I don’t, no, It’s just the best one to show what he actually intended.
I could point to any number of "swarthy"s and “sallow-skinned” and “slint-eyed” and “bow-legged” in the actual LOTR text, too. But I don’t need to, because these were Tolkien’s actual thoughts on the matter, unfiltered.
I do notice your argument has now gone to “he only meant they look like unlovely Mongols” which is … a take, I guess.
That’s because Tolkien was overwhelmingly *anti-*racist in his real life, so I get the sense it kind of horrified him, especially later in life, that he’d inadvertently ‘done a racism’, as the kids say. But done a racism he had.
No, they’re also based on things he wrote - about antisemitism, about Apartheid. Not tenuous at all.
Again to the folks in back: talking about racism in beloved works doesn’t require a book-burning, or hanging the authors in effigy. We can talk about Tolkien’s creepy projection of imperial racism onto orcs, and his snappy anti-Nazism, and his love of monarchy, and his love of a collectivist semi-anarchism, without contradicting ourselves.
Gygax wrote about orcs in ways that sounded real Bull Connor at times. He was co-authored a game that revolved around people of different races coming together to solve problems, celebrating their differences and respecting one another’s strengths. He was of his time and background, but he didn’t wear a pointy white hood.
No, I’m not. The context is exactly as I’ve given it - Tolkjien is complaining that the orcs in the script (feathered and beaked) don’t look like he imagines them - and then describes their intended appearance as racist Asian caricatures.
The bit before that, where he actually describes those physical features, does not make it any better. Far from it.
What other context is missing? Be specific. The fact that the letter is about a script doesn’t make the actual description he uses any different.
You know, admitting that Tolkien wasn’t perfect, and may have had some attitudes that were influenced by the pervasive racism of his era, doesn’t mean you have to start hating his work. It’s clear he said something racist. That doesn’t mean he’s a worthless monster and all of his work is now taboo.
I have, and you didnt care to read it. So, that line is totally out of context. I notice you never give the whole comment, just crop that one line out.
“Why does Z put beaks and feathers on Orcs!? (Orcs is not a form of Auks.) The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the ‘human’ form seen in Elves and Men. 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.”
There - the whole comment about Orcs from Letter 210.
What about that changes anything?
I’d post the whole damn letter, but that’d violate fair use, and would still make no difference to you, I think.
You can go on pleading “context” like it was a spell that would open a magic door for you, but it’s not actually a winning argument here. More context changes nothing about the original quote. Quite the reverse.
Wait, did you think I didn’t have the tea, and was going off a quick Wiki search or something, like .. some other posters … are wont to do? Naah, mate, not me.
The whole letter is the context. See Professor Tolkien was a linguist, reading or speaking almost a dozen languages. he knew well how to talk to different audiences, like in one of his letter to America, where he used several Americanisms, unlikely part of an Oxford Dons regular speech. In that one very long letter, he is speaking to an audience of film-makers, artists and animators, which for Gawds sake thing orcs have feathers and beaks. He is deliberately using language and terms to make them understand, terms they can relate to. That one line from one long letter has been used over and over- hundreds of times to try and prove that Tolkien was some sort of closet racist- because that is all they can find. Instead of whole entire letters that prove the exact opposite. He denounced Adolf Hitler as a “ruddy little ignoramus”, he expressed a “hatred of apartheid”, and so forth. yet, one line in one long letter- written to explain to a particular group of people in terms they would understand- that “proves’ he was racist. That is just pitiful I note that no one while Tolkien was alive dared to say crap like that, Tolkien would have roasted them. One line, out of one long letter, cherry picked out of a dozen books and hundreds and hundreds of letters. Pitiful.
Just Like General Patton, who in normal conversation used highly literate language, sprinkled with French phrases and Roman quotes- but when talking to the GIs used loud profane language, with plenty of curse words- the language that they would understand.
Of course now a poster will try to dig up some other so called bogus “proof”. I aint playing that game. If people want to believe anyone and everyone is racist based upon a out of context line or tow, rather than the whole public beliefs, then thats fine, but not to me, I can find line in Dr Kings speeches that show he is racist, ir just about anyone.
