essay you just watched, showing that Tolkien does *not* consider the orcs to be an evil monolith, contrary to what this video says.
This video does not mention orcs once. You claim that orcs are the focus of the video and that this video says "orcs are an evil monolith" but like... literally what the fuck are you talking about? This video is about the Haradrim. The Haradrim are humans, not orcs.
@@MarshallTheArtist No, it literally doesn't mention orcs once. The transcript of the video is in the description. Press CTRL+F and type Orc, and you'll notice exactly zero results.
Thanks! I really do value that K Klein was willing to take a sponsorship from me as an independent author; it’s something that I hope isn’t just unique to this channel.
@@rowanalexandriabennett honestly, writer to writer, putting ads for your book in RUclips videos is v smart !! I hadn’t ever thought of that (tho I’m a screenwriter and songwriter so it’s not as cut and dry as books go). catching your intended audience where they usually prowl lol
@@rowanalexandriabennett At least I have never seen anything like that sponsorship before. And it certainly worked in my case: I'll remember your book. Maybe I'll pick it up after I'm done with my current read (One Hundred Years of Solitude).
8:30 This bit about how we would interpret the same words differently as written by Tolkien vs some ancient Anglo-Saxon reminds me of Borges' short story of Don Quijote being rewritten word for word by a modern Frenchman and how that results in an entirely different work
@xCorvus7x It was a fictional story by (real author) Jorge Luis Borges, about a (fictional) French author named Pierre Menard who rewrote Don Quijote. I believe the story by Borges is called "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quijote" or something similar.
I would like to point out, not to dismiss your point but to add to it another perspective, that Tolkien also borrowed a lot from Finnish mythology and language (everyone knows the Evlish language borrowed a lot from Finnish, and Gandalf for instance has clear parables to Väinämöinen), but when Tolkien wrote his books, Finns were seen as "oriental", and a common slur for Finnish people was "China Swedes" up until the early 1940s. So although one of the antagonist groups got their influence from asiatic people, there are "asiatic" (as seen at the time) influences on "the good" side as well. I think this gives more credence to the idea that Tolkien wasn't personally racist, though that doesn't mean that his work couldn't be, and his work has been used to push racist ideas (though this in itself doesn't mean that a work is racist, racist are idiots and don't necessarily understand the works they are co-opting).
Is there any reason why Findland was seen as oriental? In my mind Finland is Nordic and thus very much European. Were there specific cultural similarities between Finland and "the East"?
@@Jack93885 Why Finns were seen as non-white? Racism has never been about anything concrete, and like with Italians and Irish people, determining who is white revolves mostly around who are seen as problematic and "lesser people". Finns were seen so in all over the world. In US it was because of the assosiation with labor union and striking and friendlyness with American Indians. In Sweden it was because of many things, including the worse social status of Finns in Sweden and Swedish ideals for race purity. Why oriental specifically? Finns share some similarities in facial structures with other Asian groups with things like narrower eyes from Finnish ansestry being a mix of germanic and uralic peoples. Another insult was "mongoloid" because of this (also used for idiots in general and for people with Down syndrome specifically). You can read more on this on Wikipedia: "Anti-Finnish sentiment"
@@nathaniel3323 And also, the words "Finn", "Finnish" and "Finland" as applied to a group of people were at one point racist slurs referring to the Sámi peoples (who were definitely seen as "other" from a Nordic perspective) and their lands rather than to the more predominantly Baltic people they reference today. "The land of mostly people who are more or less like us but also some different people" doesn't catch on as easily as "the land of the different people".
@@IaCthulhuFthagn Please site a source for that claim, cant find any result for the word Finn as a slur anywhere. Also Finnish people are quite separate from the Sámi people.
IIRC there was a mention of the fact that Easterlings and Haradrim did not exactly *chose* the dark side. They were taken by force by leaders who were corrupted and given power by Sauron. I mean, two of the Mages (the unnamed blue ones) just fucking disappeared after they went to the East, so darkness must be kinda rampant in those places and since we know that ALL humans are good by nature we could assume that shit went south in the South and East. I may or may not be pulling this out of my ass tho because for the love of God I can't remember where I heard that and was it even canon at all
@@kklein maybe? I feel really bad that I can't remember where I seen it. Point being, even disregarding that, in the grand scheme of things, all of humans, heck, all of the world is inherently good in Tolkien's work. At the very least redeemable. Which Sam's line is pointing out, I think. It doesn't make those depiction non-racist but at least makes them bit more palatable, in my humble opinion. Its maybe too "modern" as you said, but that way of thinking ("Yes, those people look ugly and fight on enemies' side, but they are still humans, therefore they are inherently good") is perfectly in-line with Tolkien's own beliefs. For a brief moment Sam became a vessel of an author. This line made me think for a good week when I first read the books back in the middle school and may or may not changed my world view entirely. Its beautiful. However, as you said, it definitely can be seen as a bit out of place. Also, can we talk about orcs for a second? I think that the most problematic part of the Legendarium is them, not Harad or East, since, you know, those are still humans and therefore redeemable by definition, but orcs are just kinda... Evil. As far as I know, Tolkien himself had a huge back and forth with the question of "Who exactly are orcs and are they redeemable?" since he was devoted christian and believed that everyone can be redeemed but orcs aren't humans therefore should they be redeemable? If yes, then why we see exactly 0 "good" orcs? I mean, "Men of the East" at least got one humanizing line, while orcs are always bad without exception and THAT I find racist
@@VasiliyOgniovI think that's because what Orcs were to Tolkien, they were the people he fought against during world war 1, wielding machines and poisons, the same ones that caused him to be taken from his ideal pastoralism to a land destroyed by technology and war, if nothing else the trenches decorating the country side, not to even claim they were Germans. I think this is why they aren't humans in narative, why they wield the name of Orco, a destruktive Ogre from Italian folklore, ultimately deriving from Orcus, the god of the underworld and why they hold an italian name instead of the Germanic, he was drawing from. As for the appearance issue, the "mongoloid" description he has in the book also has a basis in WW1, where the Germans were refered to as Huns, a mongol culture. Then again Tolkien was also the man of his time and he can't escape that.
@@VasiliyOgniov I think the idea of orcs as inherrently evil is better understood through the lens of spiritual warfare, rather than race. You mention his Christian (moreover, Catholic) faith and I think it's relevant here. That there are legions doing the work of corrupted/fallen beings, set against all that is good and holy, is a key idea in Catholicism. If Tolkein ever attended a Low Mass he would likely have recited the prayer to St. Michael as it was recited after such masses throughout near the entirity of his life. It finishes, "by the power of God thrust Satan down to hell and with him those other wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls." These beings that in the Catholic faith are considered to be of a spiritual/(primarily) internal nature are represented in a more physical form in Arda. If you consider Melkor as an analogue of Satan then it is clear how his creations, the orcs, trolls, and dragons are ontoligically evil while the men and elves, known as the Children of Ilúvatar, are ontoligcally good. Eru giving blessing to the creation of the dwarves would also set them in the good camp too. While I appreciate the intention, I find the idea of applying the lense of race to analyse a myth of ontological good and evil rather problematic in itself.
Something of note is that Tolkien himself believed that the Blue Wizards might have helped out in the Eastern Lands and prevented the “dark” people from all falling to Sauron’s influence. In fact without their help there might have been a ton more Easterlings and Southerners the main characters would’ve had to contend with and their win likely wouldn’t have been possible. Anyways this does imply he saw them as real people and redeemable. His entire viewpoint actually was that everyone was redeemable and it’s one of the reasons why he grappled so much with the origins of the Orcs, I don’t think he believed anything in the Legendarium was truly 100% evil or irredeemable. It’s for these reasons I don’t think Tolkien intended for it to be racist to be honest and I think even as you put, it’s quite a bit more complicated than black = bad = racism.
Interestingly, that version of the Blue Wizards is from later writings and musings iirc. The earlier versions had the Blue wizards falling like Saruman and becoming evil. His reevaluation of the Blue Wizards seems to occur alongside his reevaluation of the Orcs, and whether they are true Evil or perverted Good, and he never answered that definitively.
Yeah, he reached the conclusion he couldn't make anything in his Legendarium irrevocably evil, as it clashed directly with his catholic beliefs that no one is beyond redemption and good if they make the choice to pursue it
Way I saw it was that the Haradrim are seen from the perspective of the men of the northern areas. They are deemed evil and dark because they side with Sauron, but this doesn't mean they actually ARE evil. They are, much as you said in the video, seen through the sort of eyes an Anglo-Saxon would have looked through when thinking of Africa, or China. Strange, unknowable, foreign and usually subversive. This, however, does not make this view true, and indeed, to my mind at least, the scene with Sam, where he looks on the body of the dead Harad man, proved as much. In that scene, we are struck by the realization that these are men, human beings just like us, and that they have been brought here, likely coerced in some fashion, or tricked, into servitude. We do not know whether the Haradrim hate their master, whether they rebel against him, and while I think a Haradrim character would have been awesome, we do not get this in the story since, as you stated, it ultimately has nothing to do with the story as a whole. It could just be me, and my reading of the book, but to me, Tolkien proved himself not to be a racist by that beautiful scene. That he even took the time to write it, to make the reader feel for what could have easily been left a faceless evil thrall, to me speaks volumes. I will premise this, though, with the statement that Tolkien's world was different from our own, and he was a product of that world, and thus, even if he had not intended any hateful message, it is possible that he was influenced by the prevailing views of the time. I am not trying to say that Tolkien, as much as I love his works, was a perfect man, indeed no human ever can be, but I honestly do not agree with views of him being racist.
Rhey were once colonized by Numenorians who extracted resources. Too bad most people don't read the appendix or books like the silmarillion because of oversimplification
This is something I really wish the Rings of Power show had the actual creativity to explore. Maybe the men of Harad Are just tricked or coerced into Sauron's service/alliance, or maybe they have some real legitimate grievances with the Gondorians and their Numenorian ancestors (who did colonize all over the world and did, thru the later 2nd Age, become ruthless imperialists). Perhaps the people of Harad would even be offended that the Gondorians assume they're misled or tricked into siding with the strongman who promises them revenge against those proud men of the West who lorded over them before (even if Sauron would, sooner or later, prove a nastier master). That's the kind of racism I feel in Tolkien's writing: not a personal, virulent mouth-foaming hatred, but more of a disinterested, early 20th c. English attitude that, for instance, takes the existence of the British Empire as a baseline good, that doesn't think much about or interrogate what life is like for the people who aren't English under that system (sorta like Churchill's outlook in his writings on Empire and history).
Even knowing that Lovecraft was in fact racist even by the standards of his time (though he often wrote characters to be even more racist than himself, which is wacky, and conversely sometimes revealed through his writing a reverence for Asian culture and ethnicities, whether through "sloe-eyed" goddess of beauty Nathicana or the "exotic yet familiar" surroundings in the Crawling Chaos), this is how I prefer to read his works, too- Not as revealing the real author's obscene bigotry, but as reflecting the stodgy white New England attitudes of the characters, which works well with the irony that those characters often turn out to have "bad blood" in the form of ancestors who were cannibals, evil sorcerers, devil worshipers or fish.
@@johnstajduhar9617 I'm pretty sure that it's mentioned somewhere that Haradrim joined Sauron exactly because Gondorians had oppressed them in the past to the point that Sauron seemed the better option, and also that a good number of them still rejected Sauron and instead joined with the Blue Wizards (but obviously those are not the ones Sauron would send to invade middle earth, so they are not the ones that show up in LotR).
At least for me I've always found it important to look at the intent of someones work. When you read the passage in a modern context, sure it *can* be read as racist simply due to the skin colour but you have to ask if that is the intent to Tolkien writing it. My first thought that comes to mind are svartalfr from norse mythology, literally called black elves and are almost categorically evil in all appearances yet most people can agree that its probably not born from a racist intent but rather a way for a skald or poet to inject some mystery and otherness in their story. Another important note is the perspective the book is written in which is that of the men of the west. In universe they would lack sufficient knowledge of the haaradrim (or how its spelt sorry) to have more than a almost mythical image of them. I dont think the men of the east are ment as a literal people of pitch black skin etc as we see pther characters with ambiguous skin colour in the west (Aragorn being a prime example), but rather as a skewed retelling similar to the romans describing the brittons as "slow people who live in lakes of mud". Sorry rant over
@@lowcostfish not inherently no. It could be read as racist but I dont think that such a inclusion has to be intended as racist by default. What I'm trying to say is that it could be interpreted as racist but I dont think that Tolkien had a racist intent when writing it. Dark and light being representative of good and evil has been a literary staple for literal centuries and I think it's only perceived as a racist dynamic when viewed through modern thinking (once again svart alfs being a prime example).
Unintentional bigotry is a thing; internalized bigotry is a thing. I'm not saying that's necessarily Tolkien's case, but ones' intentions are, at most, helpful in contextualizing, but not a silver bullet that dispels all analysis.
@@ivanfloresvazquez7490 yeah thats fair, "the path to tragedy is lined with good intentions" and all that. But I feel like intent is still the main lens one should look through when it comes to things like this. Its kinda like how women are portrayed in Tolkiens works; pretty poorly. But he was still more "radical" when compared to his peers at the time so despite the things he wrote being very backwards from our point of view, for his time its pretty darn good so calling him a "sexist author" by todays standards would not be fair.
There seem to be a lot of people who end up at one of two extremes: On the one hand, there are those who focus solely on their immediate experience as readers, so much so that they don't really seem to think of fictional characters and events as fictional constructs at all. "The Haradrim could have had civil wars," is a perfectly natural thought to have as you read, but those types of hypotheticals can't form the basis of an interpretation that's meaningful to anyone else but yourself, and so they are quite useless in discussions with others. To those who _only_ read stories like this, and never move on to a more distanced approach, it might not be very easy to see stories as part of the culture they're in. They're self-contained things, and that's it. But a literary work will always be part of a larger context, in several ways; it literally can't _not_ be. On the other hand, there are those who contextualize stories not only to view a particular work in the context of its past or present culture, but also to label it as e.g. "dangerous," "decadent," categorically "problematic," etc. -- perhaps to promote the idea that literary works should be _in service of_ society somehow. This takes many forms, but all have in common a general failure to think of art as art, in favor of some more instrumental approach. I think it's important to be aware of how you tend to read stories and then find a more constructive balance between different ways to approach them. It's crucial to acknowledge that even seemingly contradictory ideas and analyses can all be true or valid at once.
They seem like North African/Carthaginian references if anything, given his mythological bent and how he roughly maps Middle Earth onto Real Earth (by design).
Just commenting on Sam’s line, what I always took away from the stories were that the big battles etc were based around big myths with a simple lens that represents the old mythology from one point of view. But Sam and Frodo are the non myths that aren’t simple, and eventually forgotten by the myths so they are more real. But 🤷🏻♂️
To be fair, the full quote is " They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types" I feel like that is 1). Admiting it's an odd way to describe and that it's an exageration of the look 2) I've seen people say that that sounds like the propaganda cartoons they made. Seeing some of them... they look like goblins. And, in the books, orcs and goblins are the same thing
@felixgroove4016 Oh yeah, it’s racist given that the Ukrainians are overrun with Nazism, and actively pursue Nazi policies of dehumanization and extermination against their national minorities and beyond just their Russians, and have a stated goal of killing all Russians everywhere in the world. Go back to prior 100 years. It’s basically the same as the Hun Panic complete with “stop this brute” ape imagery of the Germans during the First World War. Both campaigns relied upon mostly exaggeration of a limited number of actual crimes, and a certain number of fictional hysterias to create an image of an inhuman, alien, rampaging monster army. I was wounded out of the war, a long time ago, and the orc label did bother me at first, but I’ve since learned to adopted affectionally, especially for the strong and martial connotations.
Not justifying it, but it is quite likely that it stems form WW1, where the Germans were refered to as Huns, who were a mongolic group. It could be a metafor we're too detached form to inherently know.
Thoughful video, but I have to disagree with both the conclusion and the arguments. At no point does one need to bring race into the picture for a complete reading of LoTR. Sauron and Saruman recruiting foreign armies/mercenaries does not make those people, ontologically evil. In constrast to Sauron and Saruman who *are* ontologically evil, and not racially othered. And by the exact same Sam-quote you brought up, it is unambiguous to me that Tolkien intends to frame these foreigners as not ontologically evil or even different, which to me is essential to racism. Racism to me is the believe that different groups of people are different in their essence, that their souls so to say are different. As far as I know this is the only scene where one of these people is considered individually, and in that scene, they are humanized and empathised with. If LoTR were racist, it would bother to racially other these foreigners. It would depict how they're supposedly bad, smelly, inferior, aggressive, weak, uncivillised etc, but it doesn't do that. These people aren't antagonized because of what or who they are but soley because they're serving under Sauron. The assertion that "modern" necessitates a racialized perspective is also one that I find questionable. Regardless of if Sams quote precludes LoTR from being pre-modern, why should a modern work necessarily divide the different peoples in a story into separate races? Why must it necessarily be viewed through that lense? I feel like that that is more indicative of the readers world-view than that of the work or its author.
Tolkien grew up in the Edwardian era. If you read pretty much anything from that time period you can get a glimpse into the world he lived in. Tolkien grew up reading books like King Solomon's Mines and She. It's hard to believe that his worldview wasn't racialized.
doesn't the video directly talk about the fact that lotr isn't racist in the way modern books are? it also talks about the fact that the book is only as racist as you read it and it never asserts that there is a necessity to look at it through the modern lens of race, only that there is a tension there, for the creator of the video. it feels like you didn't engage with the video at all.
@bahaman19901 The Lord of the Rings is a modern book. Tolkien is definitely trying to emulate older works, but he is still writing it in the 20th century. If I wrote a book today in the style of Shakespeare, that doesn't mean my book is not modern. Tolkien's grew up in a world with very different views on race than today. Vastly different. Today racism is a social problem and generally considered to be evil. But when Tolkien was growing up racism was considered scientific fact. It was taught at universities including Oxford where he worked. The stories he read growing up like King Solomon's Mines and She are examples of the general attitudes of the time he lived.
2:14 That analysis doesn't work because it's inaccurate and too reductive. Aside from the struggle to be good being more fleshed out in the story than you give it credit here, The Lord of the Rings is not a story of fair, valiant, imposing men proving themselves as heroes but of those living in the shadow of such figures, common folk who happen to be tasked with a mission that asks of them not to be honourful warriors but perseverance. Their most important virtue is to endure and not give up, not to gather mythic armies and slay the evil hordes. We cannot see the perspective of the foreign peoples because the story starts with and is about people who have barely ever heard of such peoples existing. This insight isn't missing either because the story is not about finding brotherhood across nation lines but the divine challenge the protagonists face.
This was a really interesting analysis. I love looking at the works of past authors and seeing what that work says about them and their time. I don't think Tolkien intended to be racist at any point writing LOTR, but it definitely does reflect how the world around him was at that time, and how attempts at escaping societal norms often come up futile. It will be very interesting to see how the authors of today, writing books with subtle choices that no one would bat an eye to nowadays, will be regarded by people 100 years from now. Perhaps they will live at a time past climate catastrophy and newfound scarcity, where our current careless approach to consumerism will be seen as (for the lack of a more refined term) evil. Love your videos, keep making them
This is actually why I've been wishing that future LotR content from new writers would focus more on these world parts, as you don't have to strictly follow Tolkien's writing and can still expand on a world with very few restrictions.
There seem to be these two, mostly left groups not being able to come to terms with who Tolkien was. One one hand you have the people who are like "He was a perfect man. And he conformed to all the leftist modern ideas on race, gender, migration etc!" And the other is "he was a fascist, orcs are an allegory for black people, Dwarves are antisemitic etc etc" Bro, Tolkien was a Catholic, linguist and WW1 veteran. He was likely very conservative compared to today, esp compared to modern leftist ideologues and their ideas on gender etc. He likely had some racist ideas, as literally everyone had back then. And I'm not talking about, how Lovecraft was racist. Even the most progressive people had really, really cringy and bad takes on race, ethnicity, culture etc. You have to understand, they didn't have the internet. Their world wasn't as tiny as ours. They didn't get to grow up experiencing countless cultures. He wrote the book, specifically to give his own people a mythology like the norse, because he was a little envious of their cool mythology and stuff. It's like if a Nigerian or Philipino kid today sees LOTR and says, "man.. I wish my people had an epic like this" and then starts writing it himself. Tolkien was likely very conservative and right wing in many ways. Tolkien was a WW1 vet, he was a nationalist/patriot. At least those are my impressions of Tolkien from what I've read of him and from him as a Turk from the Netherlands. The reality is if you're looking for perfect poeple anywhere in history you're going to be disappointed. And I have no doubt even the most perfect person today won't fit into the mold of perfectness of some society years from now.
i agree, i think a lot of elements of tolkien's ideology seem self-contradictory today. LotR IS a story about the union of the peoples coming together and putting their differences aside to fight a common enemy, learning to appreciate each others cultures and ideas about life and respecting each others agency... it is ALSO a book about the peoples of the west uniting to fight the black and brown corrupted servants of the darkness who come in hordes from the south and east. and it's many things inbetween, too. i don't think these interpretations are contradictory, they're as you say, a product of culture and of his own personal feelings about human nature.
