And C.S. Lewis regarded science almost as evil, little more than the pursuit of power and control.
Tolkien and Lewis both were fine enough authors, but mediocre philosophers, perhaps too saddled with theology.
“Upgraded”? Nah. There was originally one “white wizard”, namely Saruman. He was definitely regarded as the most intelligent and powerful, at least to a superficial perception, and his color identification was reflected in the name of the “White Council” that he led.
But AFAICT there was not supposed to be any implication that Saruman was the best wizard because he was the “white” one. Rather, the color white was associated with leadership and intelligence and power simply because it was Saruman’s color, and Saruman was the intelligent powerful leader.
Then when Saruman’s intelligent powerful leadership degenerated into treachery and malign greed, Gandalf took over being “the White” in the sense of taking over and reclaiming Saruman’s own identity. As Gandalf remarked, “Indeed I am Saruman, one might almost say, Saruman as he should have been”.
But it wasn’t getting the “White” designation that made Gandalf “better”. It was becoming the “new and improved Saruman”, with the responsibility and official leadership role and wizardly dominance that Saruman used to have.
ASL v2.0, I wanted to recruit you most of all.
Yeah, pretty much this. Although it’s a fictional universe, it seems inspired by a particular way of looking at the real world, and many people, particularly back then, thought humans were divided into separate races as different as the races in LOTR are.
Interesting that the OP picked Hobbits as the master race. I would have thought the Elves are the more obvious one. They are all whiter than white (perhaps there was a black elf extra in the movies, but I don’t recall any), with long, fine hair and are holier than thou.
They also live in a beautiful city, are dignified and handsome/pretty, and, at least in LOTR, are not the aggressors.
This is exactly how white supremecists see the white race, and what the world would be like if we got rid of all the other races. It would be the peaceful paradise that Europe was prior to the age of exploration.
Tolkien of course had no idea of biological species when he was defining the “races” of Middle Earth. Elves and Men are of completely different creation, yet they can interbreed. Although Hobbits are described as being a variety of Men, we are never shown a hybrid or mixed pair, even in Bree, where they co-exist. Dwarves are an entirely separate creation; there is no reason to think they can interbreed with any other “race” of Middle Earth. It would be even less likely that a human-Ent hybrid.
Not sure if you mean that he was personally unaware of the (by that time well established) biological notion of species, or simply that he didn’t require his fictional “races” to be consistent with it.
The latter I would definitely agree with. In fact, one of the things I’ve always thought quite ambitious and successful about Tolkien’s world-building is the way he faithfully reproduces traditional limitations in the thinking of ancient and medieval people whose “folklore” he purported to be writing in the Middle-earth literature.
Million dollar question: who came up with the “joke”?
There’s no evidence from the life stories of either Tolkien or Lewis that they believed in racism. I give a link below to a discussion of Lewis’s view of science. And, of course, both Lewis and Tolkien knew when they were writing fiction. Just because you can strain hard enough to find something in their fiction to imply racism doesn’t mean that they actually believed in it:
I doubt very much whether Tolkien spent a lot of time working out biological plausibilities. Besides the three times humans and elves married in the thousand years they both inhabited Middle Earth, each time between the very greatest of both races, there were also sentient, ambulatory talking trees, horses that could run hundreds of miles at top speed without tiring, and gigantic eagles of superhuman wisdom sent by the gods. Among many other things. He was writing mythology.
Was he biased toward tall pale-skinned Nordic types? You betcha. He was also born in 1892. Cut him some slack.
No elf is ever described in Tolkien’s works as having dark skin, but then, I don’t think any elf was ever described as having light skin, either. He may well have implicitly assumed that they were light-skinned, since a person of his upbringing would have regarded light skin as the default, but he never made it explicit.
He was, however, explicit about hair colors, in at least some places (perhaps because hair colors in England are varied enough that no one hair color could be considered “default”). And the greatest and most knowledgeable (neither of which, of course, necessarily carries any moral judgement) of the Elves in Middle-Earth were the Noldor, and they’re stated to almost all have dark hair (Galadriel being a very rare exception).
He also explicitly specified skin color for at least some humans, and even had examples of characters making racist assumptions about others, based at least in part on their skin color. And then proceeded to have the wiser characters correct those racist assumptions. The Rohirrim are known to be pale, and the Druedain are known to be dark-skinned, but he’s quite explicit that the Druedain are just as intelligent, just as overall good, and just as human as the Rohirrim.