The whole letter doesn’t change the context of the quote one bit. In the context of the entire letter, that bit is pretty racist. In the context of explaining his conception of orcs to American animators, that bit is pretty racist.
Do you think “racism” is either “literally a nazi” or “no racism at all,” and there’s absolutely no points in between?
I had not seen the line y’all are arguing about (which is obviously racist) and also have not read Tolkien’s writings about apartheid. But i have read his multiple iterations of the origin story of the orcs, and from that, i believed that he was upset that he’d “done a racism” and was struggling with how to mitigate that. Even within the books, the goblins we meet in the Hobbit are much less human than the orcs Sam overhears arguing in Mordor.
I think one of the most damaging ideas of our time is that there’s a clear divide between good people who are never racist and bad people who always are racist. In fact, most good people fall prey to racism here and there, and try to catch it and prevent it from affecting others. And even very bad and very racist people have their moments when they recognize and respect the humanity of someone who is “other”. We are all on points in between, IMHO.
Tolkien, as best as i can tell, was a good man. He wrote wonderful books that have some important flaws. He supported Jews, and also wrote dwarves who reflect a lot of negative stereotypes about Jews. (And share some weird neutral features with Jews, like using their own calendar and angular text.) He apparently was anti-racist in other important ways, and also wrote orcs who reflect European racism. His works support colonialism. He was, like all of us, a flawed and imperfect human being.
If that’s what you think anyone’s point is in raising that quote is, you are badly mistaken.
The point is, and has always been, that he had a few racist blind spots, and one of those came out in how he imagined orcs.
That doesn’t make him “a closet racist”, it makes him human.
BUT
It does make his orcs a flawed, racist creation from the get-go.
…and of course, no-one was ever a little bit racist about one group yet cool with other groups \s
One thing I wish I knew more about is the relationship between the old European myths about legendary creatures who live underground, have considerable interest in valuable metals, act secretive and avoid proper humans on the one hand; and the old European bigotry about Jews as clannish, obsessed with money, untrustoworthy Others etc. on the other hand.
Is it the case that these myths about Dwarves were more or less fully formed by the time of significant Jewish presence (and associated bigotry), such that a German bigot would see to him obvious parallels between long-standing myths and the Jews in his local ghetto, or did the myths develop around the time of increasing Jewish presence, as a way of expressing anti-Jewish bigotry through fable and legend?
If the latter, then it seems to me that the myths are irretrievably tainted with anti-semitism and you can’t lift them into your modern attempt to create a foundational Englishi mythology without also importing anti-semitism.
If the former, and what you are doing is going back to a relatively unsullied set of myths as they existed before the Jew-haters got their filthy hands on them, then there are still very significant issues with all the connotations that now accrete around them but in theory you could just reference the myths as myths provided you do the work to signal that no, these aren’t coded Jews.
This isn’t just about Tolkien - dwarves, with the characteristics of clannish underground treasure lovers, are pretty common across fantasy and obviously withing D&D and related works.
I guess what I’m saying is, if Tolkien’s Dwarves reflect anti-Jewish stereotypes, is that a) because he wanted them to, b) inherent in dwarvish myth and he accepted that because he wanted to use Dwarves, c) an unpleasant side-effect of long-standing attempts by bigots to make dwarves reflect ant-Jewish stereotypes which we can choose to ignore.
More-or-less, yes. I don’t think there was any recorded Jewish presence in Scandinavia when the Norse dwarfs were first conceptualized. Germany did have a Jewish presence when these originally-oral tales were eventually written down, but there’s no difference in the characterization of dwarfs from one region to the other AFAIK.
It might be that the dwarf stereotypes existed first, and then when those cultures encountered Jews, they transferred over the stereotype-package onto them.
Or then there’s Pratchett’s dwarves: He does sort of lean into “dwarves = Jews”, but in ways very different from how the racists do. For instance, it’s possible for someone born non-dwarvish to become a dwarf, because “dwarf” isn’t just a species; it’s a cultural grouping. And there’s a Dwarf Rights group that’s modeled on the Anti-Defamation League.
Fwiw, Tolkien’s dwarves aren’t nearly as problematic as his orcs. And it’s probably because i kinda identified with them (as a Jew) that i often played a dwarf when i played D&D.