I have to disagree. A 1960s progressive still having cringe ideas doesn't make them a racist. Tolkien was most definitely not a racist even if he had cringe ideas because the doctrines of Catholic church then wasn't and we have no indicators of it from his letters. On the other hand, he was probably queerphobic because the doctrines of his church always was that.
I get your point, but personally I don't see any good basis for a racist accusation. The archaic description of the southerners is just realistic world building to me, helping set the period to our real-world counterpart, And Sam's thoughts on the dead soldier strikes me as a reaction any reasonably kind person would have, and even as a kid I always got the implication form this moment that plenty of the Southerners would have had the same kind of thought as Sam.
I mean, while I may disagree with some of his points, I at least can at least understand that this is his, subjective, opinion on the piece. It is an interesting debate to have. Besides, I cannot in good faith hate on a video which was clearly created with a good amount of research and effort such as this.
The fact rhat Tolkien might be racist and in other ways conservative like that is something that i got the feeling for while reading the Silmarillion. After the first coming of Man upon Beleriand, in the first fight between elves, men and Morgoth (the big bad) it's only the Easterlings among the Men that betray the others and fight on the side of Morgoth (though not all Easterlings do) and the Easterlings are explicitly described as dark/yellow skinned. There's that, and there's also the fact that in the Silmarillion basically all of the characters are either nobility or directly related to nobility. There's no hero that isn't from a regal bloodline, or at the very least the chief of its people.
In general, Tolkien is well understood as being influenced both by his Catholicism and by old literature but.. he was also a monarchist. A monarchist but also an anarchist oddly enough. He liked escapism. He wanted his universe to be comforting. What he wrote, his simplistic morality between the Vala and Morgoth, it's something that made sense to him. His writings about noble races and bloodlines against the corrupting influence of evil, that's just what he believed in. If he has a more grounded story in LotR instead of the Silmarillion, it might be because the Silmarillion was inspired by older texts but... It could also be that LotR was where he felt he needed to meet the public halfway, where he needed to compromise. He didn't in the Silmarillion, he never even published it.
Seems more like the standard pop-USA-🦅-brand cultural supremacism. (Despite Tolkien being English.) "Everyone has to conform to my way of thinking or they are evil 😈 and must be purged or forcibly indoctrinated. If they completely abandon their culture and accept mine, I will think of them as good, so I can't be racist."
@@katethegoat7507 "A monarchist but also an anarchist oddly enough" Can you talk more about that? Those are pretty diametrically opposed, it's like being a vegan game hunter
@@AlannaStarcrossed honestly I can't because I haven't understood it myself either. Iirc he just said it himself. If I'd have to guess I'd say that it might have something to do with him disliking the idea of states. He didn't like how people associate themselves with abstract countries instead of being loyal to a specific person
@@AlannaStarcrossed From what I understand, he wanted government to function very much like how it does in the good days of Numenor/Gondor. In other words, a "great man" kind leads mostly through example of upright moral character and by charismatic obligation, but without government really being involved with people's day-to-day. In other words, you give your king a tithe because it is the right thing to do and see that he will use it to protect the kingdom, without there being tax collectors to force you to. You have a beautiful, stylistically consistent home with your community because it is right for the neighborhood, not because of a permitting board. You follow your King to war because he has made a speech explaining the battle's absolute necessity. It's a completely fantastical political position, and I don't think Tolkien thought it would really work, but it is a comforting dream.
I think you over-interpreted Sam's thought. Nothing would've been worse than Tolkien actually giving a voice to the Haradrim, his imaginary representation of a real life people he knew nothing about. Tolkien writes about what he knows, we see the story through the lives of characters Tolkien himself could relate to because they draw from the same cultural source, something that would've been impossible to do with characters from the far south. Literally the most racist thing he could've done is to project (even if they were positive) preconceptions that he had about those peoples and cultures without knowing them, without having lived with them, without having experienced their everyday lives. What he did through Sam is remind all those who meet such strangers from far away lands, whatever the circumstances, to remember that they are human too, to relate to them in some kind of way, to empathise even if they happen to be your enemies. Edit : Thinking about it even more, I'm wondering if there's actually anything LESS racist than to describe people so different to you in appearance, even terrifyingly so, but to still encourage others to empathise and relate to them.
Why include them? Why make the only characters you reference in that way evil? Your logic falls apart because he is writing about them. He included them he had no need to no one made him make them black and middle eastern they could of all been white. He is a product of his time and indeed was racist, does that make his work inherently bad? No. But you have to acknowledge the reality of what he is doing. He is writing about what he does not know. He is using peoples fear of other races and the unknown as a representation of evil and that he can certainly be condemned for and i always will. Writing some good things does not mean we ignore the bad, you look at the work as a whole. He wrote about black people he didn't not include them that is the reality. He wrote one line of empathy and you declare he didn't write about them.. He projected preconceptions on them ( that they are weak willed and evil by nature) how is that not projecting them a certain way to you?... your logic is so flawed I'm afraid, he did exactly what you say is the most racist thing he could do project preconceptions on entire races he knows nothing about. If he didn't write about them they wouldn't be in his books simple and easy.
With regard to your opening, Terry Pratchett said this: "J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji."
I read LOTR while in primary school. As far as I remember, it was all quite abstract - the idea that orcs were being likened to actual human “races” would never have occurred to me.
Despite the similarity, Mordor's name derives from Sindarin Mor(n)+(n)dor, which are, respectively "Black" and "Land". The elements Morn can be found in Moria ("Black Chasm"), while (N)dor in Gondor ("Stone Land")
I was honestly surprised how much more nuanced Tolkiens legendarium is than just "Evil brown people fighting the good people of the west", all people followed Morgoth from the beginning, and the only reason people of the West turned away from him was their proximity to the elves. We can see how righteous numenoreans become corrupted, and Tolkien makes it clear at multiple points in the books that there is nothing inherently evil about easterlings or haradrim. Indeed, there is the famous Tal Elmar tale told from the pov of Edain of Gondor who were a followers of Morgoth and who were subsequently driven out and subjugated by Numenoreans, it sure isn't as black and white as you'd expect from an allegory of Christianity
An English man born un 1892 might have a problematic view of people from Africa and Asia. 🤯. I kid, but of course this is how would right about these people, but the fact he included such a line shows that he even knows his views are problematic.
“As for what you say or hint of ‘local’ conditions: I knew of them. I don’t think they have much changed (even for the worse). I used to hear them discussed by my mother; and have ever since taken a special interest in that part of the world. The treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain, & not only in South Africa. Unfortunately, not many retain that generous sentiment for long.” (Letter 61 - April 1944).
Excellent video! Really got the gears in my head turning. No fictional work can escape the reality in which it was written. We are forever trapped in our respective present. In terms of racism, I can only imagine what it must be like to come across a caricature and get the hunch that one belongs to the group of people it was based on. I've been rewriting and deleting paragraphs from this comment multiple times, trying to anticipate what the reader will make of it, and I have come to the conclusion that being an author of anything sounds like hell.
Racism suggests malice towards other groups. Something which is categorically NOT present in tolkein's work. However, it certainly does revere European culture & mythology. In an attempt to repair what tolkein believed the English people had lost through the years. It is a work of LOVE for his group. NOT an attack on other groups.
Racism doesn't imply malice it implies a lack of care about the other's humanity. A reduction of the other to the simplest most convenient form be it the helper, the animal or the enemy. The racist person does not have to hate the other to be racist they just need to be careless.
@@grandsome1 No... it implies hate. . . period. Modern wokies will tell you anything that is 100% White is racist because of a lack of inclusion, they conveniently leave out that other races have works centered around their own race 100% and it's not considered racist lol. It's double standard bs, and it's subversive drivel.
@@grandsome1 Tolkien spoke up against apartheid and against various racist ideologies. .. And even if we didn't knew that, we cannot say that lack of care means someone is racist, because it means that _for some reason_ racism is "default". That's a flawed reasoning.
@@grandsome1 That's bullshit actually! A completely brainrot take! Racism is a belief! To be racist you have to think that one race (Any race) is supperior (Generally/As a whole) than others! That's it! More pure, more human, chosen..... stuff like that! And that it should be separated from the rest or dominating/controlling the rest.....
@@grandsome1 "a lack of care" 🤦🏻♂️ Dude! Most of the society are careless about other people! In all countries! People are not so empathetic like you would like to believe! But it's not because of racism.....
Ok fair warning, REALLY long comment coming up! See, I love Tolkien's work dearly, but have often struggled with let's say, our differnt political and ideological views. Now, let's start: -It is downright silly to expect an Englishman born and raised in colonial South Africa , and deeply indoctinated in christianity, to conform to 2024 standards of political correctness and sensibilities -Tolkien often makes a point about "clean bloodlines" eg Aragorn's impeccable pedigree, but, at the same time, in the Gondor civil war I think his sympathies were clearly against the Castamiri who wanted a pure-blooded Numenorian on the throne -There is absolutely no mention of the lineage of men who first turn to Morgoth being black or anything like that -The black Numeroreans who worshipped Sauron were not called black because of any external physical characteristic -The Southrons only turned to Sauron because of the threat of numenorian colonialism, which brings us to the next point... -Tolkien wrote of his dislike of both the Roman and the British empires. By the standards of his day, such an anti-imperialist view was almost extreme! I think he deeply belived in the "civilising mission" of colonialism, that is first and foremost the spread of Christianity and maybe some basic infrastructure. He was deeply suspicious of technological progress, so I don't think he believed Africa missed out out on anything by not having any factories etc. -His descriptions of other nations is more "exotic" or "orientalist" than racist. Of course the first time you saw a black person you would be shocked, just as much as a black person would be shocked upon encountering white skinned, blue-eyed European for the first time. There is nothing wrong with admitting that we cannot understand everyone and everything -While racism takes many forms as time progresses (divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book), race as we understand it nowadays only appeared as late as the 16th century, as a justification for colonialism. Check out the History of England podcast, ep. 301 "Black Tudors" for some very intresting details
Theres also the elements of enviromentalism, which i would say are anti-colonial in nature because indigenous people tend to respect the land more than Anglo Saxons
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And think in incorrect in saying her believed in the 2 of the 3 Cs if colonization. Yeah, he believed in spreading Christianity, he was Christian and that comes with being Christian but spreading infrastructure and technology? Even basic technology? Like this is a man opposed to even cars, what basic tech more complex than what they already had would he be for spreading? Electricity? Probably a no there too.
The passages about how the Numenoreans weakened their bloodlines by mingling with lesser Men always bothered me. It reminds me of similar arguments against interracial marriage.
Its only strange when you put a modern sense into it. The "lesser men" aren't inherrently lesser in a genetic sense, although they were shorter and had shorter life, it's implied they lost the culture and morals of the elves@@BrisbaneBroncosfan67
I feel like you've glossed over a lot of important things. One thing about the men of the east and south is that although their collectively referred to as Easterlings and Haradrim respectively as if they were singular cultures, they were actually umbrella terms used by the men of the west to describe the numerous peoples of these foreign lands who were not related to the Edain, like how the Romans initially viewed the Celts and Germans or how medieval Europeans collectively called all nomadic steppe tribes (Turks, Mongols, Khazars etc) as Tatars. In addition, you claim that Tolkien painted black people in a negative light when the Haradrim we see invading Gondor are much more arabic based. I don't think we've actually seen black people in Tolkien's works. The Haradrim allying with Sauron was probably much more than just them being evil. They had been subject to conquest and colonization by Gondor and its predecessors. After spending generations under the thumb of the Dunedain, it makes sense why the Haradrim would join Sauron, not because they actually liked him but to finally win their freedom. A really interesting event involving the men of Harad and Rhun were the rebellions instigated by the blue wizards against Sauron in the Second Age. This conflict is only mentioned briefly, but it saw the two blue wizards travel to the East and South respectively where they rallied the Easterlings and Haradrim who refused to serve Sauron against him. Despite only being mentioned in passing, this event was actually quite crucial, as it prevented Sauron from amassing as many forces as he initially hoped and delayed his invasion of the west for a full 90 years, which allowed the elves and their Allies time to prepare for war. Edit: ok woah, I really went overboard with this comment and it was really pompous and dickish of me to basically open with "well your not a true fan like me" in the original response. It's just I've seen so many people on the internet trying to slander Tolkien's name just for attention so when I saw your video I had a knee-jerk reaction. At the end of the day, the idea of the Haradrim and Easterlings being evil by nature goes against the philosophy of Tolkien. While I still disagree with your statement, your video has actually made me reflect on how black and white Lotr's depiction of the Men of East and South is when compared to their depiction the rest of the Legendarium.
Yeah I really overreacted with that comment. also looking back on it, yeah there are definitely are some pretty problematic things like the black trolls with red tongues.
As Tolkien did call Sam the true hero in some letter, I think that one line is meant to imply that the rest of the portrayal of the Haradrim is wrong. Sam is the purest of all characters, no hint of evil. So Sam thinking that the Haradrim might not be inherently evil is supposed to be seen as correct, while the further portrayal is not. Tolkien spoke out against Apartheid, against racists using his book and against Antisemitism. I would not say he was racist. Especially not as racist as some of his contemporaries (HP Lovecraft comes to mind). He wrote it how the old myths were. But he still had to show that he did not fully agree with that portrayal, so he wrote in that line. And the Blue Wizards in the east helping the Easterlings fight against Sauron is supposed to show that they aren't evil either. (Though that does create uncomfortable missionary parallels, as the wizards were essentially angels, so them converting the Easterlings is a bit icky) Evil can't create, it only corrupts.
I think to remember another passage, where Sam just entered to Mordor to try to save Frodo in the Return of the King. An explanation is given to the Blackgate, which is not as much used to impede the entrance of enemies to Mordor, as it is for avoiding "slaves of Sauron" to escape its domains
I had no idea where this was leading, but I’m really glad I watched til the end. You did an excellent job on this one. As an aside, I really love your visual language of boxes for quotation, the different coloured text for annotations, and reboxing to building on even more ideas. As somebody who works with the structure of programming languages I’m constantly thinking of quotation, splicing and evaluation, and this pleases me greatly, matching up with a lot to my internal visual models. Also a links nicely to the idea of the frame narrative, which is ofc very relevant to Tolkien’s work (I’m sure this was not an accident). :)
...lol, what? I'm so sorry but I might have missed the point being made in this video. Thoughtful introspection is not a modern phenomenon. Nor is giving an antagonist group features/descriptions distinctly different from the heros an archaic technique. Tolkien giving Sam an awareness of the fallen enemy soldier's experience or perspective doesn't make LotR particularly more modern or less folklore-like. And it really works against the notion of LotR being racist; if Tolkien intended any prejudice towards other ethnic groups, Sam's sentiment seems quite contradictory to that ideal. So maybe racism was *not* what Tolkien was getting at. Or at least, that's how I choose to interpret it from a black, female, 21st-centurian perspective. 🤷🏾♀️
so giving the protagonist introspection is not what i'm talking about here. i'm comparing literary techniques, _how_ that introspection is communicated. this kind of limited third person narrative with a pause in the story for a moment of introspection is something one finds in novels, not in the texts of the old Germanic epics. what i talk about there is literary technique, that's why i have the whole section about comparing the literary techniques of epics and novels. i also don't think an author's intention is the be all and end all when it comes to interpreting their work. i never in the video call _tolkien_ racist, i'm not interested in investigating that claim here. i'm examining the piece of literature, and yeah, i think it has racism woven into its narrative - analysing it with this kind of lens can tell us about more subtle things than just whether or not tolkien personally was a racist, it can help build a picture of the attitude and conscious or unconscious biases of the society of his time, and by how we react and engage with this media in the modern day, how we've changed (or not changed) as a society. finally, tolkien is absolutely creating a modern myth, and the way he presents "the distant other" is absolutely part of that. the way he writes about Harad is reminiscent of the way Africa is written about in Germanic mythology... like I say in the video.
I disagree with your final conclusion. You could say that the haradrim and easterlings are trapped as ancient caricatures, or you could say that the perspective of the entire war of the ring is from the factions of middle earth, with them fighting for survival, will understandably not be thinking much about the daily lives and motivations of the 'other' humans. Take this as a WW1 allegory or take it as an ancient allegory, I think it still stands for both. I think the assumption that samwise's ability to empathize and wonder about the life on a follower of sauron is not departure from ancient thinking, but a rare occurrence completely within the ability of the rest of the people of middle earth, but simply they are not disposed towards it because they are being antagonized by said people. I think we are not giving the ancients enough credit to automatically assume that empathy for a foreign enemy is an exclusively modern concept. Surely at least one roman had thought briefly about the suffering of the carthaginians as they were razing the city, surely at least one mongol cavalryman briefly thought about the destruction they were causing to baghdad, surely one crusader thought about the muslim saracens being just as human as they were, even if they all did carry on with their duties. Just because there was a glimpse into moral complexity with samwise does not equate it to a modern trait. There are many historical examples of understanding between these foreign ancient cultures such as mentioned in the video, even if it was not a perfect understanding. You can take a look at the channel "voices of the past" for an actual example of what you say Tolkien was doing by creating a pseudo anglo-saxon historical mythos. Yes, most ancient (and even up to pre-modern) accounts of cultures meeting or traveling in lands of foreign cultures will end up with them somewhat mocking the customs and cultural aspects which they find to be too alien to them, out of ignorance and lack of exposure, but there are also grains of understanding, comparing aspects to their own culture, finding common ground, which seem to permeate many if not all accounts of cultures meeting. This to me is evidence of the innate nature of humans to try and seek understanding, which exists parallel to the nature of humans to also seek conflict, which I also cannot deny, but do not think is the only thing.
This perfectly puts words to how I’ve felt about fantasy racism for so long. A lot of fantasy communities are huge on historical accuracy, and for good reason, but navigating the differences between historical race relations and modern ones requires a bit more nuance and tact that a lot of people seem to lack. As a result, so much of fantasy writing and community feels very uncomfortable sometimes.
The thing is that Tolkien's stories are ultimately not about worldly politics but about the metaphysical struggle of staying true to and trusting in salvation through suffering.
Thank you for this profound analysis! I mostly agree with you, but there are some minor details you missed, that (in my opinion) make all the difference. What the creator of this video doesn't consider, is that Tolkien did not see himself as the author of The Lord of the Rings but rather as a _translator_ of a manuscript he found. *Tolkien wrote the text as a translation of a text written by a hobbit* (that is some meta stuff right there!). When looking at the style of the text that aspect is very important. Everything we read in the books is written by Frodo (based on his own account and that of the others (for instance he relied heavily on the non-hobbit-characters to weave in the mythological background)). In this case it makes more sense if the main 'feeling' of the read for us humans is that of an old anglo-saxon tale (including the descriptions) with a moment of personal reflection (deemed as 'modern writing' from our perspective) by one of the main characters (if not by THE main character). After all it is written by a people who were similar to Men but still different. So they don't have to write in the same style as we would expect it from a medieval travel account (a Gondorian as a human maybe would have done so). The comparison of the style of LotR with that of medieval writings can be helpful to understand the lack of the perspectives of the Haradrim and Easterlings (as pointed out in the Video). This is even strengthened by in-world reasons for that (e.g. it would make the story too complex; it wasn't the focus of the hobbits (Gondor and Mordor are already far away by hobbit standards: Harad was practically Antarctica for the normal hobbit),...). But we cannot conclude anything from deviations from the medieval style - it first points to the hobbits and not to Tolkien as a 'modern author'. The text doesn't translate directly into our human thinking patterns but a hobbit would read the passage where Sam reflects on the motives of the Haradan and think nothing of it, as it wouldn't be 'anachronistic' to him but rather a normal text of this period. Therefore LotR is in fact a successful "Escape into the Past", but in the eyes of a hobbit. If one assumes this perspective, the "white characters" aren't "modernised" and the the "dark-skinned southerners" aren't "trapped as ancient creatures" (12:56) - unless you want to read it as such (cf. 10:46). By seeing himself as the translator Tolkien adds another layer to his story - a layer through wich the reader doesn't have to be wondering what the author meant and can simply be enjoying it. If one still was to wonder what stood behind the writing one has to look deeper than the surface of the text (written by a hobbit) - one has to look at Tolkiens views in his life, which were - as the creator mentioned correctly - absolutely against racism. While he believed that there is a universal truth he also believed that all men are equal - traces of that can be found in his works, also concerning the servants of Mordor: The Dunlendings, Haradrim and Eaterlings are treated with mercy when they surrender and are allowed to go back in peace to their homelands. In fact King Elessar makes peace with the Haradrim and Easterlings (even without a word about reparations or anything). Though the description (through the eyes of e hobbit) may seem racist at first glance, there is no evidence whatsoever in the rest of the text to suggest that the main characters thought less of their eastern and southern neighbours than of their allies. In fact the reason, why the Easterlings and the Haradrim are (mostly) servants of Sauron is beacause they lived the longest time under his shadow. Even the Numenoreans (from wich the Gondorains derive) fell under the spell of Sauron and became his puppets, when they were closer to him. The Gondorians only reject Sauron so fiercely because of their history with him - he brought toal destruction upon them when they trusted him and they learned from that. They don't reject him because they are morally superior to the Haradrim or Easterlings. The History that sets up the events of LotR concurs with Sams reflection and his guesses to the to the answers to his question: 'What made him do it?' - deception and threats.
"Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend."
I feel like part of the reason why modern readers like to view relationships such as Sam and Frodo's as romantic is because there's so few actual gay representation in media. But at the same time, it's like they're unable to even imagine that two men can love each other deeply without it being romantic, which is just kinda sad? And paradoxically, it's also a pretty conservative worldview if you think about it. It's like saying "straight men can't be emotional and affectionate with each other, so if two guys are doing that, they must be gay".
Honestly Sam and Frodo having a romantic relationship never really made sense to me, But Legolas and Gimli I can see more, But at the same time, It doesn't really matter: They had a close relationship, they were clearly very close to eachother, In my opinion it doesn't really affect the story at all if that close relationship was romantic or platonic. Although, Perhaps, This opinion is based on my own views, of Romantic and Platonic love as being different, closely-linked, facets of the same thing, rather than completely separate things.
In the Prologue, on the third page of the book, it says, "The Harfoots were browner of skin..... They were the most normal and representative variety of Hobbit, and far the most numerous." The majority of hobbits had brown skin.
Tolkien vehemently opposed the Nazi doctrine of Teutonic racial purity, despite drawing from a common well of Teutonic mythology. That didn't stop him reflecting the common-or-garden racism of mid-20th century England that he was infused in.
@@vitornunes07 (Most of) White people: Carring, chivalrous, good, honorable, loving, loyal, noble, patriotic, relatable..... Asian & Arab people: Agressive, brute like, greedy, malicious, treacherous, tricky..... Just plain evil in pretty much all of Tolkien's work..... Also orcs in the books are described as a dark skinned, hunched, monkey like agressive primitives that are also cowardice and very smelly because they don't wash..... Same with uruks, they were just standing straight and wasn't afraid of the light..... Doesn't that resemble caricature of some..... race? But maybe it's a stretch.....
Good video. I find that that tension you discuss between the mythological style and the more modern characters is a lot of what gives the lord of the rings it’s charm. Because while the war of the ring is a mythological one, and many of the characters fit as mythological heroes (particularly Aragorn, but all the non-hobbits really) the central characters it’s all about are very much normal people you could meet in your day to day life. I find this really makes the sort come alive today in a way that mythological epics struggle to.
It is racist insofar that every mythological tradition is racist: to be the cultural understanding of a people, all but the most isolated of human groups have a human "other" that is bad because it is not the same. A lot of European names for American Indian tribes, for example, are exonyms by hostile tribes. However, I would not call LOTR or any mythological tradition racist because that carries a rightfully negative connotation that should not be applied to mythology. Further I would strongly argue against Sam's view being "incredibly modern", in that there are parallels in truly ancient mythology of humanity crossing these cultural lines for brief moments or in dire situations: for example, the Epic of Gilgamesh is all about two people from different cultural backgrounds empathising with each other and overcoming a foe that they could not face alone. It would have been far more of Tolkien's time to include a "token good" Easterling, but he refused to do that because he wanted to keep the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint. I very rarely dislike videos, but I felt this was much poorer than your usual work and calling this work racist does a disservice to Tolkien's work and life.
"Further I would strongly argue against Sam's view being "incredibly modern"" I don't think that's what's being claimed in the video? The way I understood it, It was not Sam's thoughts itself that made it feel modern, but the way in which they were written, as thoughts in Sam's head, Rather than facts or descriptions. I haven't read enough ancient works to say if that's an accurate dichotomy or not, but it's certainly a different thing than just saying what Sam thought is incredible modern.
@@ThePrinceofParthia And the video said “Because it’s black so it’s evil” , while the writer didn’t point it out from the ring trilogy instead this video started to remind you of that point as racism and therefore he can make a ridiculous video essay about it.
From the thumbnail I thought the quote meant "black men enjoy half-trolls," akin to "gentlemen prefer blondes," and I was like man, that's a pretty wild stereotype Also, counterpoint: The hobbits as a whole were direct analogs of 19th century brits, and had many objectively anachronistic elements in a world that was supposed to be (hitherto) prehistoric Europe, like pocketwatches and folding umbrellas. Sam (or rather, Frodo, who wrote the text amd assumed what Sam was thinking) is a modern reader-analog dropped into this otherwise ancient and mythological sequence of events, so he naturally thinks the things we would in that situation; But Aragorn would never think those things, for example, not because he is not goodhearted but because he is of his time.
I dare to say that no, you're wrong. Countless times in history of christianity people had been dehumanized, pointed as an enemy, an heretic, a wich, a devil's worshipper. Associating christianity to this perception of the other is Modern, the same way that the protestants are modern
@@azde4042it's certainly mutually exclusive from the concept being modern, if any anything I'd argue that most modern Christians (at least in the US) have begun to forget this very important part of the religion they claim to beleive
@@ultimate9056 really? Not too long ago the idea of a “white man’s burden” was used to justify imperialism for the sake of turning the “savage godless natives” to Christianity. It’s the main reason why so many African nation are Christian Nationalist now: Christian Imperialism.
I think a welcome addition to this video would have been to mention Kirill Eskov's novel *The Last Ringbearer*, which turns the story of *The Lord of the Rings* on its head by retelling it from the perspective of the orcs.
@@burner555I mean they were, but to claim that we must consume them noncritically, or that we should throw it away as it doesn't tolerante our sensibilities is dumb.
@@Tasorius Who is condemning anything? The first minute of this video is straight up gushing about how much he loves Lord of the Rings. If you are unable to be critical of things you love, that is that ACTUAL way you won't learn anything.
You're right. Sam's compassion is a modern soldier's compassion. It reminds me of the veterans of wars that can only be modern, because they're between such different people.
A lot of my family were miners, before my time but my Grandparents would tell stories. Anyway I always thought of the Orcs and Goblins as miners, skin black from coal, everything else (mouth, teeth, eyes) thrown into contrast. When I saw the representation of demons in Indian and other eastern religions as black skinned, that seemed to match Tolkien.
The thing is, reinterpreting myths for modern audiences is literally timeless. Lancelot's fling with Guinevere was added when it was considered a socially accepted, even ideal, form of love. It was then turned into a fatal flaw for the character when that social context faded back away and cheating was once more just considered bad, no caveats, ifs, buts, or maybes. Humans do this incessantly, repeatedly. So I can't really accept the idea that Tolkein HAD to do this in order for his story to be a valid entry as a myth woven in the modern day. He would have achieved this even if he had completely abandoned using metaphor and generalisations when it came to character's skin colours.
I also love the books and am not looking to cancel anything. Saying that, there is another layer of complication to this analysis, especially given the idea of a pure study of mythology separating it/him from modern concerns. Tolkien was an establishment Oxford don writing at the height of the Empire, a time when academic study of classics, history and archeology was pushing to create a narrative and selective mythology of white empire. it doesn't doesn't have to be shown with nefarious or mustache twirling intent, as in works such as The Lair of the White Worm's early chapters, or with overt pseudo-scientific racism of the era, but it's the context. Also, talking of being a soldier during Empire, the Battle of Helm's Deep is so evocative of The Battle of Rourke's Drift that a friend of mine, who angrily rebuffed any of my observations on this topic, gasped "rourke's drift" out loud when we watched the battle in the Jackson films. Our modern reference being the film "Zulu". And that's when I realized that a lot of the context, culture, worldview and reference in LotR go unnoticed to younger fans because time has simply moved on, and less and less of those references now feature in other culture.
i think a good way to look at it is in that it’s racist because the world that created it is racist, in the same way that even trans people can hold transphobic thoughts because the world that they live in is transphobic. it doesn’t degrade the work itself, but its an interesting part of the metatextual discussion of the work
I think a part you might have missed is the argument that if its a visual illustration of Good vs. Evil then having Gondor be centered around a white tree and mordor being the shadow land makes sense. It keeps things simple and easily recognizable, a trait not often found in some of his writings. Having a dark skinned folk from the south and them going along with Sauron makes sense when you think of it as a visual summary. It's similar to good characters using Light Magic and bad ones using Black magic. Doesn't mean he thought that of all humans but it does go along with what the story has been saying up to this point.
I can't wait to read the comments on this RUclips video, I sure hope everyone is arguing in good faith and that nobody's analysis is being misrepresented either deliberately or otherwise.
Don't you think the Haradrim were simply based on the Muslim opponents of the Crusaders? CS Lewis did much the same with his 'baddies' in The Last Battle.
The Haradrim is the Haradrim. Not muslims. They are a fictional group of people. It's like the cave on Degobah in Star wars..The only thing in the cave is what you bring with you. And you bring your racism into your reading of a fantasy book.
Tolkein actually wrote an essay on the word you mention, called Sigelwara Land, in the 1930s. in it he speculates that Sigelwara Land could have originally referred to the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Muspelheim and thus the Sigelwara themselves would originally be a kind of soot-black demons, but that this original pagan understanding was obscured by Christianization and by the time the Exodus was composed in Old English, the word was understood and used more literally. he reconstructs the word as sigel ("sun") and *hearwa ("soot", "coal, "hearth", "roast") and so it could be understood as having a meaning similar to sun-burnt, and with this more literal understanding the term shifted to mean Ethiopia. however there's no widely accepted reconstruction of the second element (and unlike sigel it's unattested), and other scholars suggest other meanings such as "worshipper". regardless, the soot-black demons with flaming eyes likely influenced the Balrogs, while the word *hearwa itself likely influenced the name Harad.
Nice Video, There is also the other possibility, that Tolkien either didn't want to make the story morally grey or that it was outside his skillset. This one line with Sam is great, but he isn't able or doesn't want to give us this depth. And this depth is almost everywhere lacking in the book. Wormtongue get's the chance to redeem himself in the end, but Tolkien doesn't allow it, he kills Saruman and is killed afterwards. Just like Saruman himself. They're evil and it seems, there is no way back from that.
This video makes compelling arguments that fall flat with the conclusion because it assumes that Tolkien has to stay within the rigid structure of old myths, rather than letting him construct something of a hybrid.
Tolkien literally makes Haradrim a dark-skinned human race who sided with evil Meanwhile Tolkien fans: That's not racist and that's not offensive. I decided it for all of you.
@@ahmadqazi2648Being that superficial is the reason why Tolkien fans (which are not, as they digged much deeper into his work) defend him of petty attacks like that
I think it's a good analysis. Tolkien wrote about how there was a lot going on with the peoples of the East and the South, but since he was focusing on Middle Earth, we never hear it. There's also the implication in a lot of his writtings that these are not evil people per se, but they are convinced and lied to by Margoth, Sauron, and most likely the Blue Wizards as well. Which, might as well be his catholicism speaking. "Those people over there? They can be good but the Devil's deceived them". When in comes to Orcs, in a couple of lines it implies that they do have some sort of moral standard. I remember on a letter he wrote to his son during WWII, he basically explains that Orcs are like, absolute evil, because of the self-inflicted writing restrictions, the style of the epic, where the enemy is big, vilified and monolothic. I reckon something similar happened with the other manish races. I feel like he would've maybe explored all that.
I have always view Sam's moment with the death haradrim a rare point of comparison with a person who has never seen conflict between humans, and soldiers that are used to violence. For Sam, that's a death human being in front of him, for the Ithilien rangers, it's just another moment in a conflict that has being going on for ages at that point
I mean... LotR has literal races in it. The Elves are ubermensch. They look and sound prettier than you. They make better, stronger, lighter crafts than you. They're better at magic than you. They're better at fighting than you. They're better at cooking than the hobbits. They're better at everything than you. They barely even leave a track when they walk in snow, so light is their step. Over with the Dwarves you've got greedy craftsmen (not as good as the Elves, but better than you) whose avarice is their downfall. And within these 'macro' races entire demographics show clear features (consider the offshoots of the Numenoreans). The Haradrim and the Easterlings are footnotes to the story (like the Black Numenoreans and Dunlendings), but there's tons of racial differentiation being done amongst the main characters of the "good guys" that the main story is wound around. It's weird to ask "is LotR racist" if you're just using it to mean "does it disenfranchise black Africans". LotR *definitely* pushes the idea that races and ethnicities have clear stereotyped differences in *innate* capabilities to each other.
And tall! Everything is better if they are tall. Gotta pick your leaders by height. Even the hobbits (who seemed to pick their mayor by girth) end up with the two tallest as the most respected leaders.
Thank you for an interesting video. You made some fascinating points, and brought up some information I was unaware of. This being said, there is something I think many people miss about the Lord of the Rings when they say it is racist. Many look at the events in the War of the Ring and see mostly light-skinned men on the side of good, and mostly dark-skinned men on the side of evil. Putting aside all the other creatures on each side, let's focus on just the men for now. What is often forgotten, is that the War of the Ring, while important, is a small part of Tolkien's story as a whole. The tale constructed by the professor over decades is a story which spans millennia, and over the course of this tale, there are men of both sorts on both sides. The Easterlings, who are described in LOTR as swarthy or dark skinned, serve Sauron in the three main novels, but are split between good and evil in the story proper. One branch of their people, the family of Ulfang, betrays the forces of good in the largest defeat of Elves and Men recorded, and another branch, the House of Bor sacrifices themselves protecting their Elven allies. Later, the Easterlings mostly serve Sauron due to his manipulating them into seeing him as a god. However, there are some which rebel against him, and these are strengthened by the Blue Wizards, of the same order as Gandalf and Saruman, Istari from the land of Valinor. There is a whole unwritten tale of the struggle between good and evil in the Eastern land land of Rhûn, but what is known is that good existed there and struggled against Sauron, in a land where no white man or character dwelt. The enmity between Harad and the men of Numenor began not because the Haradrim were evil and the men of Numenor were righteous. Quite the contrary, under the influence of Sauron, the white men of Numenor began to oppress these black men of the South, and this was the beginning of the strife between their peoples. The Haradrim, whilst often serving evil, are explicitly described as doing so because of the coercion and manipulation by which Sauron gains control of them, not through any inherent evil in their race. It is to this that Sam's thoughts unknowingly refer when he looks at the dead man in the Two towers and feels compassion. Following Sauron's downfall, Gondor did not wipe out the Haradrim, nor did it conquer and subjugate the country, but instead made peace with it, this being possible with the removal of Sauron as the primary source of evil in that land. I say primary only because no land is without evil, not even the simple Shire, and I don't want to pretend that Harad would be a paradise without Sauron. My main point is that, within Tolkien's legendarium, the Haradrim are not evil because of their race, but because of the "god" whose will they obey. Finally, men of the West are not exclusively good. I have already mentioned Numenor and its evils, but there are numerous Kings who fall to Sauron to become Ring Wraiths, whom you called black because of their cloaks, but are indeed from various kingdoms and races. Even within the three main books we see despicable men who have white skin. Gríma Wormtongue is perhaps the worst, but we see Boromir making evil choices, his father Denethor sending his son to death out of despair and arrogance, and Saruman who, although not strictly a man, is nevertheless described as White, falling wholly into evil to the point of scouring the Shire. These are glaring evils on the part of white men, and cannot be simply ignored. Men are described as weak, corruptible, and desiring of power. Please note, this is not said of black men, but of men. Skin colour is seen more as a feature, rather than a racial distinction. Instead, distinction between races is reserved for the differences between elves, men, dwarves, orcs, etc. The only reason that men of Numenor and thereafter Gondor are viewed in such a positive light, (and even for them this is not always the case), is because of the exceptional service of men like Barahir, Beren, and Elendil, all of the same line and all doing their utmost to aid good. It is for this reason, and not because of the colour of their skin, that the Men of the West are generally found siding with good and against evil. I cannot claim to know the mind of Professor Tolkien, but I do think it strange for a supposedly racist man to put so much effort into depicting both white and black men as capable of good and evil, and explicitly making peace between them following the victory over Sauron. It is easier to see this when looking at Tolkien's complete works, but it is still visible within the Lord of the Rings trilogy itself, especially in the evil deeds of men who are light of skin. For this reason, I would say that Tolkien's works are not racist. Thank you again for an interesting video, and I hope my thoughts are of interest to you. God bless.
Very good video about an interesting subject. The racism card has been used and abused in media and pop culture way too much for some years now. And although I agree with the video's conclusion, I m not sure it aims at the right direction. I m not a Tolkien expert, I m just a fan of Tolkien's books (and Jackson's amazing trilogy of course). But from what I ve read, his perceived "racism" wasn't mainly against black or brown people, but against the "easterners". The classic division in Tolkien's work that you touched on in the video, the good-evil and light-dark duality, geograpihcally and culturally isn't translated in West vs South or North vs South, but in West vs East. That is a very important distinction for many reasons. Yes, Haradrim specifically are a broad representation of Africans or Middle Eastern people compared to the good westerners, but I would argue that Orcs who are the main "evil race" in Tolkien's universe are much more of a representation of east Slavs or Mongols of the real world. The great threat from the East, a concept deep embeded in the western mind, psyche and folklore: the barbarian eastern hordes, the emperor warlords and tyrants that want to invade, conquer and subjugate the good peaceful and civilised West (Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, the Ottomans etc). Those that have nothing in common with us (they speak different tongues, they worship different gods, they are the nomadic people of the steppes, they re not farmers like the Shire and Gondor, or woodland dwellers like the Elves etc). It's no coincidence of course that the orc languages and the Black Speech (the languages of evil) don't derive from african lagnuages but from eastern languages like the Hurrian language (mesopotamian). And of course in contrast the "good" languages like the Westron (English) is part of the germanic language family and the Elven languages (Sindarin, Quenya etc) derive from celtic languages like Welsh, or from Finnish (although ironically Finnish is closer to the mongolian language family than to the germanic). Also many people tend to view Orcs as black, but they re not. The Uruk-hai are depicted as black. Orcs are mostly shown as pale grey skinned, a colour that is neither white nor black, but in fact is closer to white. It's almost like they are a sick and twisted version of white, which fits perfectly with their origin story: they were elves and men who where taken by the dark powers and tortured, altered etc to make an "evil" race loyal to the dark lord, be it Morgoth or later Sauron.
I don't know why Sam's internal monologue traps the Haradrim as caricatures. I really think you needed to explore this thought more rather than abruptly ending on it. As you pointed out, Tolkien was composing both mythological tales from the perspective of ancient peoples, while at the same time writing a modern novel featuring the interior thoughts of its characters. There is always a tension between the two in The Lord of the Rings and this is actually what makes this work so great. Sam's meditation about the man of Harad is a moment where maybe the faceless enemy of ancient sagas crosses into the modern novel. Tolkien, as a lover of tales of old wars, wants to tell the story of this battle as, maybe, someone like Julius Caesar or the historians of antiquity would, but as a war veteran also wants to put a modern, novelistic perspective on it. He wants to humanise the apparently faceless enemy because these were the kinds of thoughts that struck him in the trenches in a 20th century war - and by doing so, he's cutting through dehumanising attitudes and propaganda in a way the ancients probably couldn't. The passage about the half-trolls with black skin, white eyes and red tongues does make the modern reader uncomfortable, but then this is followed by Sam's humanising thoughts about the slain man of Harad. Yes, we still don't know anything about the Haradrim from this passage - just like ancient peoples wouldn't know anything about Ethiopians or Numidians if they ended up fighting them - but we are made to recognise, thanks to Sam's interior monologue, that they are every bit as human as we are in spite of our ignorance.
Looking at the analysis before 2:12 , the saying "sometimes cigar is just a cigar" comes to mind. Featuring characters of some group in bad light doesn't necessarily mean anything. The uneasy feeling we get is IMO a result of overreliance on patterns. Patterns in media can tell us about the landscape, but not the individual works. Well... I might be completely wrong since I'm not an analyst
One way we can kinda tell if we are overanalyzing is to switch the groups, like easterlings to green people. Is the work now racist against green people? No.
And sometimes racism is just racism. Portraying the good guys as white and the bad guys as POC does have racist undertones. What if they were green is a silly question, discrimination is often very specific. So a work that's antisemitic because it uses Jewish stereotypes wouldn't be an issue if it used a different religion. But that's why it's antisemitic.
@@mnm1273 I should communicated my "green people" point better. Like you said "So a work that's antisemitic because it uses Jewish stereotypes wouldn't be an issue if it used a different religion"... being the bad guys isn't a stereotype. For a work to be racist it's not enough for good guys to be white and black guys to be bad guys, because not everything is commenting on something (!) BUT this can be made racist with stereotypes etc.
@@metawarp7446 "being the bad guys isn't a stereotype." heroes being white and villains being POC does reflect racist attitudes of the time though. If there are three characters it can be coincidences, when there are multiple nations and a half a dozen main character it's a choice.
