J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy writings have been said to embody outmoded attitudes to race. He was exposed as a child to Victorian attitudes to race, and to a literary tradition of monsters. In his personal life, he was anti-racist both in peacetime and during the two World Wars.
With the late 19th-century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline, Robin Anne Reid and others have suggested that the presentation of the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings embodies scientific racism. David Ibata has stated that Peter Jackson's depiction of the Orcs in his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy was modelled on racist wartime propaganda caricatures of the Japanese. Tolkien said that his Dwarves were reminiscent of the Jews, raising questions of possible antisemitism. John Magoun has said that the work embodies what he calls a moral geography, namely that the West of Middle-earth is good and the East is evil.
In his personal life, Tolkien strongly opposed Nazi racial theories, as seen in a 1938 letter he wrote to his publisher. In the Second World War he vigorously opposed anti-German propaganda. Sandra Ballif Straubhaar has described Middle-earth as definitely polycultural and polylingual. Scholars including Patrick Curry and Christine Chism have noted that assertions that Tolkien was a racist based on The Lord of the Rings often omit relevant evidence from the text.
Scholarly approaches
Scholars and commentators have said that Tolkien held outmoded views on race, as seen in the Middle-earth stories, based on his depictions of the relationship between evil and race (the main races being Elf, Dwarf, Hobbit, Man, and Orc). Robert Stuart says that Tolkien was a "racialist" since he writes of races with different attributes, and then proceeds to analyse Tolkien's use of black and white (including his antipathy to racism and apartheid from his mother's experience in South Africa), the nature of Orcs, the racial connections in his language, antisemitism, and the apparent hierarchy of races and lords within them. Stuart concludes that "Tolkien's legendarium is suffused with racialist imagery and, at times, imbued with racist values".
The folklorist and Tolkien scholar Dimitra Fimi examines Tolkien's use of and attitudes to race in her 2009 book Tolkien, Race and Cultural History. She notes that scholars including Anderson Rearick, David Perry, and Patrick Curry have criticised or defended Tolkien on "racial charges". In response, she says that Tolkien wrote mostly "when race was still a valid scientific term", while scholars still held "ideas of the nature of Man and his place in the world". In her view, it is therefore "very problematic to pursue such questions [of racism] in Tolkien's work, since they could only be treated within the framework of modern perspectives on racism and racial discrimination".
Discussions of racism in Middle-earth
Tolkien's descriptions of certain characters and races have been criticised as racist by writers including Andrew O'Hehir and Jenny Turner—especially his descriptions of Orcs and their purported similarity to 20th century stereotypes of Asians. In a private letter, Tolkien describes orcs as:
Writing for Salon, the journalist Andrew O'Hehir says of Tolkien's orcs: "They are dark-skinned and slant-eyed, and although they possess reason, speech, social organization and, as Shippey mentions, a sort of moral sensibility, they are inherently evil." O'Hehir concludes that while Tolkien's own description of Orcs is a revealing representation of the "Other", it is "also the product of his background and era" and that Tolkien was not consciously "a racist or an anti-Semite"; he mentions Tolkien's letters to this effect. The literary critic Jenny Turner, writing in the London Review of Books, repeats O'Hehir's statement that Orcs are "by design and intention a northern European's paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about", but adds similar caveats, saying: "Tolkien does not appear to have been half as crackers on these topics [of race and race purity] as many others were. He sublimated the anxieties, perhaps, in his books."
Patrick Curry, Christine Chism and others say that race-focused critiques of Tolkien and his Middle-earth writings often omit relevant textual evidence, cite imagery from adaptations such as Peter Jackson's films rather than the work itself, ignore the absence of evidence of racist attitudes or events in the author's personal life, and claim that seeing racism in his writing is itself a marginal view.
Walter Scheps writes that Tolkien's accountability "does not extend beyond" his creation: "we cannot expect it to conform to important human values". Scheps adds that since Tolkien is the only source of data on Orcs and other races, "we need no longer be bothered by the fact that Tolkien's evil creatures are black (orcs), speak ungrammatical, lower class English (trolls)", and so on. Scheps specifically denies that Middle-earth is amoral – he quotes Patricia Meyer Spacks as saying "amorality is not really possible in Tolkien's scheme" – but states that the work's morality "is nevertheless radically different from our own".
Moral decline through racial mixing
The scholars of English literature William N. Rogers II and Michael R. Underwood note that a widespread element of late 19th century Western culture was fear of moral decline and degeneration; this led to eugenics. In The Two Towers, the Ent Treebeard says:, book 3, ch. 4, "Treebeard"
The literature scholar Robin Anne Reid, writing in the Journal of Tolkien Research, says that modern studies of the many influences on Tolkien's orcs include a focus on the scientific racism of the 19th century and the 20th-century challenges to that concept. Similarly, the Australian scholar Helen Young, who studies the links between white supremacism and medievalism, describes Tolkien as a bridge between the scientific racism of the 19th century and racism in modern fantasy.
