By convention, a book’s introductory remarks can be personalised. That’s fortunate, as convention also ordains that those of us who write about John Ronald Reuel Tolkien locate ourselves very personally in relation to that controversial author. So… I encountered The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s masterwork, (henceforth LOTR) during my first year as a student at the University of Saskatchewan: a geeky undergraduate, uneasily observing the counter-culture from the university library, and thus being totally unrepresentative of the stereotypical ‘hippy’ North-American Tolkien fan of the time. No ‘pipe-weed’ for me! It was, for that recently uprooted teenager, a lonely time in a new country, and also the moment when Middle-earth gripped the global imagination, never to let go. Even now, more than half a century later, I vividly recall the impact of the Shire’s homeliness when I so missed home, as well as my puzzlement about the emus parading on the cover of my Ballantine paperback edition of the Fellowship volume—a bemusement shared by Tolkien at much the same time, albeit in response to the similarly emu-infested cover of Ballantine’s Hobbit (Tolkien 1981, 362). From that beginning, I’ve been a living refutation of W.H. Auden’s observation that ‘nobody seems to have a moderate opinion [about LOTR]’, with Auden reflecting that ‘people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it’ (Auden 1956). No such extremes for me. I loved, still love, Tolkien’s preternatural ability to evoke historical depth beneath living landscapes. The ‘high speech’ of his book’s later chapters…not so much. Unlike many of LOTR’s readers, I haven’t ritualised an annual rereading of a work that has become, for millions, virtually a sacred text. Indeed, as I was leaving Saskatoon for postgraduate study in 1969, I took a heretical pleasure in laughing along with the Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings. But Tolkien’s classic, once read, did evoke a life-long love of ‘high fantasy’ as I revelled in the burgeoning genre that he’d empowered.
Decades passed, with marriage, a doctorate, yet another wrenching removal to a new country, pursuit of an academic career, and the birth of children. Tolkien’s presence persisted, however, as a spectre haunting my leisure-reading, where I encountered his shadowy presence in one fantasy series after another—some of them virtual pastiches of his masterpiece. I returned to LOTR when my daughters were of an age to immerse themselves in Middle-earth, again enjoying a cover-to-cover reading, but being greatly surprised and much dismayed when both young women (precocious feminists) rejected the book, although they had adored The Hobbit when I’d read it to them as children. Later yet, during the latter years of my teaching career at the University of Western Australia, I created a wonderfully rewarding (at least for its creator) teaching unit on ‘The Historical Imagination in Fantasy and Science Fiction’. Tolkien was, needless to say, central to its curriculum, and the brilliant students who worked with me over the years have stimulated many of my best insights. If nothing else, it was great fun, reading and rereading LOTR together.
My pleasure in teaching Tolkien decided me to write about him. I’d been trained as a historian of ideas, and had spent several decades elucidating the Marxist ideological tradition in France. By the early twenty-first century, however, it was obvious that both French history and the history of Marxism were in decline, while the fantasy genre had acquired a newfound respectability. Why not redeploy my skills in textual interpretation and ideology-theory to studying Tolkien, who seemed to impassion young people at least as much as Marx had done when I was a student? Why, I asked myself, had Tolkien become ‘the author of the century’? (Shippey 2000) What visions of political order and social hierarchy might so many millions of readers have taken away from their sojourns in Tolkien’s realms? So, in 2006, with the publication of my last book on Marxism, I embarked on a project tentatively entitled ‘The Politics of Middle-earth’. There have been times since then, however, when I’ve doubted the decision. It has challenged me in ways that I’d not anticipated, and has proven to be at least as taxing a topic as the history of Marxism had ever been.
Why taxing? First, studying the meaning of a work and the meaning intended by its creator requires attention to authorial context. I had long followed the Cambridge School in the history of ideas, with its reminder that all texts have emerged in precise places and from specific times and that they’ve all been addressed to particular audiences, with the School’s consequent urging that the ‘meaning’ of a work is best elucidated by locating it in its original milieu (Skinner 1969). For my study of the ideological dimension of Tolkien’s fantasy,1 these protocols impelled placing his works in their period and place—among the ancient traditions, contemporary preoccupations, and hopes and fears for the future that animated Tolkien’s imagination, from his Edwardian youth to his post-1968 old age. After all, Tolkien, by his own estimation, was someone who cloaked ‘such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under mythical and legendary dress’ (Tolkien 1981, 211). Inside the myths of Arda, within the legends of Middle-earth, thus lie concealed Tolkien’s views on his catastrophic époque.