One of the interesting things as an author is how much we repeat the stories we've been told without thinking. I'm writing a novel with a pov from a pre-conquest Indigenous background, and to get an idea of what life was like back then, you have to really dig through the history written by the (quite racist) victors, reading between the lines as much as possible (or read much smarter people who did the same thing). Sometimes I think about how easy it would be to just repeat the much easier it would be for someone to just put together a story from that history, without reading between the lines. They wouldn't have to be a bad person, or to dislike that group. The story might be good, extremely good. I think this is one of the ways racism perpetuates itself in the absence of hate, and also why representation matters (especially for writers).
In Tolkien's legendarium it's explained that the Haradrim have pretty good reasons to be enemies of Gondor, because the Numenorians treated them quite badly. Sauron is basically exploiting the animosity between the people of Harad and the Gondorians to gain the Haradrim as allies. But they aren't really meant to be purely evil like the orcs are and in fact make peace with Gondor after the fall of Sauron. Plus the East vs West conflict is an integral part of European history, with the invasions of Arabs, Turks and other Eastern peoples. The battle of Pelennor Fields reads a lot like the second siege of Vienna. And Minas Tirith has a lot of parallels with Constantinople during the late years of the Eastern Roman Empire. The greatest city of the western people stands at the borders with the eastern invader and awaits help to try and survive. That's basically Constantinople during the 14th and 15th centuries.
So how would you break down the Silmarillion and the battle of Dagor dagrath and the easternlings that allied with the elven kingdoms and one king betrayed the alliance for Morgoth and one choose the alliance?
Black and Arab people who co-sign to white ideas and white supremacy through Christianity Aka coons that’s what I got outta the Easterlings siding with elves. Yall act like white people didn’t try to brainwash POC folks with Christianity to weaken us to do what white folks wanted that’s what I took outta that in Silmarillon
Tolkien's mentor was from Cádiz, Spain, very close to África, and during his time, Spain got into several wars with Moroco. Historial context can add to the subconcious reasoning.
Really good and eloquent video. There is one difference that I don't think you stressed enough. The people of the south in the sagas (the only relevant texts I am familiar with) are no threat. They are distant. They are only present to people who go there (e.g. go to Miklagård/Constantinople to earn money). Tolkien could in fact have made a mythology where the south was similarly distant and unthreatening, where elves and men spoke badly of them but were not threatened by them. So the people are not just kept in their mythological oldnorseanglosaxon format; they are made worse. Aragorn and other white characters are entirely mythological, but they are not made worse. Tolkien's source for this is (I guess) not medieval. It is just pedestrian, banal, imperial racism.
Something that adds another layer of complexity on to this it the idea of a "mythology of England." A country having a strong mythological narrative can often serve as a foundation for nationalism - this is not to say that making a mythology about a country is necessarily inherently nationalist, just that if you want to increase nationalism, establishing a mythology is helpful for bringing the people of a country together, telling them that their country is special or uniquely good or superior or whatever. I think it's pretty clear that Tolkien was not constructing his mythology for this purpose. For one, you mentioned his anti-racism. For another, if you wanted to spark nationalist sentiment, a pro-war message would probably be very helpful in achieving that, which his books don't have. Having said that, I do think it's still worth looking at some historical context related to the kind of stuff Tolkien was writing about. In the 1870s - before Tolkien's time, but not by so much that it would have been out of the cultural consciousness - Wagner made his Ring cycle (that's not the actual translation of the German name, that's just how it's commonly referred to). Wagner was of course a brilliant composer, though also a noted antisemite. Like Tolkien, he had a general interest in Germanic mythology, especially (but not exclusively) Norse mythology. For an example more contemporary to Tolkien, the Nazis also used Norse mythology, along with the idea of the Aryan (though the two aren't related - the actual irl Aryans lived in the middle east and India) to establish a national identity for the Germans to rally behind. This was after Tolkien published The Hobbit and before he published LotR. To re-emphasize, I'm not saying that Tolkien's work falls in to the same category as the two examples I gave (which I realize were both specifically in the country of Germany - fear not, I know that Germanic doesn't mean German lol). I'm just saying that that's the landscape of Germanic folk tales around the time, so there are bound to be some similarities, and some of them will be a little uncomfortable. Whether or not his allegation that he read the Völsunga Saga in Old Norse as a kid are true, it's clear that he was fascinated by Germanic mythology from a young age, so it's likely (if not certain) that he chose to write about Germanic myths because they're Really Freaking Cool(tm) and had been obsessed with them for along time, not because of any sort of ulterior motive related to the usage of said myths at the time. Ultimately this really doesn't change your conclusion at all, it's just some interesting stuff that I was reminded of while watching this video, and I feel like it sort of fits along with the vibe, even if it's not exactly the same vibe. Vibe-tangential, I guess?
While I enjoyed the video, I do think you are applying to much of our modern perceptions on the symbolism in Tolkien’s world. As you pointed out, while there is no doubt a certain degree of subtle racism regarding phenotypes, it is more a product of the cultural positioning that the world of the Lord of the Rings is set than one of active value judgement against people with darker skin-tones. As a fantasy world derived from northwestern European histore and mythology, the focus revilves around peoples who exhibit the kinds of traits most common of northwestern Europe, which rightfully positions such as their point from which other characteristics are contrasted. Since the forces of Sauron are drawn from the lands furthest from western Middle Earth, it is unsurprising that many of such will appear in a manner which would be considered both strange and exotic (and thus, also potentially startling and/or croghtneing to the inhabitants to a certain degree). While it’s easy to interpret this as a direct commentary on the real-world peoples exhibiting dark skin tones, the lack of active value judgement in the Lord of the Rings suggests it is circumstantial rather than inherent or deliberate. The equation of “black” as a color with “evil” predates the early modern period when Europeans had frequent contact with dark-skinned populations, and occurs cross-culturally in many languages. It is an unfortunate situation that such associations now carry an additional layer of cultural baggage, but in the case of the Lord of the Rings it is not actually a commentary on dark-skin as being inherently “evil” or bad in some way. This is because the world in which the story is set is one which is meant to resemble the post-classical and early medieval period of northwestern Europe, and so the cultural associations we see are a product of that period of time, rather than later eras. (I know you mentioned this in the video, I’m merely reiterating) The description of the Orcs or Easterlings is unfortunate, and probably does show a degree of soft bigotry towards east asian features (which is a product of the times Tolkien lived in), but there is also an argument to be made that it is reminiscent of early medieval authors hyperbolic descriptions of steppe peoples like the Huns, Avars, and Mongols, whom European states only ever experienced as aggressors. It is probably a combination of both to be honest. I disagree with your assertion that Samwise’s commentary regarding the Haradrim soldier requires a modern sense of reflection, or that it in someway tethers the story to modern conceptions. Sam’s statement is one which can occur regardless of time or place: genuine curiosity about someone who is both different and your enemy; and therefore isn’t necessarily a meta-textual commentary on the perspectives contained within it. It _could_ be interpreted that way, but that is a choice made at the discretion of the reader, not an inherent framing in and of itself. Overall, interesting video even if I disagree with some of the minutiae.
Yes. Near Haradrim are clear analogies of Arabs, specifically the Saracens who Western Europeans fought in the Crusades and romanticised as noble adversaries, particularly in the figure of Saladin. Note the Southrons are described in the Battle of the Pellenor Fields as mounted knights wielding curved scimitars, and worthy adversaries of King Theoden.
I don't agree that Sam's sentiment is incredibly modern. Thinking it's modern to humanize the enemy is not to understand humanity. This is one of the oldest conflicts of being human. In order to kill other humans, you have to demonize them, but once they're dead, they're no longer demons (except in your dreams). And even if Sam knows it, that doesn't change the rest of the world. There were lots of things Tolkien gave scant detail about, and I don't think it necessarily means a lot. But he definitely paints the enemy in the sus terms of another era, altho I'm not altogether sure he didn't see it for what it was, a form of mythological propaganda, that perhaps only Sam, the good one, sees through. And iirc, Tolkien himself said he was trying to create a modern myth, so it's not just critical opinion. Excellent video.
I think they meant that the passage is modern in its presentation and format. It's telling us his thoughts in a third person omniscient fashion, in a way that the old myths and epics LotR is partly based on would never have done. The passage is typical of a novel, not an epic. Empathy is of course a timeless experience, but it's presented in a modern, novelistic way.
Great video, and so glad you mentioned Le Guin! She's an incredible writer, I hope you return to this topic and explore some of her work, especially Earthsea (which has, as you know, interesting views of race itself).
Personally i think more it’s the consequences of Tolkien drawing on actually historical events, mythology and those different geographical locations of different cultures and ethnicities. Looking at Europe that was his entire inspiration source in his works, and that he mainly draw from the period around the medieval times, (sprinkled with some antiquity) not having that much mixed skin colour is much easier to understand. Europe at that period although diverse was much more homogeneous in the different regions than it is today, so having a fantasy world resembling that makes sense. Seeing his background it’s no surprise the main focus was anglo Saxon, celts and norsemen - meaning white and as he made so Sauron drawing forces from south that meant to be Arabia/Turkey and Northern Africa it might strike as racistic, but the world in that period wasn’t as mixed in terms of skin colour so drawing heavily from that period would ultimately get such an effect unless he made so that Sauron also draw from north and central, which might not really make sense as that was the central power. I think mostly Americans have an issue with it and see, racism in it due to own history and how their own country is constructed etc. but I think it’s important to understand medieval Europe that this is fundamentally his alternative version off. Did he express some negative, stereotypical description in his work, yes he likely did, but I haven’t read things in his work that pointed to it influences on the skin colour in terms of good/bad.
I strongly disagree with the thesis of this video, and critiquing Tolkien in our modern and developing and frankly shallow considerations of race is extremely disrespectful to his work. Just because the book is focus on the perspective of Western Middle Earth, does not make it inherently racist. There are many books that exclude the perspective of other people groups and that doesn't make said works problematic. If you believe the implications of The Lord of the Rings is racist, then you don't understand racism. You also neglect a lot of detail about the forces of evil in the books to promote your narrative. Overall the editing is good and your script is engaging, but I would not have been proud of this conclusion.
no, just focusing on the perspective of one group does not make a work racist. nor do i say so. in fact, i give a pretty big defence of the idea that it does not, that this can be used as a defence against accusations of racism. but the thing is, Tolkien wasn't writing in a long and distant past as you seem to suggest - in fact, he grew up with modern and frankly shallow considerations of race in a post colonial world. and it is THIS that seeps into his work, and gives it racist undertones.
It isn't racist. It is the a reality of war to an invading force. Tolkien was from a time were the Ottoman empire & other invading empires into Europe were still present in the people minds of his time. The Darkness is not one of skin but faith & core ethics for it is Christendom against Islam. Tolkien was a catholic & a devout one at that even though he was a stoic of sorts like myself but I am godless. Trust me if you had ever seen an Arab slave market & how they treat women today let alone the past you would see no light=Christ in those people. If Christ is the light then who does the darkness represent? Read Tolkien's works again but do so from the mind set of a catholic as it comes of very different!
If you have never read the bible in Old & new testament as well as European mythology with related folktales then you will not understand Tolkien nor the core of his writings. You are so far detached from his time by 21st century cobblers that you will never understand the core values of that man & hopes of that man. South of Sahara Africa is not even present in Tolkien's universe just as how it was not present nor relevant to European history prior to the industrial age. Not everything is to do with race & I assume you are an American which everything comes down to race in your unpleasant country! “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”=Oscar Wilde This Irish man that happens to be bi-sexual summed up the USA better then my words ever could!
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Omg is it an epistolary novel?
@@beckyginger3432 Certainly part of it is! If you’ve read Hyperion by Dan Simmons, it borrows some framing ideas from it. One of the characters’ stories is a series of journal entries. I hope you give it a shot!
Never knew that videos could be sponsored by books
TIL
This is interesting
I actually didnt skip this sponsor, unlike nearly all others, which should tell you a lot
Not a big reader, but this still interested me more than some random ass company / service ever could
@@Xnoob545 That means a lot that you didn’t skip it! I really hope you give it a shot.
Nobody in nomadic European warrior societies was obsessed with concepts like racial purity, which are a product of the modern era. They had no problem whatsoever absorbing and intermarrying with neighboring or subject peoples. Medieval people weren't as racist as they're often portrayed, either: Arthurian legends for example contain several Moorish knights. Medieval Europeans were far more concerned with religion than race.
That's not what my Pagan friends tell me. They cared about race, that is unique to Euros of all time.
@@MorrisJohn-vo2vn And? There's no historical continuity whatsoever between ancient religions and neopaganism. Your friend claiming to be an expert on ancient paganism would be like a Catholic claiming to be an expert on the Roman empire just because they're Catholic. Also, your friend just happens to be quite wrong about ancient societies' views on race. For one thing, they didn't have a concept of "race" like we do (that comes from the 19th century). For another, they made no bones about intermarrying with other peoples; the archaeology and genetics more than bear that out.
@valmarsiglia I would say a better comparison would be a seminary educted Catholic saying they know early church or a uni educted Hindu saying they know Vedic religion. This is being reconstructed using real modern reconstruction methods, a late modern tradition of reconstructions and actually being deeply motivated and interested in reconstructing it.
They most definitely still bad a racial idea. Not the modern one but close enough to make comparisons and intermarriage was still rare btw "different race" people at the time.
@@MorrisJohn-vo2vn Given how little is actually known about ancient religious belief and practice, a more honest term would be "reconstructed" in scare quotes. There's a great amount of wishful thinking and modern biases and assumptions that go into all such efforts to "reconstruct" ancient religions, and such efforts say far more about the people and era in which they were made and very little to nothing about the religions they seek to emulate (just think of similar Victorian attempts to "reconstruct" ancient religions and how thoroughly Victorian they all were). And the difference between a Catholic seminarian and a neopagan is that the seminarian actually has a great deal of historical continuity with early Christianity to study, however much Catholic theology and practice has changed over the centuries.
@@MorrisJohn-vo2vnand your friend would be wrong, probably using fake history to justify their own beliefs. Tribalism existed, but it wasn't about race until the late middle ages. For a medieval English person an African or Arabian man was no more different to him than a Castilian or Polish man save from their religious beliefs. The first time something similar to a concept of race started forming in Europe was in the 12th century due to the first crusade, and it wasn't fully formed until way later, as a way to justify colonialism and establishing caste systems in colonies.
while the worldbuilding itself is undeniably inspired by england and norse mythology, i always got the impression that the actual storytelling in lotr was heavily influenced by tolkiens experiences as a ww1 soldier. you can see it in the way sauron, the ultimate bad guy in the story, doesnt even show up at any point, the heroes never ever see him just like how ww1 never actually got to see the ultimate bad guy leading the enemy nation. likewise, while the heros do get to see the enemy army up close, they only get to see them as this massive wave of evil soldiers, they cant know them as individuals, they cant make friends with them, they cant think of them as anything other than an massive wave of evil soldiers. only sometimes will they allow themselves to look at a fallen soldier and wonder what the mans name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather stayed there in peace.
thank you for making this btw, loved the video!!!
I feel that the opposite is the case. Tolkien was absolutely uninterested in a modern world, even his descriptions of war are probably taken from the descriptions of ancient battles like Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.
His strict dualism of good and evil also perfectly reflect his Catholic worldview, I would go as far as to say that Gollum is a parody of a more psychologically driven literature, because in Tolkien's opinion humans are not that complicated.
I'd argue that while the world wars had no influence on lotr's plot, it definitely had one on the depiction of war itself. This is especially flagrant in The Fall of Gondolin, where industrialized war is shown as a force much more destructive and uncaring to the older ways.
@@daniel5730 Tolkien (like many of the Inklings) was explicitly and less explicitly very influenced by G. K. Chesterton, an older English Catholic writer, who was primarily a journalist. He was not disinterested in the Modern world, he was critical of modernity per se - and especially _Modernism_ - in the same way as Chesterton. Just because Tolkien asserts elements of myth and history in his storytelling doesn't create some binary where he can have nothing to do with the Modern world. It's true, his battles are very well-grounded in Classical and Medieval warfare- but look at Grond, which much more resembles the kind of Modern, industrialized, specialized weapon that appeared in WWI. I cannot emphasize enough that if you read Chesterton, you will see the discourse about Modernism versus what he might call "common sense" inherent to Tolkien's novels. Hell, Tolkien said that "Chestertonian fantasy" was a "means of recovery" to heal the _modern_ world. He was thinking about now!
And Catholicism, as Chesterton would say explicitly and Tolkien clearly agreed with, is not dualist. Tolkien's world isn't dualist, that interpretation comes from people imposing assumptions onto it because of their unfamiliarity with Tolkien's beliefs and influences. In Arda, as in Catholicism, evil is the privation of the good with no independent being or substance, a twisting of the natural order which is in some sense allowed to happen by the highest good. We _see_ complicated, "morally-grey" characters all throughout Tolkien's work, because - as a Catholic writer who consciously revised his work to emphasize his Catholicism - Tolkien's mortals "participate in creaturely free will" (to greater and lesser degrees), they are not categorically good nor evil.
@@Eronoc13
Let me elaborate, when I wrote that Tolkien was uninterested in modern world I've meant that he wasn't looking to explore it in his works as anything positive or remarkable. He is clearly critical of it - Sauron's force is clearly industrial and there's a whole chapter dedicated to forced industrialization of Shire, through little dialogue we have from orcs we understand that they know about moral laws but aren't following them since they are corrupted.
But I will remain convicted that despite being devote Catholic, Tolkien made Middle Earth much more pagan in spirit, than it is usually thought - all his positive heroes are descendants of noble bloodlines and their appearance always mirrors their inner nobility and power, something that doesn't jive with equalizing morals of Christianity.
And secondly - I still think that the world of Middle Earth is dualistic and that Tolkien wasn't interested in "Morally Grey Characters". It is clear that he valued devotion to duty and confidence in reality of good and evil. Compare the death of two kings - Theoden and Denethor; one overcame his slumber and died in a battle confident and content with his demise, while another gloated in his doubts until he was driven to madness. I think characters like Gollum and Denethor paint us a good picture of what Tolkien thought of morally grey characters.
And lastly - this is where I differ from the author of this channel. While I don't agree with Tolkien politically, I think his insistence on keeping his work anachronistic and maybe even anti-modern in spirit. While I can't say that I don't enjoy Ursula Le Guinn's writing, I found that fantasy that comes from "unproblematic" authors is always enlightenment wearing a fantasy outfit, her stories with fantasy elements could be told in any other setting, but when it comes to Middle Earth the form is crucial to the substance. And overall - it feels much more authentic.
@@daniel5730I'm pretty sure moral naivity isn't tied to any religion in particular. Also you're going quite wild with that gollum theory of yours, it's going to take a bit more then this to make it convincing
Edit: while I think that it's rather obvious that Tolkien was indeed willing to explore and discuss the modern times I agree he viewed them negatively. I remember being quite amused when I realised that while all characters talked in that peculiar pompous manner, the orcs spoke very much normally. But that is just a cherry on top, the more telling examples have already been listed in the main comment
My only problem is that the idea of empathy is treated as modernistic. You can find all sorts of examples throughout history of people voicing sympaties for other peoples, even if it wasn't in the way we do now. Sam's thoughts are completely realistic for the time and culture he grew up in.
It’s honestly the same fallacy that gives way to moral relativism and saying “a product of their time” in defense against prejudices and violence like slavery and based on race, sexuality, gender, etc. While it’s a valid reason for someone doing what they do because others are doing it, that doesn’t make their actions any less objectively harmful and unempathetic. The victims of that society were opposed to it and so were others who were empathetic but couldn’t have a platform to say what they wanted to say. It’s “might makes right”, might in numbers.
Would you be OK with judging nonwhite cultures by that standard? Didn't think so.
@@joelanderson5285 Yes I would. I would agree some wouldn't and that's cringe, but I hold a consistent worldview. Also, I don't even think this video is entirely fair towards Tolkien as it leaves out what he said about the controversy initially (although his late comments were problematic).
He doesn’t say Empathy is modernistic. He‘s saying this type of character-writing as well as this specific form of introspection are generally a product of modern literature, which is true.
@@joelanderson5285White people judge non-white cultures by that standard all the time, it is a broken record of colonisers highlighting negative aspects of cultures to justify the uncountable horrors we inflicted on them because "these people sacrifice women for not believing in their gods" while Europeans did the same to their own women, or "these people keep the heads of their enemies as trophies" when the British Museum held taxidermy heads of victims of colonisation well into the 20th/21st century. I cannot think of a single non-white culture that hasn't received dehumanizing levels of judgement from Europeans.
I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don’t care what they tell you in school, Frodo was black.
This shit is one year old, everyone who still makes these jokes is definitely a closet racist
I... I´ll need you to walk me through this epic thing whatever it is
@@zeecaptain42"Oh my science my epic blackerinos ÖÖÖ"
The thing you're referencing is 1 year old now. I'm convinced everyone who still makes this "joke" is a closeted bigot at this point
I think it's okay even if Frodo is white.
Sam's compassion isn't 'modern', it's timeless.
sure, compassion is timeless, but Sam's existence as a compassionate character is really a product of the time of the novel. Odin never stops and thinks about the perspective of the jotuns, for instance.