The philosopher Charles W. Mills comments that in his Middle-earth writings, Tolkien effectively reprises the racist myth of 19th-century European thinking by men such as the British advocate of eugenics, Francis Galton. Mills notes that there was a fear that intermixing of what were then called races would lead to "internal diminution and degeneration" of the supposedly superior white Europeans. Stuart concurs, examining Tolkien's alternative proposals for the origins of Orcs, whether "Animals, Automatons, or Twisted Elves", and finding signs of a racist attitude there.
Polycultural Middle-earth
The Germanic studies scholar Sandra Ballif Straubhaar says there is sometimes evidence in Tolkien's writing of "a kind of racism perhaps not unremarkable in a mid-twentieth century Western man", but that this is often overstated and must be balanced against the "polycultured, polylingual world" that is "absolutely central" to Middle-earth as well as Tolkien's own "appalled objection" to those seeking to use his work to uphold racist ideas in the real world. She writes that Tolkien made a "concerted effort" to change the Western European paradigm that speakers of supposedly superior languages were "ethnically superior".
Responding to David Tjeder's suggestion that Gollum's negative description of a dark-skinned men from Harad was "stereotypical and reflective of colonial attitudes", Straubhaar compares Gollum's description—with its "arbitrary and stereotypical assumptions about the 'Other—with Sam Gamgee's more humane response to the sight of a dead Harad warrior:
Gollum's perspective is absurd, Straubhaar says, and cannot be taken as an authority on Tolkien's opinion; Straubhaar finds Gamgee's response "harder to find fault with". Fimi says that, in the same scene, Tolkien is "far from demonising the enemy or dehumanising the 'other.
Dwarves and antisemitism
Tolkien scholars have debated the relationship of Dwarves to Jews. Tolkien stated that he thought of his Dwarves as reminiscent of "the Jews", and that the Dwarves' words were "constructed to be Semitic". Zak Cramer documents in Mallorn the evidence for Jewish influence in Tolkien's Middle-earth writings. He comments that words like "Adûnaic" and "Rohirrim", and the structure of the Dwarvish language Khuzdul, are all evidently "Hebraic". Some commentators draw parallels between the Dwarves as a diasporic people yearning for an ancestral homeland and Zionism.
Tolkien's portrayal of Dwarves raises the question, examined by Rebecca Brackmann in Mythlore, of whether there was an element of antisemitism, however deeply buried, in Tolkien's account of the Dwarves, inherited from English attitudes of his time. Brackmann notes that Tolkien attempted to work through the issue in his Middle-earth writings. Stuart notes Tolkien's phrase about the Jews, "that gifted people", and discusses the evidence for and against his having antisemitic views.
Orcs and evil
Anderson Rearick III writes that in Middle-earth, darkness and black are linked with evil Orcs and the Dark Lord Sauron, and that the Orcs are essentially expendable, a view with which Tom Shippey concurs. Rearick lists multiple arguments that imply that Tolkien was not racist, citing Steuard Jensen's observation that there are "light skinned characters who did evil things", including Boromir, Denethor, Gollum, Saruman, and Gríma Wormtongue. He notes that the link between darkness and evil is made many times in the Bible, with phrases such as "the shadow of death" or "you are all children of light". The irredeemable Orcs, he notes, are traceable to Old English vocabularies where Latin Orcus (Pluto, ruler of the underworld, or death) is glossed as "orc, giant, or the devil of Hell". Rearick ends by stating that racism is a philosophy of power, whereas The Lord of the Rings embodies the Christian renunciation of power; he explains that Frodo gives up everything to fulfil his quest, just as Christ did. In his view, "nothing could be more contrary to the assumptions of racism than a Hobbit as a hero".
Fimi, author of an academic study of Tolkien and race, notes the years of heated popular and scholarly debate on whether Tolkien was racist, and concludes that the answer is both yes and no. She writes that Middle-earth is hierarchical like the medieval great chain of being, with God at the top, above (in turn) Elves, Men, and at the bottom monsters such as Orcs. In her view, this makes sense in terms of theology, and indeed in a mythology like The Silmarillion, whereas a novel like The Lord of the Rings demanded rounded characters rather than symbols of good or evil.
Fimi writes that Tolkien "agonised" over the origins of Orcs. Summarizing his explanations, she states that if they were corrupted Elves or Men, that would fit the view that Morgoth could corrupt but not create; that Elves and Men had free will, and if they did evil, could perhaps be redeemed. She writes that the earlier author George MacDonald had created a race of evil goblins, something that she finds an equally uncomfortable "product of 19th-century anxieties about race and evolutionary degeneration". She comments, however, that a novel is written within a tradition; Tolkien's orcs fit into the tradition of MacDonald's goblins and ultimately of the monsters in Beowulf. She concludes, "I believe Tolkien's racial prejudices are implicit in Middle-Earth, but his values – friendship, fellowship, altruism, courage, among many others – are explicit, which makes for a complex, more interesting world", and that complexities of this kind get people of each generation to read The Lord of the Rings, and to interpret it afresh.
Orcs as a demonised enemy
In a private letter, Tolkien describes orcs as:
Fimi describes Tolkien's mentions of "swarthy complexions" and slanted eyes as "straight out of Victorian anthropology, which links mental qualities and physique".