He was not a systematic thinker, with even philological treatises such as ‘English and Welsh’ remaining relatively inchoate. But his ideas and ideals are nonetheless evident ‘in solution’,2 saturating his fantasies. John Garth is surely right in arguing that ‘Middle-earth was created to reflect what [Tolkien] most loved and detested in his own world’ (Garth 2020, 184). I wanted, above all else, to explore that act of creation. My book therefore began under the very Cambridge-School guidance of Verlyn Flieger when she urges us to read Tolkien ‘as a man of his time’, taking him ‘out of the medieval box in which he has languished for too long and [setting] him solidly in the context of the twentieth century that shaped him and produced his work’ (Flieger 2005, 26). It was only via such historicising method, I was convinced, that I could discover, in Tolkien and his texts, what Umberto Eco has characterised as the intentio auctoris, ‘the intention of the author’ (Eco 1992a, 25).
I began confidently. During many years of teaching twentieth-century European history, I had acquired considerable background knowledge of English cultural and intellectual life during Tolkien’s time (I’d taught a unit on ‘Intellect and Ideology’ that included substantial twentieth-century British content). But how inadequate that knowledge proved to be, given the demands of real research! I quickly discovered just how demanding the relevant scholarly literature was, just how rich Tolkien’s cultural context had been, and just how little of either I’d actually mastered. Elucidating the textual world of a conservative English Catholic of Tolkien’s time, for instance, meant reading the works of the Catholic ideologues whose texts Tolkien certainly knew and valued, such as Christopher Dawson, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, as well as some he likely knew, such as Vincent McNabb; perusing journals that expressed Tolkien’s theological and political viewpoint, such as The English Review of the 1930s when under the Catholic-conservative editorship of Douglas Jerrold; and mastering the scholarship on the political subculture of English Catholicism. And what of Tolkien’s ecological vision, an obvious passion imbuing his fantasies? I soon discovered that a primary resource of the time would have been the ‘muck and mysticism’ circle that included the Kinship in Husbandry and the English Mistery, neither of which I’d encountered before. Reading the works of Rolf Gardiner, Harold Massingham, Lord Lymington, and William Sanderson was demanding enough, but there were scholarly studies of the coterie as well, which also had to be read and assimilated.
Then there were Tolkien’s conservative ideological predilections,3 which patently resonated with Traditionalist Toryism rather than with the big-business Conservatism of Baldwin and his ilk. Against the thoroughly modern Conservative Party, Tolkien had been happy to identify with ‘reaction’ (Tolkien 1997, 149, 1981, 65), thus linking his political ideals and ideas with those of his contemporaries who angrily repudiated ‘scientism’, ‘progress’, and ‘modernity’ in favour of the ‘Old West’ so adored by Tolkien’s Inklings Fellowship (Duriez 2015, 19–21, 102, and 218). I was aware, of course, that Tolkien had been entranced by the rambunctious reactionary poet Roy Campbell (Tolkien 1981, 95–96), and so read Campbell’s notorious Spanish Civil War epic Flowering Rifle (1939), emerging from the reading shaken by the vast poem’s murderous rhetoric and overt anti-Semitism. Given Tolkien’s virtually Jacobite idealisation of ‘the return of the king’, I delved into the Tory persona of Arthur Bryant, the most popular historian of ‘Olde England’ during Tolkien’s time, and realised that Tolkien’s seemingly eccentric royalist and aristocratic predilections had been more widely shared than I’d imagined. The ‘Diehard’ ultra-conservatism born during Tolkien’s Edwardian youth had obviously survived into his maturity, and manifests in his fantasies. Reading the scholarly literature on that almost forgotten ideological tradition, and engaging with its leading lights, proved to be powerfully illuminating of Tolkien and his texts.
And what of the contemporary literary culture in which the highly literate Tolkien had bathed? I already knew, as Tolkien obviously had, the fantasies of his fellow Inklings C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, along with the romances of William Morris that the youthful Tolkien had so adored, particularly The Roots of the Mountains and The House of the Wolfings, as well as the fantasy and science fiction that he had savoured as an adult, from Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and E.R. Eddison to David Lindsay, Arthur Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. But there was so much more. I engaged with works that Tolkien had certainly known and loved, being quite overwhelmed by the fiery faith animating Francis Thompson’s ‘Hound of Heaven’, while remaining thoroughly underwhelmed by the serial murders bloodying ‘the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs’—‘best of all’ in Tolkien’s memories of his youthful reading (Tolkien 1997, 135). After long struggle with John Inglesant , I could only agree with Tolkien that few would now find the strange book ‘possible to read’ (Tolkien 1981, 348). Finally, needless to say, I engaged with some of the medieval works that had so preoccupied the great medievalist. Beowulf seemed a more extravagant adventure, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a more exotic fantasy, The King of Tars a weirder tale than anything encountered on the Fantasy and Science Fiction shelves of my local bookshop.