One could say that the Hobbits have a "more modern" outlook than most people in Middle Earth, having been raised in comfort and rarely struggling, much like many of the people who espoused modern ideals at the time of Tolkien. I wouldn't include the Men of the West as "modern" people, as their values are extremely different from the Hobbits, more prone to resort to violence and dehumanization of the enemy.
We know little of elves, and distant lords of heaven - our gods are of war, and of famine, Gondorkin, and it is from the north and west it comes. - ‘The times of Eldarion’, A Ring of Far Harad. Probably.
@@kklein He did have sexual relations with them.
Plus, the Aesir and the Jötunn often get along. It is just some specific Jötunns which are dangerous (but not necessarily intentionally malevolent 😈).
@@kklein Why is the existence of a character embodying a timeless, universal, human concept somehow tied to our time when such descriptions and characters can be found most anywhere
I'm a little disappointed that this video essay doesn't mention the commentary in the books about how the orcs of Mordor loath their lord Sauron, nor of the conflicts between the orcs, which are described in the books.
because the orcs aren't the focus of the video?
@@MCArt25 Everything I just said pertains to the topic of the video essay you just watched, showing that Tolkien does *not* consider the orcs to be an evil monolith, contrary to what this video says.
This video does not mention orcs once.
You claim that orcs are the focus of the video and that this video says "orcs are an evil monolith" but like... literally what the fuck are you talking about?
This video is about the Haradrim. The Haradrim are humans, not orcs.
@@Ruminations09 You must be trolling. I never said the video focuses on orcs, though it does mention them multiple times.
@@MarshallTheArtist No, it literally doesn't mention orcs once. The transcript of the video is in the description. Press CTRL+F and type Orc, and you'll notice exactly zero results.
A video with a sponsor that isn't just a random thing with no connection to the video; a video with an actual fitting sponsor?
Thanks! I really do value that K Klein was willing to take a sponsorship from me as an independent author; it’s something that I hope isn’t just unique to this channel.
@@rowanalexandriabennett honestly, writer to writer, putting ads for your book in RUclips videos is v smart !! I hadn’t ever thought of that (tho I’m a screenwriter and songwriter so it’s not as cut and dry as books go). catching your intended audience where they usually prowl lol
@@rowanalexandriabennett At least I have never seen anything like that sponsorship before. And it certainly worked in my case: I'll remember your book. Maybe I'll pick it up after I'm done with my current read (One Hundred Years of Solitude).
@@kivadacosta Haha that's the idea! Hope you give it a shot. Any works of yours that I could check out? Shameless plugs encouraged!
@@lonestarr1490 Oh dear; I really dread being the book you READ after one of my favorites. But I'm glad to hear it, nonetheless!
8:30 This bit about how we would interpret the same words differently as written by Tolkien vs some ancient Anglo-Saxon reminds me of Borges' short story of Don Quijote being rewritten word for word by a modern Frenchman and how that results in an entirely different work
Who rewrote it?
@xCorvus7x It was a fictional story by (real author) Jorge Luis Borges, about a (fictional) French author named Pierre Menard who rewrote Don Quijote. I believe the story by Borges is called "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quijote" or something similar.
@@stilltoomanyhats Ah, okay, thank you.
Yes! I love Borges
I would like to point out, not to dismiss your point but to add to it another perspective, that Tolkien also borrowed a lot from Finnish mythology and language (everyone knows the Evlish language borrowed a lot from Finnish, and Gandalf for instance has clear parables to Väinämöinen), but when Tolkien wrote his books, Finns were seen as "oriental", and a common slur for Finnish people was "China Swedes" up until the early 1940s. So although one of the antagonist groups got their influence from asiatic people, there are "asiatic" (as seen at the time) influences on "the good" side as well. I think this gives more credence to the idea that Tolkien wasn't personally racist, though that doesn't mean that his work couldn't be, and his work has been used to push racist ideas (though this in itself doesn't mean that a work is racist, racist are idiots and don't necessarily understand the works they are co-opting).
Is there any reason why Findland was seen as oriental? In my mind Finland is Nordic and thus very much European. Were there specific cultural similarities between Finland and "the East"?
@@Jack93885 Why Finns were seen as non-white? Racism has never been about anything concrete, and like with Italians and Irish people, determining who is white revolves mostly around who are seen as problematic and "lesser people". Finns were seen so in all over the world. In US it was because of the assosiation with labor union and striking and friendlyness with American Indians. In Sweden it was because of many things, including the worse social status of Finns in Sweden and Swedish ideals for race purity.
Why oriental specifically? Finns share some similarities in facial structures with other Asian groups with things like narrower eyes from Finnish ansestry being a mix of germanic and uralic peoples. Another insult was "mongoloid" because of this (also used for idiots in general and for people with Down syndrome specifically). You can read more on this on Wikipedia: "Anti-Finnish sentiment"
@@The.RaxingThe Sami people and the language being Ugric makes for this perception on the Finnish.
@@nathaniel3323 And also, the words "Finn", "Finnish" and "Finland" as applied to a group of people were at one point racist slurs referring to the Sámi peoples (who were definitely seen as "other" from a Nordic perspective) and their lands rather than to the more predominantly Baltic people they reference today.
"The land of mostly people who are more or less like us but also some different people" doesn't catch on as easily as "the land of the different people".
@@IaCthulhuFthagn Please site a source for that claim, cant find any result for the word Finn as a slur anywhere. Also Finnish people are quite separate from the Sámi people.
IIRC there was a mention of the fact that Easterlings and Haradrim did not exactly *chose* the dark side. They were taken by force by leaders who were corrupted and given power by Sauron. I mean, two of the Mages (the unnamed blue ones) just fucking disappeared after they went to the East, so darkness must be kinda rampant in those places and since we know that ALL humans are good by nature we could assume that shit went south in the South and East.
I may or may not be pulling this out of my ass tho because for the love of God I can't remember where I heard that and was it even canon at all
i THINK this comes from a series of letters Tolkien wrote about the Blue Wizards after the publishing of LotR
@@kklein maybe? I feel really bad that I can't remember where I seen it.
Point being, even disregarding that, in the grand scheme of things, all of humans, heck, all of the world is inherently good in Tolkien's work. At the very least redeemable. Which Sam's line is pointing out, I think. It doesn't make those depiction non-racist but at least makes them bit more palatable, in my humble opinion.
Its maybe too "modern" as you said, but that way of thinking ("Yes, those people look ugly and fight on enemies' side, but they are still humans, therefore they are inherently good") is perfectly in-line with Tolkien's own beliefs. For a brief moment Sam became a vessel of an author. This line made me think for a good week when I first read the books back in the middle school and may or may not changed my world view entirely. Its beautiful. However, as you said, it definitely can be seen as a bit out of place.
Also, can we talk about orcs for a second? I think that the most problematic part of the Legendarium is them, not Harad or East, since, you know, those are still humans and therefore redeemable by definition, but orcs are just kinda... Evil. As far as I know, Tolkien himself had a huge back and forth with the question of "Who exactly are orcs and are they redeemable?" since he was devoted christian and believed that everyone can be redeemed but orcs aren't humans therefore should they be redeemable? If yes, then why we see exactly 0 "good" orcs? I mean, "Men of the East" at least got one humanizing line, while orcs are always bad without exception and THAT I find racist
@@VasiliyOgniovI think that's because what Orcs were to Tolkien, they were the people he fought against during world war 1, wielding machines and poisons, the same ones that caused him to be taken from his ideal pastoralism to a land destroyed by technology and war, if nothing else the trenches decorating the country side, not to even claim they were Germans. I think this is why they aren't humans in narative, why they wield the name of Orco, a destruktive Ogre from Italian folklore, ultimately deriving from Orcus, the god of the underworld and why they hold an italian name instead of the Germanic, he was drawing from.
As for the appearance issue, the "mongoloid" description he has in the book also has a basis in WW1, where the Germans were refered to as Huns, a mongol culture. Then again Tolkien was also the man of his time and he can't escape that.
Isn't this basically how reasonable people deal with these issues today? It's not the people, it's the political environment?
@@VasiliyOgniov I think the idea of orcs as inherrently evil is better understood through the lens of spiritual warfare, rather than race.
You mention his Christian (moreover, Catholic) faith and I think it's relevant here. That there are legions doing the work of corrupted/fallen beings, set against all that is good and holy, is a key idea in Catholicism. If Tolkein ever attended a Low Mass he would likely have recited the prayer to St. Michael as it was recited after such masses throughout near the entirity of his life. It finishes,
"by the power of God thrust Satan down to hell
and with him those other wicked spirits
who wander through the world for the ruin of souls."
These beings that in the Catholic faith are considered to be of a spiritual/(primarily) internal nature are represented in a more physical form in Arda. If you consider Melkor as an analogue of Satan then it is clear how his creations, the orcs, trolls, and dragons are ontoligically evil while the men and elves, known as the Children of Ilúvatar, are ontoligcally good. Eru giving blessing to the creation of the dwarves would also set them in the good camp too.
While I appreciate the intention, I find the idea of applying the lense of race to analyse a myth of ontological good and evil rather problematic in itself.
Something of note is that Tolkien himself believed that the Blue Wizards might have helped out in the Eastern Lands and prevented the “dark” people from all falling to Sauron’s influence. In fact without their help there might have been a ton more Easterlings and Southerners the main characters would’ve had to contend with and their win likely wouldn’t have been possible.
Anyways this does imply he saw them as real people and redeemable. His entire viewpoint actually was that everyone was redeemable and it’s one of the reasons why he grappled so much with the origins of the Orcs, I don’t think he believed anything in the Legendarium was truly 100% evil or irredeemable. It’s for these reasons I don’t think Tolkien intended for it to be racist to be honest and I think even as you put, it’s quite a bit more complicated than black = bad = racism.
Interestingly, that version of the Blue Wizards is from later writings and musings iirc. The earlier versions had the Blue wizards falling like Saruman and becoming evil. His reevaluation of the Blue Wizards seems to occur alongside his reevaluation of the Orcs, and whether they are true Evil or perverted Good, and he never answered that definitively.
Yeah, he reached the conclusion he couldn't make anything in his Legendarium irrevocably evil, as it clashed directly with his catholic beliefs that no one is beyond redemption and good if they make the choice to pursue it
Way I saw it was that the Haradrim are seen from the perspective of the men of the northern areas. They are deemed evil and dark because they side with Sauron, but this doesn't mean they actually ARE evil. They are, much as you said in the video, seen through the sort of eyes an Anglo-Saxon would have looked through when thinking of Africa, or China. Strange, unknowable, foreign and usually subversive. This, however, does not make this view true, and indeed, to my mind at least, the scene with Sam, where he looks on the body of the dead Harad man, proved as much. In that scene, we are struck by the realization that these are men, human beings just like us, and that they have been brought here, likely coerced in some fashion, or tricked, into servitude. We do not know whether the Haradrim hate their master, whether they rebel against him, and while I think a Haradrim character would have been awesome, we do not get this in the story since, as you stated, it ultimately has nothing to do with the story as a whole. It could just be me, and my reading of the book, but to me, Tolkien proved himself not to be a racist by that beautiful scene. That he even took the time to write it, to make the reader feel for what could have easily been left a faceless evil thrall, to me speaks volumes.
I will premise this, though, with the statement that Tolkien's world was different from our own, and he was a product of that world, and thus, even if he had not intended any hateful message, it is possible that he was influenced by the prevailing views of the time. I am not trying to say that Tolkien, as much as I love his works, was a perfect man, indeed no human ever can be, but I honestly do not agree with views of him being racist.
Rhey were once colonized by Numenorians who extracted resources. Too bad most people don't read the appendix or books like the silmarillion because of oversimplification
This is something I really wish the Rings of Power show had the actual creativity to explore. Maybe the men of Harad Are just tricked or coerced into Sauron's service/alliance, or maybe they have some real legitimate grievances with the Gondorians and their Numenorian ancestors (who did colonize all over the world and did, thru the later 2nd Age, become ruthless imperialists). Perhaps the people of Harad would even be offended that the Gondorians assume they're misled or tricked into siding with the strongman who promises them revenge against those proud men of the West who lorded over them before (even if Sauron would, sooner or later, prove a nastier master). That's the kind of racism I feel in Tolkien's writing: not a personal, virulent mouth-foaming hatred, but more of a disinterested, early 20th c. English attitude that, for instance, takes the existence of the British Empire as a baseline good, that doesn't think much about or interrogate what life is like for the people who aren't English under that system (sorta like Churchill's outlook in his writings on Empire and history).
@@johnstajduhar9617 it is stated explicitly that the numenorians just extracted resources without care, so it's implied why
Even knowing that Lovecraft was in fact racist even by the standards of his time (though he often wrote characters to be even more racist than himself, which is wacky, and conversely sometimes revealed through his writing a reverence for Asian culture and ethnicities, whether through "sloe-eyed" goddess of beauty Nathicana or the "exotic yet familiar" surroundings in the Crawling Chaos), this is how I prefer to read his works, too- Not as revealing the real author's obscene bigotry, but as reflecting the stodgy white New England attitudes of the characters, which works well with the irony that those characters often turn out to have "bad blood" in the form of ancestors who were cannibals, evil sorcerers, devil worshipers or fish.
@@johnstajduhar9617 I'm pretty sure that it's mentioned somewhere that Haradrim joined Sauron exactly because Gondorians had oppressed them in the past to the point that Sauron seemed the better option, and also that a good number of them still rejected Sauron and instead joined with the Blue Wizards (but obviously those are not the ones Sauron would send to invade middle earth, so they are not the ones that show up in LotR).
At least for me I've always found it important to look at the intent of someones work. When you read the passage in a modern context, sure it *can* be read as racist simply due to the skin colour but you have to ask if that is the intent to Tolkien writing it.
My first thought that comes to mind are svartalfr from norse mythology, literally called black elves and are almost categorically evil in all appearances yet most people can agree that its probably not born from a racist intent but rather a way for a skald or poet to inject some mystery and otherness in their story.
Another important note is the perspective the book is written in which is that of the men of the west. In universe they would lack sufficient knowledge of the haaradrim (or how its spelt sorry) to have more than a almost mythical image of them. I dont think the men of the east are ment as a literal people of pitch black skin etc as we see pther characters with ambiguous skin colour in the west (Aragorn being a prime example), but rather as a skewed retelling similar to the romans describing the brittons as "slow people who live in lakes of mud".
Sorry rant over
Haradrims are basically the Arabs or berbers of northern Africa with the more darker skinned ones being the sub-saharan people of central africa
Do you not think there is some racism in using black skin to inject mystery and otherness?
@@lowcostfish not inherently no. It could be read as racist but I dont think that such a inclusion has to be intended as racist by default.
What I'm trying to say is that it could be interpreted as racist but I dont think that Tolkien had a racist intent when writing it. Dark and light being representative of good and evil has been a literary staple for literal centuries and I think it's only perceived as a racist dynamic when viewed through modern thinking (once again svart alfs being a prime example).
Unintentional bigotry is a thing; internalized bigotry is a thing. I'm not saying that's necessarily Tolkien's case, but ones' intentions are, at most, helpful in contextualizing, but not a silver bullet that dispels all analysis.
@@ivanfloresvazquez7490 yeah thats fair, "the path to tragedy is lined with good intentions" and all that. But I feel like intent is still the main lens one should look through when it comes to things like this.
Its kinda like how women are portrayed in Tolkiens works; pretty poorly. But he was still more "radical" when compared to his peers at the time so despite the things he wrote being very backwards from our point of view, for his time its pretty darn good so calling him a "sexist author" by todays standards would not be fair.
There seem to be a lot of people who end up at one of two extremes:
On the one hand, there are those who focus solely on their immediate experience as readers, so much so that they don't really seem to think of fictional characters and events as fictional constructs at all. "The Haradrim could have had civil wars," is a perfectly natural thought to have as you read, but those types of hypotheticals can't form the basis of an interpretation that's meaningful to anyone else but yourself, and so they are quite useless in discussions with others. To those who _only_ read stories like this, and never move on to a more distanced approach, it might not be very easy to see stories as part of the culture they're in. They're self-contained things, and that's it. But a literary work will always be part of a larger context, in several ways; it literally can't _not_ be.
On the other hand, there are those who contextualize stories not only to view a particular work in the context of its past or present culture, but also to label it as e.g. "dangerous," "decadent," categorically "problematic," etc. -- perhaps to promote the idea that literary works should be _in service of_ society somehow. This takes many forms, but all have in common a general failure to think of art as art, in favor of some more instrumental approach.
I think it's important to be aware of how you tend to read stories and then find a more constructive balance between different ways to approach them. It's crucial to acknowledge that even seemingly contradictory ideas and analyses can all be true or valid at once.
I always interpreted the people of Harad as more an analogue to Arab people than black people but I don't think that fundamentally changes much.
They seem like North African/Carthaginian references if anything, given his mythological bent and how he roughly maps Middle Earth onto Real Earth (by design).
@@johnstajduhar9617 ah so still a semitic people then
Perhaps more than one group, allied under a temporary banner. These sorts of things happened a lot.
@@dayalasingh5853North Africans are racially Semites?
@@dayalasingh5853 North Africans aren't Semitic, (well, not then) but Berber so it is more Afro-Asiatic.
Just commenting on Sam’s line, what I always took away from the stories were that the big battles etc were based around big myths with a simple lens that represents the old mythology from one point of view. But Sam and Frodo are the non myths that aren’t simple, and eventually forgotten by the myths so they are more real. But 🤷🏻♂️
The line about orcs looking like the "least-lovely mongol-types" doesn't really help either
To be fair, the full quote is
" They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types"
I feel like that is 1). Admiting it's an odd way to describe and that it's an exageration of the look 2) I've seen people say that that sounds like the propaganda cartoons they made. Seeing some of them... they look like goblins. And, in the books, orcs and goblins are the same thing
Interestingly, after the war in Ukraine started, Ukranians started to call Russians "orks" (орки). I wonder if this can be called racist
@felixgroove4016
Oh yeah, it’s racist given that the Ukrainians are overrun with Nazism, and actively pursue Nazi policies of dehumanization and extermination against their national minorities and beyond just their Russians, and have a stated goal of killing all Russians everywhere in the world.
Go back to prior 100 years. It’s basically the same as the Hun Panic complete with “stop this brute” ape imagery of the Germans during the First World War.
Both campaigns relied upon mostly exaggeration of a limited number of actual crimes, and a certain number of fictional hysterias to create an image of an inhuman, alien, rampaging monster army.
I was wounded out of the war, a long time ago, and the orc label did bother me at first, but I’ve since learned to adopted affectionally, especially for the strong and martial connotations.
@@felixgroove4016dehumanizing? Ye that sounds racist
Not justifying it, but it is quite likely that it stems form WW1, where the Germans were refered to as Huns, who were a mongolic group. It could be a metafor we're too detached form to inherently know.
Thoughful video, but I have to disagree with both the conclusion and the arguments.
At no point does one need to bring race into the picture for a complete reading of LoTR.
Sauron and Saruman recruiting foreign armies/mercenaries does not make those people, ontologically evil. In constrast to Sauron and Saruman who *are* ontologically evil, and not racially othered.
And by the exact same Sam-quote you brought up, it is unambiguous to me that Tolkien intends to frame these foreigners as not ontologically evil or even different, which to me is essential to racism.
Racism to me is the believe that different groups of people are different in their essence, that their souls so to say are different.
As far as I know this is the only scene where one of these people is considered individually, and in that scene, they are humanized and empathised with.
If LoTR were racist, it would bother to racially other these foreigners. It would depict how they're supposedly bad, smelly, inferior, aggressive, weak, uncivillised etc, but it doesn't do that.
These people aren't antagonized because of what or who they are but soley because they're serving under Sauron.
The assertion that "modern" necessitates a racialized perspective is also one that I find questionable. Regardless of if Sams quote precludes LoTR from being pre-modern, why should a modern work necessarily divide the different peoples in a story into separate races? Why must it necessarily be viewed through that lense?
I feel like that that is more indicative of the readers world-view than that of the work or its author.
Thanks. I really needed to read that.
Tolkien grew up in the Edwardian era. If you read pretty much anything from that time period you can get a glimpse into the world he lived in. Tolkien grew up reading books like King Solomon's Mines and She. It's hard to believe that his worldview wasn't racialized.
doesn't the video directly talk about the fact that lotr isn't racist in the way modern books are?
it also talks about the fact that the book is only as racist as you read it
and it never asserts that there is a necessity to look at it through the modern lens of race, only that there is a tension there, for the creator of the video.
it feels like you didn't engage with the video at all.
@bahaman19901 The Lord of the Rings is a modern book. Tolkien is definitely trying to emulate older works, but he is still writing it in the 20th century. If I wrote a book today in the style of Shakespeare, that doesn't mean my book is not modern.
Tolkien's grew up in a world with very different views on race than today. Vastly different. Today racism is a social problem and generally considered to be evil. But when Tolkien was growing up racism was considered scientific fact. It was taught at universities including Oxford where he worked.