I bow to your superior LOTR knowledge. I was basing the elves being white on their depiction in the movies. I haven’t read the book.
Incidentally, while I’m posting, I want to be clear I was not criticizing Tolkien. I was just saying that the fact that it’s a fictional universe doesn’t automatically mean there’s no racial subtext there. But I haven’t seen anything to say it’s actually racist, let alone “fantastically”.
Well, yes and no. In parts of The Silmarillion, at least, he was writing mythology; but elsewhere he was writing “history”—the history of Middle Earth.
The reason he didn’t spend a lot of time working out biological plausibilities (as I understand it) is because he wasn’t particularly interested or trained in biology. He did spend a lot of time working out liguistic plausibilities.
Which is odd, because the thread was started about something that was pretty clearly not authored by Tolkien, and while it clearly drew inspiration from his works, I’m not sure what Tolkien’s views of or expressions of racism have to do with the…“joke” itself. It’s almost as if this is more like a thread in cafe society entitled “Was Tolkien Racist?” rather than in IMHO and titled “is this…” honestly, I can’t even repeat the thread title because I cringe at the pun.
I’d have said “too saddled with romanticism”. In their defense they were perhaps reacting to the prevalence of “scientism” which in their day was advocating Brave New World- levels of reductionism.
What I meant was that Tolkien was not concerned with the biological concept of species in defining his different “races.” However, the biological species concept was not “well established” at the time Tolkein was writing. Tolkien wrote LOTR between 1937 and 1949. Ernst Mayr first defined the Biological Species Concept in 1942, but it wouldn’t be fully established as the prevailing concept for some years after that. And there’s no reason that Tolkien, as a professor of English, would be familiar with the fine points of evolutionary biology.
Tolkien’s “races” were not biological entities, and didn’t have to obey biological rules, any more than talking trees or eagles or shape-shifting bear-men had to.
Yes, I wasn’t trying to claim that Tolkien was using any modern biological criteria for determining “species”, a term that I don’t think he ever applies to any “race” or type of creature in his Middle-Earth writings. However, the notion of “species” as a biological category distinguishing types of living beings in some way had been around for over a century by Tolkien’s time, and ISTM he would certainly have been aware of it.
When I initially responded to monstro’s question about the taxonomy of Middle-earth “races” and their belonging to the same “species” according to their interbreeding capacity, I didn’t mean to imply that that’s how Tolkien himself interpreted their biological relationships. I was using Tolkien’s canonical pronouncement on the “relatedness” of different races and trying to extrapolate from that how we might classify them. Sorry if I wasn’t clear about that.
I concur, if by “biological entities” you mean “categories consistent with the taxonomy of modern biological science”.
To come back to the OP, the Shire, where most of Hobbits lived, was protected during thousands of years by the Dunedain ( heirs of the lost realms of the north) and the Elven kingdoms of Elrond and Cirdan.
Why spend ressources, time and lives to protect a bunch of glutonous farmers that don’t contribute to the struggle against Sauron? because they represent some kind of innocence, almost child-like, that is worthy.
See the evolution of the Hobbits in LotR: they start as happy and cheerful, but deeply out of their league. After many ordeals, they went back, and don’t quite feel the same about the others Hobbits who didn’t have the same experience with the outside world.
Many characters appreciate the lightness of the Hobbits, finding them refreshing and friendly. That’s the Emotionnal Quotient for the Hobbits: they live peaceful lives, protected from the horrors and wars of the world, and they have a more open minded view than more battered characters.
Also, they grow food. And pipe-weed.
If any “species concept” was familiar to Tolkien, it would have been the Typological or Morphological Species concept, which was the classical species concept of Linnaeus. Species were defined according to a “type.” If another group deviated too much from the defined type it would be considered a different species. If less so, it would be a variety or subspecies. Linnaeus grouped a lot organisms just on the basis of physical similarity, rather than on common descent (which wasn’t yet a concept).
By this standard, Men and Elves could be regarded as closely related even though they had completely different origins. Men and Hobbits differed more in appearance, and were different “kinds,” even though they had a common descent. Orcs were different from Elves even if they were derived from them.