You mean Howard.
Of course ERB was about as racist as most people of his time and place, I recently re-read “Tarzan of the Apes” and there was a lot of pretty awful racism. Not just Tarzan’s hereditary nobility, but African cannibals and a wildly racist Mammy character.
Hmm – some confusion going on, or a mental slip. Burroughs wrote the Tarzan novels (and lots of other stuff). Robert E. Howard wrote Conan (and lots of other stuff). A lot of the stuff with black guys in it in Howard is actually not terribly racist, especially for a guy in 1930s Texas.
Given that Conan himself actually led a black pirate ship in Schendi and greatly respected the Schendi pirates (who of course respected him, he’s Conan after all) I would say that Howard was waaaaay to the non-racist end of the scale for his time.
Definitely meant Howard–sorry! ANd it’s been several years since I read Conan, so I can’t speak to specific stories, but I remember being constantly repelled by his treatment of black men specifically.
And if you want a racist fantasy writer, check out H.P. Lovecraft … anti-semitic, also very prejudiced against Asians, I’ve not heard or read anything about him being racist toward black people, but maybe they just didn’t exist in his New England. Yet, being anti-Semitic, he married a Jewish woman. One weird, fucked-up, talented fellow. And yes, his racism shows in his stories. He describes non-white people as “degenerate races” and he meant Asians and such, he wasn’t talking about the half fish half human people in the Dunwich Horror, though his attitude toward them is fully informed by his racism.
I agree entirely (although when I mentioned it on this Board a while back someone got massively upset and claimed I didn’t understand Lovecraft), and it’s generally recognized. I read one commentator, though, who claimed that Lovecraft was getting over his racism as he got older, although UI don’t recall who, or what his evidence was.
Lovecraft’s racism is more “masked” I guess? It is never really clear who these degenerate races are in reality, just that they did stuff in the far past.
In at least one of his stories he speaks of the police conducting raids in the areas where the degenerate races live, and it’s very clear they’re asians, possibly arabs as well. Can’t recall the name of the story offhand.
I looked for a quote from the book I cited but I found something MUCH better: a game called Hitler or Lovecraft? Nothing masked about the racism in these quotes.
Specifically, when a German publishing house was interested in publishing a German edition of The Hobbit, Tolkien was asked to attest that he was pure Aryan. Now, as it happens, Tolkien’s ancestry appears to be 100% Aryan, but he didn’t give the requested assurances. His letter to his agent said that he had many Jewish friends and would not insult them by appearing to support the Nazis’ “pernicious and unscientific race doctrine.”
And in correspondence with his son, Tolkien called Hitler “a ruddy little igoramus” who had perverted and cheapened everything Tolkien loved about Germanic folklore.
I can’t absolve a man I never met of racism, but it seems clear he was NOT an anti-semite.
As for charges of racism, I would suggest that Tolkien was a patriot and nationalist rather than a racist. He never thought of “whites” as a race, and didn’t think of himself as “white.” He thought of himself as an Englishman. He loved England, its land, its forests, its history, its people, its myths and legends. If the hobbits were all white, it’s because Englishmen of Tolkien’s day were almost all white. The Shire represents an idealized pre-Industrial Revolution England.
I only got one question wrong, the quiz was pretty easy because while Hitler certainly thought blacks were inferior, he didn’t really hate them because there weren’t any in Germany.
Isn’t the term “degenerate” there just meaning someone uneducated, uncultured or unrefined? They’re not degenerate because they’re Asian, they’re degenerate because they’re poor, uneducated and uncivilized. In the same sense, we might use the term degenerate to describe hillbillies, rednecks and white trash. They’re not degenerate because of their race; they’re degenerate because they might spit tobacco on your carpet.
I might be projecting my own personal and/or modern meaning onto what HPL wrote, though.
Most of those quotes were from his private letters, though, not his published works.
No, in Lovecraft’s terms, it meant that they had sex with fish monsters.
Hey, I read that one!
I thought the treatment of racial issues was fairly well done there, as racial/tribal/national tensions most certainly do exist, you have bigoted characters, but the author/narrator didn’t come across (to me) as the bigot, he was just describing the bigotry and tribalism in the setting.
Given human nature, a setting entirely without prejudice is, in my opinion, less believable that one with.
One of Lovecraft’s stories had the narrator absolutely shocked because he was attracted to a woman and it turns out she had NEGRO BLOOD! Oh, yeah, and she was also some terrifying monster, but a bigger deal was made of the first part. Anytime his stories called for cats, they were also named after slurs.
Tolkein and racism is interesting because it is kinda ‘eeeeh’ when you look at it, and even he later admitted that the idea of orcs was kind of fucked up - not from a racist standpoint, however, but from a religious standpoint. The idea of inherently evil people didn’t set well after a certain point.
Also, one type of racism that’s really common but not mentioned yet is a lot more subtle - don’t try to portray some sort of metaphor for real-world discrimination and have all your main characters white people. Just don’t. That’s awful.
Ah but how many of those quotes are from Lovecraft’s famous stories? Versus crap like interviews or personal correspondence?
Listen the racism in Howard’s Conan stories was so bad it took me out of story even, but Lovecraft never hit me in the face with it. I read mostly his adventure stories and there are mentions of degenerate races mucking about the ancient past, but the whole thing is so vague it is unclear who it is even referring to. Like a story saying primitives built a temple, how do you connect that to real life?
I’m sure Lovecraft WAS a racist, but his stories don’t get into it too much(I’m not sure which one had cops calling asians degenrate).
thinks over how to phrase this without coming off as defensive Did anyone miss the part of the OP where I said my protagonist was a Black kid in Fantasy Medieval Iceland? Or when I said I have a dwarven character who’s a fence in another thread?
I’ve never read a Tolkienesque fantasy novel where it seemed to me that the writer actually researched Norse mythology or medieval Scandinavia, where the protagonist was non-White or where dwarven characters were any more than miners or smiths who had great underground cities. Certainly no Dwarven or Elven criminals.
The RL Norse did have contact with Black Africans. In the 9th century a Danish viking chieftain named Hasteinn captured Black African slaves (“blamenn”) in North Africa during a Mediterranean raid and sold them in an Irish slave market.
He wrote a poem called On the Creation of Niggers; it’s hard to get much more overtly racist than that.
How many Lovecraft collections does that show up in?
Tolkien’s descriptions and treatments of the inhabitants of Far Harad, as black troll-like creatures living in the jungles, is pretty icky.