The stories he read growing up like King Solomon's Mines and She are examples of the general attitudes of the time he lived.
Don't forget the smackdown he laid on the Nazis when they asked whether he was Aryan or Jewish.
2:14 That analysis doesn't work because it's inaccurate and too reductive.
Aside from the struggle to be good being more fleshed out in the story than you give it credit here, The Lord of the Rings is not a story of fair, valiant, imposing men proving themselves as heroes but of those living in the shadow of such figures, common folk who happen to be tasked with a mission that asks of them not to be honourful warriors but perseverance. Their most important virtue is to endure and not give up, not to gather mythic armies and slay the evil hordes.
We cannot see the perspective of the foreign peoples because the story starts with and is about people who have barely ever heard of such peoples existing.
This insight isn't missing either because the story is not about finding brotherhood across nation lines but the divine challenge the protagonists face.
This was a really interesting analysis. I love looking at the works of past authors and seeing what that work says about them and their time. I don't think Tolkien intended to be racist at any point writing LOTR, but it definitely does reflect how the world around him was at that time, and how attempts at escaping societal norms often come up futile. It will be very interesting to see how the authors of today, writing books with subtle choices that no one would bat an eye to nowadays, will be regarded by people 100 years from now. Perhaps they will live at a time past climate catastrophy and newfound scarcity, where our current careless approach to consumerism will be seen as (for the lack of a more refined term) evil.
Love your videos, keep making them
I am gonna write a book and explicitly gonna say ''This book is definitely meant to be RACIST to every nations under the sun''.
This is actually why I've been wishing that future LotR content from new writers would focus more on these world parts, as you don't have to strictly follow Tolkien's writing and can still expand on a world with very few restrictions.
There seem to be these two, mostly left groups not being able to come to terms with who Tolkien was.
One one hand you have the people who are like "He was a perfect man. And he conformed to all the leftist modern ideas on race, gender, migration etc!"
And the other is "he was a fascist, orcs are an allegory for black people, Dwarves are antisemitic etc etc"
Bro, Tolkien was a Catholic, linguist and WW1 veteran. He was likely very conservative compared to today, esp compared to modern leftist ideologues and their ideas on gender etc. He likely had some racist ideas, as literally everyone had back then. And I'm not talking about, how Lovecraft was racist. Even the most progressive people had really, really cringy and bad takes on race, ethnicity, culture etc. You have to understand, they didn't have the internet. Their world wasn't as tiny as ours. They didn't get to grow up experiencing countless cultures. He wrote the book, specifically to give his own people a mythology like the norse, because he was a little envious of their cool mythology and stuff. It's like if a Nigerian or Philipino kid today sees LOTR and says, "man.. I wish my people had an epic like this" and then starts writing it himself. Tolkien was likely very conservative and right wing in many ways. Tolkien was a WW1 vet, he was a nationalist/patriot.
At least those are my impressions of Tolkien from what I've read of him and from him as a Turk from the Netherlands. The reality is if you're looking for perfect poeple anywhere in history you're going to be disappointed. And I have no doubt even the most perfect person today won't fit into the mold of perfectness of some society years from now.
i agree, i think a lot of elements of tolkien's ideology seem self-contradictory today. LotR IS a story about the union of the peoples coming together and putting their differences aside to fight a common enemy, learning to appreciate each others cultures and ideas about life and respecting each others agency... it is ALSO a book about the peoples of the west uniting to fight the black and brown corrupted servants of the darkness who come in hordes from the south and east. and it's many things inbetween, too. i don't think these interpretations are contradictory, they're as you say, a product of culture and of his own personal feelings about human nature.
I have to disagree. A 1960s progressive still having cringe ideas doesn't make them a racist.
Tolkien was most definitely not a racist even if he had cringe ideas because the doctrines of Catholic church then wasn't and we have no indicators of it from his letters. On the other hand, he was probably queerphobic because the doctrines of his church always was that.
I get your point, but personally I don't see any good basis for a racist accusation. The archaic description of the southerners is just realistic world building to me, helping set the period to our real-world counterpart, And Sam's thoughts on the dead soldier strikes me as a reaction any reasonably kind person would have, and even as a kid I always got the implication form this moment that plenty of the Southerners would have had the same kind of thought as Sam.
Im sure this video wont be any controversial at all. And that the comments will be completely in good faith :)
Flame War in 3...2...1...
Can't wait for K Klein to be dogpiled on Twitter and RUclips
I mean, while I may disagree with some of his points, I at least can at least understand that this is his, subjective, opinion on the piece. It is an interesting debate to have. Besides, I cannot in good faith hate on a video which was clearly created with a good amount of research and effort such as this.
You can't "in good faith" think that LotR is racist either so reap what you sow.
@@junfour you can. Why do you think that you can't? You might want to explore that
The fact rhat Tolkien might be racist and in other ways conservative like that is something that i got the feeling for while reading the Silmarillion. After the first coming of Man upon Beleriand, in the first fight between elves, men and Morgoth (the big bad) it's only the Easterlings among the Men that betray the others and fight on the side of Morgoth (though not all Easterlings do) and the Easterlings are explicitly described as dark/yellow skinned.
There's that, and there's also the fact that in the Silmarillion basically all of the characters are either nobility or directly related to nobility. There's no hero that isn't from a regal bloodline, or at the very least the chief of its people.
In general, Tolkien is well understood as being influenced both by his Catholicism and by old literature but.. he was also a monarchist. A monarchist but also an anarchist oddly enough. He liked escapism. He wanted his universe to be comforting. What he wrote, his simplistic morality between the Vala and Morgoth, it's something that made sense to him. His writings about noble races and bloodlines against the corrupting influence of evil, that's just what he believed in. If he has a more grounded story in LotR instead of the Silmarillion, it might be because the Silmarillion was inspired by older texts but... It could also be that LotR was where he felt he needed to meet the public halfway, where he needed to compromise. He didn't in the Silmarillion, he never even published it.
Seems more like the standard pop-USA-🦅-brand cultural supremacism. (Despite Tolkien being English.)
"Everyone has to conform to my way of thinking or they are evil 😈 and must be purged or forcibly indoctrinated. If they completely abandon their culture and accept mine, I will think of them as good, so I can't be racist."
@@katethegoat7507 "A monarchist but also an anarchist oddly enough" Can you talk more about that? Those are pretty diametrically opposed, it's like being a vegan game hunter
@@AlannaStarcrossed honestly I can't because I haven't understood it myself either. Iirc he just said it himself. If I'd have to guess I'd say that it might have something to do with him disliking the idea of states. He didn't like how people associate themselves with abstract countries instead of being loyal to a specific person
@@AlannaStarcrossed From what I understand, he wanted government to function very much like how it does in the good days of Numenor/Gondor. In other words, a "great man" kind leads mostly through example of upright moral character and by charismatic obligation, but without government really being involved with people's day-to-day.
In other words, you give your king a tithe because it is the right thing to do and see that he will use it to protect the kingdom, without there being tax collectors to force you to. You have a beautiful, stylistically consistent home with your community because it is right for the neighborhood, not because of a permitting board. You follow your King to war because he has made a speech explaining the battle's absolute necessity.
It's a completely fantastical political position, and I don't think Tolkien thought it would really work, but it is a comforting dream.
I think you over-interpreted Sam's thought. Nothing would've been worse than Tolkien actually giving a voice to the Haradrim, his imaginary representation of a real life people he knew nothing about. Tolkien writes about what he knows, we see the story through the lives of characters Tolkien himself could relate to because they draw from the same cultural source, something that would've been impossible to do with characters from the far south. Literally the most racist thing he could've done is to project (even if they were positive) preconceptions that he had about those peoples and cultures without knowing them, without having lived with them, without having experienced their everyday lives. What he did through Sam is remind all those who meet such strangers from far away lands, whatever the circumstances, to remember that they are human too, to relate to them in some kind of way, to empathise even if they happen to be your enemies.
Edit : Thinking about it even more, I'm wondering if there's actually anything LESS racist than to describe people so different to you in appearance, even terrifyingly so, but to still encourage others to empathise and relate to them.
Why include them? Why make the only characters you reference in that way evil? Your logic falls apart because he is writing about them. He included them he had no need to no one made him make them black and middle eastern they could of all been white. He is a product of his time and indeed was racist, does that make his work inherently bad? No. But you have to acknowledge the reality of what he is doing. He is writing about what he does not know. He is using peoples fear of other races and the unknown as a representation of evil and that he can certainly be condemned for and i always will. Writing some good things does not mean we ignore the bad, you look at the work as a whole. He wrote about black people he didn't not include them that is the reality. He wrote one line of empathy and you declare he didn't write about them.. He projected preconceptions on them ( that they are weak willed and evil by nature) how is that not projecting them a certain way to you?... your logic is so flawed I'm afraid, he did exactly what you say is the most racist thing he could do project preconceptions on entire races he knows nothing about. If he didn't write about them they wouldn't be in his books simple and easy.
With regard to your opening, Terry Pratchett said this: "J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji."
I read LOTR while in primary school. As far as I remember, it was all quite abstract - the idea that orcs were being likened to actual human “races” would never have occurred to me.
morþor meant 'crime, violence, torment' in Old English, btw.
It's morþing time
@@burner555Morthing.
Now, it just means Murder...
Couldn't resist.
Despite the similarity, Mordor's name derives from Sindarin Mor(n)+(n)dor, which are, respectively "Black" and "Land". The elements Morn can be found in Moria ("Black Chasm"), while (N)dor in Gondor ("Stone Land")
@@merydoesstuff Yes, that is Tolkien's etymology, but his inspiration must've come form Old English
I was honestly surprised how much more nuanced Tolkiens legendarium is than just "Evil brown people fighting the good people of the west", all people followed Morgoth from the beginning, and the only reason people of the West turned away from him was their proximity to the elves. We can see how righteous numenoreans become corrupted, and Tolkien makes it clear at multiple points in the books that there is nothing inherently evil about easterlings or haradrim. Indeed, there is the famous Tal Elmar tale told from the pov of Edain of Gondor who were a followers of Morgoth and who were subsequently driven out and subjugated by Numenoreans, it sure isn't as black and white as you'd expect from an allegory of Christianity
It's not an allegory of Christianity, at least according to Tolkien.
wtf does Christianity have to do with this
An English man born un 1892 might have a problematic view of people from Africa and Asia. 🤯. I kid, but of course this is how would right about these people, but the fact he included such a line shows that he even knows his views are problematic.
“As for what you say or hint of ‘local’ conditions: I knew of them. I don’t think they have much changed (even for the worse). I used to hear them discussed by my mother; and have ever since taken a special interest in that part of the world. The treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain, & not only in South Africa. Unfortunately, not many retain that generous sentiment for long.” (Letter 61 - April 1944).
womp womp
muh problematic views
@@Sercer25stupid liberals dont even let me hate people anymore..,,!
Excellent video! Really got the gears in my head turning.
No fictional work can escape the reality in which it was written. We are forever trapped in our respective present. In terms of racism, I can only imagine what it must be like to come across a caricature and get the hunch that one belongs to the group of people it was based on.
I've been rewriting and deleting paragraphs from this comment multiple times, trying to anticipate what the reader will make of it, and I have come to the conclusion that being an author of anything sounds like hell.
Racism suggests malice towards other groups.
Something which is categorically NOT present in tolkein's work.
However, it certainly does revere European culture & mythology. In an attempt to repair what tolkein believed the English people had lost through the years.
It is a work of LOVE for his group. NOT an attack on other groups.
Racism doesn't imply malice it implies a lack of care about the other's humanity. A reduction of the other to the simplest most convenient form be it the helper, the animal or the enemy. The racist person does not have to hate the other to be racist they just need to be careless.
@@grandsome1 No... it implies hate. . . period. Modern wokies will tell you anything that is 100% White is racist because of a lack of inclusion, they conveniently leave out that other races have works centered around their own race 100% and it's not considered racist lol.
It's double standard bs, and it's subversive drivel.
@@grandsome1 Tolkien spoke up against apartheid and against various racist ideologies.
.. And even if we didn't knew that, we cannot say that lack of care means someone is racist, because it means that _for some reason_ racism is "default". That's a flawed reasoning.
@@grandsome1 That's bullshit actually!
A completely brainrot take!
Racism is a belief!
To be racist you have to think that one race (Any race) is supperior (Generally/As a whole) than others!
That's it!
More pure, more human, chosen..... stuff like that!
And that it should be separated from the rest or dominating/controlling the rest.....
@@grandsome1 "a lack of care" 🤦🏻♂️
Dude!
Most of the society are careless about other people!
In all countries!
People are not so empathetic like you would like to believe!
But it's not because of racism.....
Ok fair warning, REALLY long comment coming up! See, I love Tolkien's work dearly, but have often struggled with let's say, our differnt political and ideological views. Now, let's start:
-It is downright silly to expect an Englishman born and raised in colonial South Africa , and deeply indoctinated in christianity, to conform to 2024 standards of political correctness and sensibilities
-Tolkien often makes a point about "clean bloodlines" eg Aragorn's impeccable pedigree, but, at the same time, in the Gondor civil war I think his sympathies were clearly against the Castamiri who wanted a pure-blooded Numenorian on the throne
-There is absolutely no mention of the lineage of men who first turn to Morgoth being black or anything like that
-The black Numeroreans who worshipped Sauron were not called black because of any external physical characteristic
-The Southrons only turned to Sauron because of the threat of numenorian colonialism, which brings us to the next point...
-Tolkien wrote of his dislike of both the Roman and the British empires. By the standards of his day, such an anti-imperialist view was almost extreme! I think he deeply belived in the "civilising mission" of colonialism, that is first and foremost the spread of Christianity and maybe some basic infrastructure. He was deeply suspicious of technological progress, so I don't think he believed Africa missed out out on anything by not having any factories etc.
-His descriptions of other nations is more "exotic" or "orientalist" than racist. Of course the first time you saw a black person you would be shocked, just as much as a black person would be shocked upon encountering white skinned, blue-eyed European for the first time. There is nothing wrong with admitting that we cannot understand everyone and everything
-While racism takes many forms as time progresses (divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book), race as we understand it nowadays only appeared as late as the 16th century, as a justification for colonialism. Check out the History of England podcast, ep. 301 "Black Tudors" for some very intresting details
Theres also the elements of enviromentalism, which i would say are anti-colonial in nature because indigenous people tend to respect the land more than Anglo Saxons
PLEASE, you, and EVERYONE, if you haven't already, embrace the One True Only God YHWH Jehovah, Only One Jesus Christ His Only Begotten Son and Lord and Savior of our souls and the Only One Holy Spirit. God is good. God is love. Jesus IS coming. Your soul depends on it!
I have seen God act in my life. He saved my soul, changed my heart, changed my mind, helped people through me, took care of people in my life, people I hurt before I found God. God is the only reason I was able to reconcile with my dad before he died.
God worked through Jesus Christ to save our souls. Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins. Believe in your heart and confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and that God raised Him from the dead and you will be saved. Be baptized in The Holy Spirit, and if He wills, water as well. Repent of your sins, accept God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit into your heart, that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only Begotten Son Jesus Christ, that all who believe on Him shall not perish but have eternal life. Jesus Christ is The Way, The Truth and The Life. No one comes to the Father Jehovah God but through Him.
Not long after I got saved I prayed to God for help understanding the Holy Bible, and that same day someone knocked on my door asking me if I wanted to understand the Bible.
The Holy Bible says, "love thy enemy", "turn the other cheek", "If your enemy is hungry, feed him", "if he is thirsty, give him a drink", "pray for those who persecute you", "do not repay evil for evil".
LORD willing, all humans may commit sin of almost every kind (gay, straight), and that's wrong, and all humans sin, as God tells us through the The Holy Bible, "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." The Holy Bible also says, "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.", "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." and, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."
“Indoctrinated in Christianity” just say raised a Christian, which is a good thing.
And think in incorrect in saying her believed in the 2 of the 3 Cs if colonization. Yeah, he believed in spreading Christianity, he was Christian and that comes with being Christian but spreading infrastructure and technology? Even basic technology? Like this is a man opposed to even cars, what basic tech more complex than what they already had would he be for spreading? Electricity? Probably a no there too.
The passages about how the Numenoreans weakened their bloodlines by mingling with lesser Men always bothered me. It reminds me of similar arguments against interracial marriage.
It does have an explanation behind it, but yeah it’s still a strange description
Its only strange when you put a modern sense into it. The "lesser men" aren't inherrently lesser in a genetic sense, although they were shorter and had shorter life, it's implied they lost the culture and morals of the elves@@BrisbaneBroncosfan67
well they were stronger and wiser than ordinary men and lived much longer, they were simply “better”
I feel like you've glossed over a lot of important things. One thing about the men of the east and south is that although their collectively referred to as Easterlings and Haradrim respectively as if they were singular cultures, they were actually umbrella terms used by the men of the west to describe the numerous peoples of these foreign lands who were not related to the Edain, like how the Romans initially viewed the Celts and Germans or how medieval Europeans collectively called all nomadic steppe tribes (Turks, Mongols, Khazars etc) as Tatars. In addition, you claim that Tolkien painted black people in a negative light when the Haradrim we see invading Gondor are much more arabic based. I don't think we've actually seen black people in Tolkien's works. The Haradrim allying with Sauron was probably much more than just them being evil. They had been subject to conquest and colonization by Gondor and its predecessors. After spending generations under the thumb of the Dunedain, it makes sense why the Haradrim would join Sauron, not because they actually liked him but to finally win their freedom. A really interesting event involving the men of Harad and Rhun were the rebellions instigated by the blue wizards against Sauron in the Second Age. This conflict is only mentioned briefly, but it saw the two blue wizards travel to the East and South respectively where they rallied the Easterlings and Haradrim who refused to serve Sauron against him. Despite only being mentioned in passing, this event was actually quite crucial, as it prevented Sauron from amassing as many forces as he initially hoped and delayed his invasion of the west for a full 90 years, which allowed the elves and their Allies time to prepare for war.
Edit: ok woah, I really went overboard with this comment and it was really pompous and dickish of me to basically open with "well your not a true fan like me" in the original response. It's just I've seen so many people on the internet trying to slander Tolkien's name just for attention so when I saw your video I had a knee-jerk reaction. At the end of the day, the idea of the Haradrim and Easterlings being evil by nature goes against the philosophy of Tolkien. While I still disagree with your statement, your video has actually made me reflect on how black and white Lotr's depiction of the Men of East and South is when compared to their depiction the rest of the Legendarium.
bro we didn't need a full essay, especially one you open with "I feel like you're not that well versed in Tolkien"
@@Thermopolis11Your very reply suggests you did in fact need the full essay
smallest LOTR essay
Yeah I really overreacted with that comment. also looking back on it, yeah there are definitely are some pretty problematic things like the black trolls with red tongues.
Tell me why I read the thumbnail to the tune of Uptown Funk
Because it’s vastly superior
As Tolkien did call Sam the true hero in some letter, I think that one line is meant to imply that the rest of the portrayal of the Haradrim is wrong.
Sam is the purest of all characters, no hint of evil. So Sam thinking that the Haradrim might not be inherently evil is supposed to be seen as correct, while the further portrayal is not. Tolkien spoke out against Apartheid, against racists using his book and against Antisemitism. I would not say he was racist. Especially not as racist as some of his contemporaries (HP Lovecraft comes to mind).
He wrote it how the old myths were. But he still had to show that he did not fully agree with that portrayal, so he wrote in that line.
And the Blue Wizards in the east helping the Easterlings fight against Sauron is supposed to show that they aren't evil either. (Though that does create uncomfortable missionary parallels, as the wizards were essentially angels, so them converting the Easterlings is a bit icky)
Evil can't create, it only corrupts.
7:11 elephants are mentioned in the Old English poems.
Are they? I'd be interested to see an example of that.
@@ashwinnmyburgh9364 There is the poem "Wonders of the East", which talks about dragons and phoenixes, too.
Any time someone mentions elephants, all I can think of is Hannibal reaching Rome
and telling the troops "Actually, lets just go home, guys" LOL
I think to remember another passage, where Sam just entered to Mordor to try to save Frodo in the Return of the King. An explanation is given to the Blackgate, which is not as much used to impede the entrance of enemies to Mordor, as it is for avoiding "slaves of Sauron" to escape its domains
I had no idea where this was leading, but I’m really glad I watched til the end. You did an excellent job on this one.
As an aside, I really love your visual language of boxes for quotation, the different coloured text for annotations, and reboxing to building on even more ideas. As somebody who works with the structure of programming languages I’m constantly thinking of quotation, splicing and evaluation, and this pleases me greatly, matching up with a lot to my internal visual models. Also a links nicely to the idea of the frame narrative, which is ofc very relevant to Tolkien’s work (I’m sure this was not an accident). :)
...lol, what? I'm so sorry but I might have missed the point being made in this video.
Thoughtful introspection is not a modern phenomenon. Nor is giving an antagonist group features/descriptions distinctly different from the heros an archaic technique. Tolkien giving Sam an awareness of the fallen enemy soldier's experience or perspective doesn't make LotR particularly more modern or less folklore-like. And it really works against the notion of LotR being racist; if Tolkien intended any prejudice towards other ethnic groups, Sam's sentiment seems quite contradictory to that ideal. So maybe racism was *not* what Tolkien was getting at.
Or at least, that's how I choose to interpret it from a black, female, 21st-centurian perspective. 🤷🏾♀️
so giving the protagonist introspection is not what i'm talking about here. i'm comparing literary techniques, _how_ that introspection is communicated. this kind of limited third person narrative with a pause in the story for a moment of introspection is something one finds in novels, not in the texts of the old Germanic epics. what i talk about there is literary technique, that's why i have the whole section about comparing the literary techniques of epics and novels.
i also don't think an author's intention is the be all and end all when it comes to interpreting their work. i never in the video call _tolkien_ racist, i'm not interested in investigating that claim here. i'm examining the piece of literature, and yeah, i think it has racism woven into its narrative - analysing it with this kind of lens can tell us about more subtle things than just whether or not tolkien personally was a racist, it can help build a picture of the attitude and conscious or unconscious biases of the society of his time, and by how we react and engage with this media in the modern day, how we've changed (or not changed) as a society.
finally, tolkien is absolutely creating a modern myth, and the way he presents "the distant other" is absolutely part of that. the way he writes about Harad is reminiscent of the way Africa is written about in Germanic mythology... like I say in the video.
@@kklein "Blah blah blah, White people bahd, Blah"
I disagree with your final conclusion. You could say that the haradrim and easterlings are trapped as ancient caricatures, or you could say that the perspective of the entire war of the ring is from the factions of middle earth, with them fighting for survival, will understandably not be thinking much about the daily lives and motivations of the 'other' humans. Take this as a WW1 allegory or take it as an ancient allegory, I think it still stands for both. I think the assumption that samwise's ability to empathize and wonder about the life on a follower of sauron is not departure from ancient thinking, but a rare occurrence completely within the ability of the rest of the people of middle earth, but simply they are not disposed towards it because they are being antagonized by said people. I think we are not giving the ancients enough credit to automatically assume that empathy for a foreign enemy is an exclusively modern concept. Surely at least one roman had thought briefly about the suffering of the carthaginians as they were razing the city, surely at least one mongol cavalryman briefly thought about the destruction they were causing to baghdad, surely one crusader thought about the muslim saracens being just as human as they were, even if they all did carry on with their duties. Just because there was a glimpse into moral complexity with samwise does not equate it to a modern trait. There are many historical examples of understanding between these foreign ancient cultures such as mentioned in the video, even if it was not a perfect understanding. You can take a look at the channel "voices of the past" for an actual example of what you say Tolkien was doing by creating a pseudo anglo-saxon historical mythos. Yes, most ancient (and even up to pre-modern) accounts of cultures meeting or traveling in lands of foreign cultures will end up with them somewhat mocking the customs and cultural aspects which they find to be too alien to them, out of ignorance and lack of exposure, but there are also grains of understanding, comparing aspects to their own culture, finding common ground, which seem to permeate many if not all accounts of cultures meeting. This to me is evidence of the innate nature of humans to try and seek understanding, which exists parallel to the nature of humans to also seek conflict, which I also cannot deny, but do not think is the only thing.
This perfectly puts words to how I’ve felt about fantasy racism for so long. A lot of fantasy communities are huge on historical accuracy, and for good reason, but navigating the differences between historical race relations and modern ones requires a bit more nuance and tact that a lot of people seem to lack. As a result, so much of fantasy writing and community feels very uncomfortable sometimes.
Why should fantasy respect history? Did medieval Europe really have dragons?
@@MarshallTheArtist Wait, what? We didn't? 😢
The thing is that Tolkien's stories are ultimately not about worldly politics but about the metaphysical struggle of staying true to and trusting in salvation through suffering.
@@doomhippie6673 You didn't answer my first question. My second was rhetorical, but my first was sincere.
@@MarshallTheArtist That's like saying 'did medieval Europe have Toyotas?' You clearly don't understand the issue.
Thank you for this profound analysis!
I mostly agree with you, but there are some minor details you missed, that (in my opinion) make all the difference.
What the creator of this video doesn't consider, is that Tolkien did not see himself as the author of The Lord of the Rings but rather as a _translator_ of a manuscript he found. *Tolkien wrote the text as a translation of a text written by a hobbit* (that is some meta stuff right there!). When looking at the style of the text that aspect is very important. Everything we read in the books is written by Frodo (based on his own account and that of the others (for instance he relied heavily on the non-hobbit-characters to weave in the mythological background)).
In this case it makes more sense if the main 'feeling' of the read for us humans is that of an old anglo-saxon tale (including the descriptions) with a moment of personal reflection (deemed as 'modern writing' from our perspective) by one of the main characters (if not by THE main character). After all it is written by a people who were similar to Men but still different. So they don't have to write in the same style as we would expect it from a medieval travel account (a Gondorian as a human maybe would have done so).
The comparison of the style of LotR with that of medieval writings can be helpful to understand the lack of the perspectives of the Haradrim and Easterlings (as pointed out in the Video). This is even strengthened by in-world reasons for that (e.g. it would make the story too complex; it wasn't the focus of the hobbits (Gondor and Mordor are already far away by hobbit standards: Harad was practically Antarctica for the normal hobbit),...). But we cannot conclude anything from deviations from the medieval style - it first points to the hobbits and not to Tolkien as a 'modern author'. The text doesn't translate directly into our human thinking patterns but a hobbit would read the passage where Sam reflects on the motives of the Haradan and think nothing of it, as it wouldn't be 'anachronistic' to him but rather a normal text of this period. Therefore LotR is in fact a successful "Escape into the Past", but in the eyes of a hobbit.
If one assumes this perspective, the "white characters" aren't "modernised" and the the "dark-skinned southerners" aren't "trapped as ancient creatures" (12:56) - unless you want to read it as such (cf. 10:46).
By seeing himself as the translator Tolkien adds another layer to his story - a layer through wich the reader doesn't have to be wondering what the author meant and can simply be enjoying it.
If one still was to wonder what stood behind the writing one has to look deeper than the surface of the text (written by a hobbit) - one has to look at Tolkiens views in his life, which were - as the creator mentioned correctly - absolutely against racism.
While he believed that there is a universal truth he also believed that all men are equal - traces of that can be found in his works, also concerning the servants of Mordor: The Dunlendings, Haradrim and Eaterlings are treated with mercy when they surrender and are allowed to go back in peace to their homelands. In fact King Elessar makes peace with the Haradrim and Easterlings (even without a word about reparations or anything). Though the description (through the eyes of e hobbit) may seem racist at first glance, there is no evidence whatsoever in the rest of the text to suggest that the main characters thought less of their eastern and southern neighbours than of their allies.
In fact the reason, why the Easterlings and the Haradrim are (mostly) servants of Sauron is beacause they lived the longest time under his shadow. Even the Numenoreans (from wich the Gondorains derive) fell under the spell of Sauron and became his puppets, when they were closer to him. The Gondorians only reject Sauron so fiercely because of their history with him - he brought toal destruction upon them when they trusted him and they learned from that. They don't reject him because they are morally superior to the Haradrim or Easterlings. The History that sets up the events of LotR concurs with Sams reflection and his guesses to the to the answers to his question: 'What made him do it?' - deception and threats.
Also many modern readers see the relationship between Frodo and Sam as romantic, but that wasn't Tolkien's intend as far as I know
Sureeeee it wasn't 😉😉
This isn't really relevant?
"Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend."
I feel like part of the reason why modern readers like to view relationships such as Sam and Frodo's as romantic is because there's so few actual gay representation in media. But at the same time, it's like they're unable to even imagine that two men can love each other deeply without it being romantic, which is just kinda sad? And paradoxically, it's also a pretty conservative worldview if you think about it. It's like saying "straight men can't be emotional and affectionate with each other, so if two guys are doing that, they must be gay".
Honestly Sam and Frodo having a romantic relationship never really made sense to me, But Legolas and Gimli I can see more, But at the same time, It doesn't really matter: They had a close relationship, they were clearly very close to eachother, In my opinion it doesn't really affect the story at all if that close relationship was romantic or platonic. Although, Perhaps, This opinion is based on my own views, of Romantic and Platonic love as being different, closely-linked, facets of the same thing, rather than completely separate things.
It's been a while since I saw a video from this channel :)
Hi from Sweden, as I'm completing my Erasmus scholarship
In the Prologue, on the third page of the book, it says, "The Harfoots were browner of skin..... They were the most normal and representative variety of Hobbit, and far the most numerous." The majority of hobbits had brown skin.
Tolkien vehemently opposed the Nazi doctrine of Teutonic racial purity, despite drawing from a common well of Teutonic mythology. That didn't stop him reflecting the common-or-garden racism of mid-20th century England that he was infused in.
Then show where he reflected it
@@vitornunes07 I don't need to - It's the theme of the video you're commenting under.
@@phnompenhandy You do having made the claim.
@@MiLikesVids Don't feed the trolls.
@@vitornunes07 (Most of) White people: Carring, chivalrous, good, honorable, loving, loyal, noble, patriotic, relatable.....
Asian & Arab people: Agressive, brute like, greedy, malicious, treacherous, tricky..... Just plain evil in pretty much all of Tolkien's work.....
Also orcs in the books are described as a dark skinned, hunched, monkey like agressive primitives that are also cowardice and very smelly because they don't wash.....
Same with uruks, they were just standing straight and wasn't afraid of the light.....
Doesn't that resemble caricature of some..... race?
But maybe it's a stretch.....
Good video. I find that that tension you discuss between the mythological style and the more modern characters is a lot of what gives the lord of the rings it’s charm. Because while the war of the ring is a mythological one, and many of the characters fit as mythological heroes (particularly Aragorn, but all the non-hobbits really) the central characters it’s all about are very much normal people you could meet in your day to day life.
I find this really makes the sort come alive today in a way that mythological epics struggle to.
It is racist insofar that every mythological tradition is racist: to be the cultural understanding of a people, all but the most isolated of human groups have a human "other" that is bad because it is not the same. A lot of European names for American Indian tribes, for example, are exonyms by hostile tribes. However, I would not call LOTR or any mythological tradition racist because that carries a rightfully negative connotation that should not be applied to mythology.
Further I would strongly argue against Sam's view being "incredibly modern", in that there are parallels in truly ancient mythology of humanity crossing these cultural lines for brief moments or in dire situations: for example, the Epic of Gilgamesh is all about two people from different cultural backgrounds empathising with each other and overcoming a foe that they could not face alone. It would have been far more of Tolkien's time to include a "token good" Easterling, but he refused to do that because he wanted to keep the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint.
I very rarely dislike videos, but I felt this was much poorer than your usual work and calling this work racist does a disservice to Tolkien's work and life.
"Further I would strongly argue against Sam's view being "incredibly modern"" I don't think that's what's being claimed in the video? The way I understood it, It was not Sam's thoughts itself that made it feel modern, but the way in which they were written, as thoughts in Sam's head, Rather than facts or descriptions. I haven't read enough ancient works to say if that's an accurate dichotomy or not, but it's certainly a different thing than just saying what Sam thought is incredible modern.
@@ThePrinceofParthia And the video said “Because it’s black so it’s evil” , while the writer didn’t point it out from the ring trilogy instead this video started to remind you of that point as racism and therefore he can make a ridiculous video essay about it.
From the thumbnail I thought the quote meant "black men enjoy half-trolls," akin to "gentlemen prefer blondes," and I was like man, that's a pretty wild stereotype
Also, counterpoint: The hobbits as a whole were direct analogs of 19th century brits, and had many objectively anachronistic elements in a world that was supposed to be (hitherto) prehistoric Europe, like pocketwatches and folding umbrellas. Sam (or rather, Frodo, who wrote the text amd assumed what Sam was thinking) is a modern reader-analog dropped into this otherwise ancient and mythological sequence of events, so he naturally thinks the things we would in that situation; But Aragorn would never think those things, for example, not because he is not goodhearted but because he is of his time.
Black/white symbolism of good/evil had been used for, i dunno, millenia from europe to asia.
It's called black & white dualism.
Your thesis is wrong. Sam’s statement is not modern. It is Christian. And it also is a very common sentiment among combat veterans like Tolkien.
you're acting as if all of these are mutually exclusive.
I dare to say that no, you're wrong. Countless times in history of christianity people had been dehumanized, pointed as an enemy, an heretic, a wich, a devil's worshipper. Associating christianity to this perception of the other is Modern, the same way that the protestants are modern
@@azde4042it's certainly mutually exclusive from the concept being modern, if any anything I'd argue that most modern Christians (at least in the US) have begun to forget this very important part of the religion they claim to beleive
@@ultimate9056 i mean, it's not as if medieval christians were the kindest and most understanding either.
@@ultimate9056 really? Not too long ago the idea of a “white man’s burden” was used to justify imperialism for the sake of turning the “savage godless natives” to Christianity. It’s the main reason why so many African nation are Christian Nationalist now: Christian Imperialism.
I think a welcome addition to this video would have been to mention Kirill Eskov's novel *The Last Ringbearer*, which turns the story of *The Lord of the Rings* on its head by retelling it from the perspective of the orcs.
If we do not criticize the past, we never learn from it
"BuTt iT wAs DifFErenT bACk tHeN"
@@burner555I mean they were, but to claim that we must consume them noncritically, or that we should throw it away as it doesn't tolerante our sensibilities is dumb.
It's not about excusing, or condemning, it's about understanding it, so we hopefully don't make the same mistakes.
If we condemn the past for every little thing we interpret into it, we will destroy history, and not actually learn anything...
@@Tasorius Who is condemning anything? The first minute of this video is straight up gushing about how much he loves Lord of the Rings. If you are unable to be critical of things you love, that is that ACTUAL way you won't learn anything.
You're right. Sam's compassion is a modern soldier's compassion. It reminds me of the veterans of wars that can only be modern, because they're between such different people.
A lot of my family were miners, before my time but my Grandparents would tell stories. Anyway I always thought of the Orcs and Goblins as miners, skin black from coal, everything else (mouth, teeth, eyes) thrown into contrast. When I saw the representation of demons in Indian and other eastern religions as black skinned, that seemed to match Tolkien.
The thing is, reinterpreting myths for modern audiences is literally timeless. Lancelot's fling with Guinevere was added when it was considered a socially accepted, even ideal, form of love. It was then turned into a fatal flaw for the character when that social context faded back away and cheating was once more just considered bad, no caveats, ifs, buts, or maybes. Humans do this incessantly, repeatedly. So I can't really accept the idea that Tolkein HAD to do this in order for his story to be a valid entry as a myth woven in the modern day. He would have achieved this even if he had completely abandoned using metaphor and generalisations when it came to character's skin colours.
I also love the books and am not looking to cancel anything. Saying that, there is another layer of complication to this analysis, especially given the idea of a pure study of mythology separating it/him from modern concerns. Tolkien was an establishment Oxford don writing at the height of the Empire, a time when academic study of classics, history and archeology was pushing to create a narrative and selective mythology of white empire. it doesn't doesn't have to be shown with nefarious or mustache twirling intent, as in works such as The Lair of the White Worm's early chapters, or with overt pseudo-scientific racism of the era, but it's the context. Also, talking of being a soldier during Empire, the Battle of Helm's Deep is so evocative of The Battle of Rourke's Drift that a friend of mine, who angrily rebuffed any of my observations on this topic, gasped "rourke's drift" out loud when we watched the battle in the Jackson films. Our modern reference being the film "Zulu". And that's when I realized that a lot of the context, culture, worldview and reference in LotR go unnoticed to younger fans because time has simply moved on, and less and less of those references now feature in other culture.
Best take I’ve ever seen in the matter. You put into words what I have personally struggled to do
i think a good way to look at it is in that it’s racist because the world that created it is racist, in the same way that even trans people can hold transphobic thoughts because the world that they live in is transphobic. it doesn’t degrade the work itself, but its an interesting part of the metatextual discussion of the work
I think a part you might have missed is the argument that if its a visual illustration of Good vs. Evil then having Gondor be centered around a white tree and mordor being the shadow land makes sense. It keeps things simple and easily recognizable, a trait not often found in some of his writings. Having a dark skinned folk from the south and them going along with Sauron makes sense when you think of it as a visual summary. It's similar to good characters using Light Magic and bad ones using Black magic. Doesn't mean he thought that of all humans but it does go along with what the story has been saying up to this point.
What about the orcs. Who were they based on
What I’d like to know
I can't wait to read the comments on this RUclips video, I sure hope everyone is arguing in good faith and that nobody's analysis is being misrepresented either deliberately or otherwise.
Don't you think the Haradrim were simply based on the Muslim opponents of the Crusaders? CS Lewis did much the same with his 'baddies' in The Last Battle.
Exactly!
The Haradrim is the Haradrim. Not muslims. They are a fictional group of people. It's like the cave on Degobah in Star wars..The only thing in the cave is what you bring with you. And you bring your racism into your reading of a fantasy book.
Tolkein actually wrote an essay on the word you mention, called Sigelwara Land, in the 1930s. in it he speculates that Sigelwara Land could have originally referred to the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Muspelheim and thus the Sigelwara themselves would originally be a kind of soot-black demons, but that this original pagan understanding was obscured by Christianization and by the time the Exodus was composed in Old English, the word was understood and used more literally. he reconstructs the word as sigel ("sun") and *hearwa ("soot", "coal, "hearth", "roast") and so it could be understood as having a meaning similar to sun-burnt, and with this more literal understanding the term shifted to mean Ethiopia. however there's no widely accepted reconstruction of the second element (and unlike sigel it's unattested), and other scholars suggest other meanings such as "worshipper". regardless, the soot-black demons with flaming eyes likely influenced the Balrogs, while the word *hearwa itself likely influenced the name Harad.
Nice Video,
There is also the other possibility, that Tolkien either didn't want to make the story morally grey or that it was outside his skillset.
This one line with Sam is great, but he isn't able or doesn't want to give us this depth. And this depth is almost everywhere lacking in the book. Wormtongue get's the chance to redeem himself in the end, but Tolkien doesn't allow it, he kills Saruman and is killed afterwards. Just like Saruman himself. They're evil and it seems, there is no way back from that.
This video makes compelling arguments that fall flat with the conclusion because it assumes that Tolkien has to stay within the rigid structure of old myths, rather than letting him construct something of a hybrid.
Tolkien literally makes Haradrim a dark-skinned human race who sided with evil
Meanwhile Tolkien fans: That's not racist and that's not offensive. I decided it for all of you.
@@ahmadqazi2648Being that superficial is the reason why Tolkien fans (which are not, as they digged much deeper into his work) defend him of petty attacks like that
@@ahmadqazi2648 'dark people can't be evil'
-ahmadqazi
@@Sercer25 No, but stereotyping an entire group of people is pretty stupid just like all white supremacists
@@ahmadqazi2648 Crime stats are more factual than what ahmadqazi has to say.
I think it's a good analysis.
Tolkien wrote about how there was a lot going on with the peoples of the East and the South, but since he was focusing on Middle Earth, we never hear it.
There's also the implication in a lot of his writtings that these are not evil people per se, but they are convinced and lied to by Margoth, Sauron, and most likely the Blue Wizards as well. Which, might as well be his catholicism speaking. "Those people over there? They can be good but the Devil's deceived them".
When in comes to Orcs, in a couple of lines it implies that they do have some sort of moral standard. I remember on a letter he wrote to his son during WWII, he basically explains that Orcs are like, absolute evil, because of the self-inflicted writing restrictions, the style of the epic, where the enemy is big, vilified and monolothic. I reckon something similar happened with the other manish races.
I feel like he would've maybe explored all that.
I have always view Sam's moment with the death haradrim a rare point of comparison with a person who has never seen conflict between humans, and soldiers that are used to violence. For Sam, that's a death human being in front of him, for the Ithilien rangers, it's just another moment in a conflict that has being going on for ages at that point
I mean... LotR has literal races in it. The Elves are ubermensch. They look and sound prettier than you. They make better, stronger, lighter crafts than you. They're better at magic than you. They're better at fighting than you. They're better at cooking than the hobbits. They're better at everything than you. They barely even leave a track when they walk in snow, so light is their step. Over with the Dwarves you've got greedy craftsmen (not as good as the Elves, but better than you) whose avarice is their downfall. And within these 'macro' races entire demographics show clear features (consider the offshoots of the Numenoreans).
The Haradrim and the Easterlings are footnotes to the story (like the Black Numenoreans and Dunlendings), but there's tons of racial differentiation being done amongst the main characters of the "good guys" that the main story is wound around.
It's weird to ask "is LotR racist" if you're just using it to mean "does it disenfranchise black Africans". LotR *definitely* pushes the idea that races and ethnicities have clear stereotyped differences in *innate* capabilities to each other.
And tall! Everything is better if they are tall. Gotta pick your leaders by height. Even the hobbits (who seemed to pick their mayor by girth) end up with the two tallest as the most respected leaders.
Thank you for an interesting video. You made some fascinating points, and brought up some information I was unaware of. This being said, there is something I think many people miss about the Lord of the Rings when they say it is racist.
Many look at the events in the War of the Ring and see mostly light-skinned men on the side of good, and mostly dark-skinned men on the side of evil. Putting aside all the other creatures on each side, let's focus on just the men for now.
What is often forgotten, is that the War of the Ring, while important, is a small part of Tolkien's story as a whole. The tale constructed by the professor over decades is a story which spans millennia, and over the course of this tale, there are men of both sorts on both sides.
The Easterlings, who are described in LOTR as swarthy or dark skinned, serve Sauron in the three main novels, but are split between good and evil in the story proper. One branch of their people, the family of Ulfang, betrays the forces of good in the largest defeat of Elves and Men recorded, and another branch, the House of Bor sacrifices themselves protecting their Elven allies. Later, the Easterlings mostly serve Sauron due to his manipulating them into seeing him as a god. However, there are some which rebel against him, and these are strengthened by the Blue Wizards, of the same order as Gandalf and Saruman, Istari from the land of Valinor. There is a whole unwritten tale of the struggle between good and evil in the Eastern land land of Rhûn, but what is known is that good existed there and struggled against Sauron, in a land where no white man or character dwelt.
The enmity between Harad and the men of Numenor began not because the Haradrim were evil and the men of Numenor were righteous. Quite the contrary, under the influence of Sauron, the white men of Numenor began to oppress these black men of the South, and this was the beginning of the strife between their peoples. The Haradrim, whilst often serving evil, are explicitly described as doing so because of the coercion and manipulation by which Sauron gains control of them, not through any inherent evil in their race. It is to this that Sam's thoughts unknowingly refer when he looks at the dead man in the Two towers and feels compassion.
Following Sauron's downfall, Gondor did not wipe out the Haradrim, nor did it conquer and subjugate the country, but instead made peace with it, this being possible with the removal of Sauron as the primary source of evil in that land. I say primary only because no land is without evil, not even the simple Shire, and I don't want to pretend that Harad would be a paradise without Sauron. My main point is that, within Tolkien's legendarium, the Haradrim are not evil because of their race, but because of the "god" whose will they obey.
Finally, men of the West are not exclusively good. I have already mentioned Numenor and its evils, but there are numerous Kings who fall to Sauron to become Ring Wraiths, whom you called black because of their cloaks, but are indeed from various kingdoms and races. Even within the three main books we see despicable men who have white skin. Gríma Wormtongue is perhaps the worst, but we see Boromir making evil choices, his father Denethor sending his son to death out of despair and arrogance, and Saruman who, although not strictly a man, is nevertheless described as White, falling wholly into evil to the point of scouring the Shire. These are glaring evils on the part of white men, and cannot be simply ignored.
Men are described as weak, corruptible, and desiring of power. Please note, this is not said of black men, but of men. Skin colour is seen more as a feature, rather than a racial distinction. Instead, distinction between races is reserved for the differences between elves, men, dwarves, orcs, etc. The only reason that men of Numenor and thereafter Gondor are viewed in such a positive light, (and even for them this is not always the case), is because of the exceptional service of men like Barahir, Beren, and Elendil, all of the same line and all doing their utmost to aid good. It is for this reason, and not because of the colour of their skin, that the Men of the West are generally found siding with good and against evil.
I cannot claim to know the mind of Professor Tolkien, but I do think it strange for a supposedly racist man to put so much effort into depicting both white and black men as capable of good and evil, and explicitly making peace between them following the victory over Sauron. It is easier to see this when looking at Tolkien's complete works, but it is still visible within the Lord of the Rings trilogy itself, especially in the evil deeds of men who are light of skin. For this reason, I would say that Tolkien's works are not racist. Thank you again for an interesting video, and I hope my thoughts are of interest to you. God bless.
This is facts 🥵
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Very good video about an interesting subject. The racism card has been used and abused in media and pop culture way too much for some years now. And although I agree with the video's conclusion, I m not sure it aims at the right direction.
I m not a Tolkien expert, I m just a fan of Tolkien's books (and Jackson's amazing trilogy of course). But from what I ve read, his perceived "racism" wasn't mainly against black or brown people, but against the "easterners". The classic division in Tolkien's work that you touched on in the video, the good-evil and light-dark duality, geograpihcally and culturally isn't translated in West vs South or North vs South, but in West vs East. That is a very important distinction for many reasons. Yes, Haradrim specifically are a broad representation of Africans or Middle Eastern people compared to the good westerners, but I would argue that Orcs who are the main "evil race" in Tolkien's universe are much more of a representation of east Slavs or Mongols of the real world. The great threat from the East, a concept deep embeded in the western mind, psyche and folklore: the barbarian eastern hordes, the emperor warlords and tyrants that want to invade, conquer and subjugate the good peaceful and civilised West (Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, the Ottomans etc). Those that have nothing in common with us (they speak different tongues, they worship different gods, they are the nomadic people of the steppes, they re not farmers like the Shire and Gondor, or woodland dwellers like the Elves etc).
It's no coincidence of course that the orc languages and the Black Speech (the languages of evil) don't derive from african lagnuages but from eastern languages like the Hurrian language (mesopotamian). And of course in contrast the "good" languages like the Westron (English) is part of the germanic language family and the Elven languages (Sindarin, Quenya etc) derive from celtic languages like Welsh, or from Finnish (although ironically Finnish is closer to the mongolian language family than to the germanic).
Also many people tend to view Orcs as black, but they re not. The Uruk-hai are depicted as black. Orcs are mostly shown as pale grey skinned, a colour that is neither white nor black, but in fact is closer to white. It's almost like they are a sick and twisted version of white, which fits perfectly with their origin story: they were elves and men who where taken by the dark powers and tortured, altered etc to make an "evil" race loyal to the dark lord, be it Morgoth or later Sauron.
Finally someone said it and let’s not get on the idea of the white mans burden to educate POC PEOPLE with the dog whistle of white Christian values
I don't know why Sam's internal monologue traps the Haradrim as caricatures. I really think you needed to explore this thought more rather than abruptly ending on it. As you pointed out, Tolkien was composing both mythological tales from the perspective of ancient peoples, while at the same time writing a modern novel featuring the interior thoughts of its characters. There is always a tension between the two in The Lord of the Rings and this is actually what makes this work so great. Sam's meditation about the man of Harad is a moment where maybe the faceless enemy of ancient sagas crosses into the modern novel. Tolkien, as a lover of tales of old wars, wants to tell the story of this battle as, maybe, someone like Julius Caesar or the historians of antiquity would, but as a war veteran also wants to put a modern, novelistic perspective on it. He wants to humanise the apparently faceless enemy because these were the kinds of thoughts that struck him in the trenches in a 20th century war - and by doing so, he's cutting through dehumanising attitudes and propaganda in a way the ancients probably couldn't. The passage about the half-trolls with black skin, white eyes and red tongues does make the modern reader uncomfortable, but then this is followed by Sam's humanising thoughts about the slain man of Harad. Yes, we still don't know anything about the Haradrim from this passage - just like ancient peoples wouldn't know anything about Ethiopians or Numidians if they ended up fighting them - but we are made to recognise, thanks to Sam's interior monologue, that they are every bit as human as we are in spite of our ignorance.
Looking at the analysis before 2:12 , the saying "sometimes cigar is just a cigar" comes to mind.
Featuring characters of some group in bad light doesn't necessarily mean anything. The uneasy feeling we get is IMO a result of overreliance on patterns. Patterns in media can tell us about the landscape, but not the individual works.
Well... I might be completely wrong since I'm not an analyst
One way we can kinda tell if we are overanalyzing is to switch the groups, like easterlings to green people. Is the work now racist against green people? No.
And sometimes racism is just racism. Portraying the good guys as white and the bad guys as POC does have racist undertones.
What if they were green is a silly question, discrimination is often very specific. So a work that's antisemitic because it uses Jewish stereotypes wouldn't be an issue if it used a different religion. But that's why it's antisemitic.
@@mnm1273
I should communicated my "green people" point better. Like you said "So a work that's antisemitic because it uses Jewish stereotypes wouldn't be an issue if it used a different religion"... being the bad guys isn't a stereotype.
For a work to be racist it's not enough for good guys to be white and black guys to be bad guys, because not everything is commenting on something (!) BUT this can be made racist with stereotypes etc.
@@metawarp7446 "being the bad guys isn't a stereotype." heroes being white and villains being POC does reflect racist attitudes of the time though.
If there are three characters it can be coincidences, when there are multiple nations and a half a dozen main character it's a choice.
According to this argument Lord of the Rings wouldn't be racist then.
The modern novel was invented by Cervantes (who was sold into slavery by the Ottomans) and fought at the Battle of Lepanto.
One of the interesting things as an author is how much we repeat the stories we've been told without thinking. I'm writing a novel with a pov from a pre-conquest Indigenous background, and to get an idea of what life was like back then, you have to really dig through the history written by the (quite racist) victors, reading between the lines as much as possible (or read much smarter people who did the same thing).
Sometimes I think about how easy it would be to just repeat the much easier it would be for someone to just put together a story from that history, without reading between the lines. They wouldn't have to be a bad person, or to dislike that group. The story might be good, extremely good.
I think this is one of the ways racism perpetuates itself in the absence of hate, and also why representation matters (especially for writers).
Tolkien: famously lazy
@@maydaymemer4660 I'm not sure how you managed to draw that meaning from my comment unless you were alredy looking for it.
In Tolkien's legendarium it's explained that the Haradrim have pretty good reasons to be enemies of Gondor, because the Numenorians treated them quite badly. Sauron is basically exploiting the animosity between the people of Harad and the Gondorians to gain the Haradrim as allies.
But they aren't really meant to be purely evil like the orcs are and in fact make peace with Gondor after the fall of Sauron.
Plus the East vs West conflict is an integral part of European history, with the invasions of Arabs, Turks and other Eastern peoples.
The battle of Pelennor Fields reads a lot like the second siege of Vienna.
And Minas Tirith has a lot of parallels with Constantinople during the late years of the Eastern Roman Empire. The greatest city of the western people stands at the borders with the eastern invader and awaits help to try and survive.
That's basically Constantinople during the 14th and 15th centuries.
So how would you break down the Silmarillion and the battle of Dagor dagrath and the easternlings that allied with the elven kingdoms and one king betrayed the alliance for Morgoth and one choose the alliance?
Black and Arab people who co-sign to white ideas and white supremacy through Christianity Aka coons that’s what I got outta the Easterlings siding with elves. Yall act like white people didn’t try to brainwash POC folks with Christianity to weaken us to do what white folks wanted that’s what I took outta that in Silmarillon
Tolkien's mentor was from Cádiz, Spain, very close to África, and during his time, Spain got into several wars with Moroco. Historial context can add to the subconcious reasoning.
welcome back kay klein
i used that same bard clip art in my first dnd campaign on my character sheet lol 3:55
Really good and eloquent video. There is one difference that I don't think you stressed enough. The people of the south in the sagas (the only relevant texts I am familiar with) are no threat. They are distant. They are only present to people who go there (e.g. go to Miklagård/Constantinople to earn money).
Tolkien could in fact have made a mythology where the south was similarly distant and unthreatening, where elves and men spoke badly of them but were not threatened by them. So the people are not just kept in their mythological oldnorseanglosaxon format; they are made worse. Aragorn and other white characters are entirely mythological, but they are not made worse.
Tolkien's source for this is (I guess) not medieval. It is just pedestrian, banal, imperial racism.
Oh god the mental gymnastics
@@vitornunes07 are you mentally out of breath? Then read more :)
Something that adds another layer of complexity on to this it the idea of a "mythology of England." A country having a strong mythological narrative can often serve as a foundation for nationalism - this is not to say that making a mythology about a country is necessarily inherently nationalist, just that if you want to increase nationalism, establishing a mythology is helpful for bringing the people of a country together, telling them that their country is special or uniquely good or superior or whatever. I think it's pretty clear that Tolkien was not constructing his mythology for this purpose. For one, you mentioned his anti-racism. For another, if you wanted to spark nationalist sentiment, a pro-war message would probably be very helpful in achieving that, which his books don't have.
Having said that, I do think it's still worth looking at some historical context related to the kind of stuff Tolkien was writing about. In the 1870s - before Tolkien's time, but not by so much that it would have been out of the cultural consciousness - Wagner made his Ring cycle (that's not the actual translation of the German name, that's just how it's commonly referred to). Wagner was of course a brilliant composer, though also a noted antisemite. Like Tolkien, he had a general interest in Germanic mythology, especially (but not exclusively) Norse mythology. For an example more contemporary to Tolkien, the Nazis also used Norse mythology, along with the idea of the Aryan (though the two aren't related - the actual irl Aryans lived in the middle east and India) to establish a national identity for the Germans to rally behind. This was after Tolkien published The Hobbit and before he published LotR.
To re-emphasize, I'm not saying that Tolkien's work falls in to the same category as the two examples I gave (which I realize were both specifically in the country of Germany - fear not, I know that Germanic doesn't mean German lol). I'm just saying that that's the landscape of Germanic folk tales around the time, so there are bound to be some similarities, and some of them will be a little uncomfortable. Whether or not his allegation that he read the Völsunga Saga in Old Norse as a kid are true, it's clear that he was fascinated by Germanic mythology from a young age, so it's likely (if not certain) that he chose to write about Germanic myths because they're Really Freaking Cool(tm) and had been obsessed with them for along time, not because of any sort of ulterior motive related to the usage of said myths at the time.
Ultimately this really doesn't change your conclusion at all, it's just some interesting stuff that I was reminded of while watching this video, and I feel like it sort of fits along with the vibe, even if it's not exactly the same vibe. Vibe-tangential, I guess?
While I enjoyed the video, I do think you are applying to much of our modern perceptions on the symbolism in Tolkien’s world. As you pointed out, while there is no doubt a certain degree of subtle racism regarding phenotypes, it is more a product of the cultural positioning that the world of the Lord of the Rings is set than one of active value judgement against people with darker skin-tones.
As a fantasy world derived from northwestern European histore and mythology, the focus revilves around peoples who exhibit the kinds of traits most common of northwestern Europe, which rightfully positions such as their point from which other characteristics are contrasted.
Since the forces of Sauron are drawn from the lands furthest from western Middle Earth, it is unsurprising that many of such will appear in a manner which would be considered both strange and exotic (and thus, also potentially startling and/or croghtneing to the inhabitants to a certain degree). While it’s easy to interpret this as a direct commentary on the real-world peoples exhibiting dark skin tones, the lack of active value judgement in the Lord of the Rings suggests it is circumstantial rather than inherent or deliberate.
The equation of “black” as a color with “evil” predates the early modern period when Europeans had frequent contact with dark-skinned populations, and occurs cross-culturally in many languages. It is an unfortunate situation that such associations now carry an additional layer of cultural baggage, but in the case of the Lord of the Rings it is not actually a commentary on dark-skin as being inherently “evil” or bad in some way. This is because the world in which the story is set is one which is meant to resemble the post-classical and early medieval period of northwestern Europe, and so the cultural associations we see are a product of that period of time, rather than later eras.
(I know you mentioned this in the video, I’m merely reiterating)
The description of the Orcs or Easterlings is unfortunate, and probably does show a degree of soft bigotry towards east asian features (which is a product of the times Tolkien lived in), but there is also an argument to be made that it is reminiscent of early medieval authors hyperbolic descriptions of steppe peoples like the Huns, Avars, and Mongols, whom European states only ever experienced as aggressors.
It is probably a combination of both to be honest.
I disagree with your assertion that Samwise’s commentary regarding the Haradrim soldier requires a modern sense of reflection, or that it in someway tethers the story to modern conceptions. Sam’s statement is one which can occur regardless of time or place: genuine curiosity about someone who is both different and your enemy; and therefore isn’t necessarily a meta-textual commentary on the perspectives contained within it. It _could_ be interpreted that way, but that is a choice made at the discretion of the reader, not an inherent framing in and of itself.
Overall, interesting video even if I disagree with some of the minutiae.
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You keep saying 'black people' when most Haradrim are not black. Only Far Harad has the black people (who are quite unflatteringly described).
Yes. Near Haradrim are clear analogies of Arabs, specifically the Saracens who Western Europeans fought in the Crusades and romanticised as noble adversaries, particularly in the figure of Saladin. Note the Southrons are described in the Battle of the Pellenor Fields as mounted knights wielding curved scimitars, and worthy adversaries of King Theoden.
Very well done. Thank you for the video.
1:43 ok you're just setting yourself up at this point
I don't agree that Sam's sentiment is incredibly modern. Thinking it's modern to humanize the enemy is not to understand humanity. This is one of the oldest conflicts of being human. In order to kill other humans, you have to demonize them, but once they're dead, they're no longer demons (except in your dreams). And even if Sam knows it, that doesn't change the rest of the world. There were lots of things Tolkien gave scant detail about, and I don't think it necessarily means a lot. But he definitely paints the enemy in the sus terms of another era, altho I'm not altogether sure he didn't see it for what it was, a form of mythological propaganda, that perhaps only Sam, the good one, sees through. And iirc, Tolkien himself said he was trying to create a modern myth, so it's not just critical opinion. Excellent video.
I think they meant that the passage is modern in its presentation and format. It's telling us his thoughts in a third person omniscient fashion, in a way that the old myths and epics LotR is partly based on would never have done. The passage is typical of a novel, not an epic. Empathy is of course a timeless experience, but it's presented in a modern, novelistic way.
0:57 and here your lord of the rings card is now rejected.
Even just some guy would tell you neither group are a direct one to one comparison.
Great video, and so glad you mentioned Le Guin! She's an incredible writer, I hope you return to this topic and explore some of her work, especially Earthsea (which has, as you know, interesting views of race itself).
Ok you've had time to watch the video now you can comment
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@@klop4228 Every day i wake up
Wasn’t the men on Sauron’s side pardoned at the end?
So good. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently (for some reason), so this video comes at the perfect time to articulate how I feel about it
Personally i think more it’s the consequences of Tolkien drawing on actually historical events, mythology and those different geographical locations of different cultures and ethnicities. Looking at Europe that was his entire inspiration source in his works, and that he mainly draw from the period around the medieval times, (sprinkled with some antiquity) not having that much mixed skin colour is much easier to understand. Europe at that period although diverse was much more homogeneous in the different regions than it is today, so having a fantasy world resembling that makes sense. Seeing his background it’s no surprise the main focus was anglo Saxon, celts and norsemen - meaning white and as he made so Sauron drawing forces from south that meant to be Arabia/Turkey and Northern Africa it might strike as racistic, but the world in that period wasn’t as mixed in terms of skin colour so drawing heavily from that period would ultimately get such an effect unless he made so that Sauron also draw from north and central, which might not really make sense as that was the central power.
I think mostly Americans have an issue with it and see, racism in it due to own history and how their own country is constructed etc. but I think it’s important to understand medieval Europe that this is fundamentally his alternative version off. Did he express some negative, stereotypical description in his work, yes he likely did, but I haven’t read things in his work that pointed to it influences on the skin colour in terms of good/bad.
I strongly disagree with the thesis of this video, and critiquing Tolkien in our modern and developing and frankly shallow considerations of race is extremely disrespectful to his work. Just because the book is focus on the perspective of Western Middle Earth, does not make it inherently racist. There are many books that exclude the perspective of other people groups and that doesn't make said works problematic. If you believe the implications of The Lord of the Rings is racist, then you don't understand racism. You also neglect a lot of detail about the forces of evil in the books to promote your narrative. Overall the editing is good and your script is engaging, but I would not have been proud of this conclusion.
no, just focusing on the perspective of one group does not make a work racist. nor do i say so. in fact, i give a pretty big defence of the idea that it does not, that this can be used as a defence against accusations of racism.
but the thing is, Tolkien wasn't writing in a long and distant past as you seem to suggest - in fact, he grew up with modern and frankly shallow considerations of race in a post colonial world. and it is THIS that seeps into his work, and gives it racist undertones.
It isn't racist.
It is the a reality of war to an invading force.
Tolkien was from a time were the Ottoman empire & other invading empires into Europe were still present in the people minds of his time.
The Darkness is not one of skin but faith & core ethics for it is Christendom against Islam.
Tolkien was a catholic & a devout one at that even though he was a stoic of sorts like myself but I am godless.
Trust me if you had ever seen an Arab slave market & how they treat women today let alone the past you would see no light=Christ in those people.
If Christ is the light then who does the darkness represent?
Read Tolkien's works again but do so from the mind set of a catholic as it comes of very different!
If you have never read the bible in Old & new testament as well as European mythology with related folktales then you will not understand Tolkien nor the core of his writings.
You are so far detached from his time by 21st century cobblers that you will never understand the core values of that man & hopes of that man.
South of Sahara Africa is not even present in Tolkien's universe just as how it was not present nor relevant to European history prior to the industrial age.
Not everything is to do with race & I assume you are an American which everything comes down to race in your unpleasant country!
“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”=Oscar Wilde
This Irish man that happens to be bi-sexual summed up the USA better then my words ever could!