And then there were works that Tolkien had likely known. Dedicated as he was to England’s country people, I guessed, for instance, that Tolkien would have read the ruralist bestseller Lark Rise to Candleford , or that the emblematic work at least mirrored his intense countryside predilections. I purchased Flora Thompson’s gentle trilogy on that assumption, and enormously enjoyed it, quite apart from understanding Tolkien’s Hobbiton all the better for having sojourned in Lark Rise and Candleford Green. Less enjoyable was persevering through the ‘Oxford’ crime novels of Tolkien’s good friend Katherine Farrer, although her mannered books proved to be powerfully illuminating of the anti-‘scientistic’ views of Tolkien’s circle, which, along with Tolkien himself, enjoyed Farrer’s genre (M.G.R. Tolkien 1995). Years passed as I worked to think myself into the world that Tolkien knew. Nonetheless, however challenging the task, once contextualisation had enfolded the author and his works, the multiple resonances between Tolkien’s complex persona and contemporaries such as Dawson, Gardiner or Bryant (even Farrer) echoed throughout Middle-earth—penetrating into previously obscure recesses of his texts, allowing me to better empathise with their creator’s passions and purpose.
Surely Tolkien himself would have approved, given his own belief that ‘a story cannot be judged from its summarized plot, but only from the way this is told, and from the ideas and feelings which are stirred in the author—whether consciously formulated by him or not—in the telling, and which breathe a life and purpose into [his tale]’ (Tolkien 2002, 34). Immersing myself in the textual ocean in which Tolkien had swum sensitised me to the ‘life and purpose’ that breathes through Tolkien’s oeuvre. He need not have read all the works that, to informed understanding, represented his ‘cultural imaginary’: that conceptual common ground upon which he stood with others of his time. But that common ground must be explored. To illustrate this method, not all American libertarians have read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom . But, nonetheless, reading The Road to Serfdom is an imperative for understanding American libertarians. For understanding Tolkien, Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West, for instance, that great anti-Nazi polemic of 1938, is similarly an imperative text. Tolkien may not have read the book, but it perfectly represents the conservative Catholic hatred of Hitler that Tolkien so obviously shared. I’ve not indulged in yet another variation on the game of ‘source-hunting’ played so often on the field of Tolkien Studies—the source-hunting that Tolkien disliked as speciously reducing the true creativity of a text. He was, indeed, at times inclined to deny any ‘influences’ inflecting his creative imagination (Kilby et al. 1984, 21). So, obeying Tolkien’s own strictures (Tolkien 1997, 120), instead of extracting the referential ‘bones’ from the ‘soup’ of his stories—the skeletal remains of Grendel’s dismembered arm, the desiccated skull of the decapitated Green Knight—I’ve explored the cultural cuisine, the intellectual fare of his time, from which Tolkien necessarily confected his own highly original textual dishes. As Anna Vaninskaya has argued, it’s indispensable to find the ‘contemporary analogues’ that best illuminate Tolkien’s creativity, thereby ‘assembling a picture of a period to see where Tolkien fits into it’ (Vaninskaya 2006, 5). Working with such texts of the time, I tasked myself with understanding the mentalities to which Tolkien spoke, and which spoke through him.
So, the years passed as I pursued the long labour of interpreting Tolkien in terms of ‘the ideas and feeling which are stirred in the author’, and which had stirred the audience that Tolkien once addressed. Interpretation, however, is always a collective enterprise, and that too presented a taxing challenge. One owes respect, and attention, to others who have engaged with one’s subject. Anyone who studies a body of texts is part of an interpretive tradition (Outhwaite 1990). For those of us who care about Tolkien, that tradition is astonishingly rich and rewarding. Hundreds upon hundreds of scholars have explored Tolkien’s legacy, elucidating every imaginable aspect of his work—almost always writing with fervour, arguing from radically distinct and often conflicting perspectives, sometimes manifesting the most outré of prejudices. Few other authors have amassed such a massive, diverse, and interesting critical archive. Perforce, I set myself the task of reading as many of the studies of Tolkien as possible.4
Why this onerous exercise, when most Tolkien scholars rarely reference each other in any comprehensive way? (Drout and Wynne 2000, 101; Timmons 1998, 229) The reasons have been twofold. Most obviously, the work of fellow scholars has stimulated, challenged, and occasionally refuted my own understanding of Tolkien. The contrast between my first rereading of LOTR upon commencing my project and later readings has astounded me—with those later readings so much more replete with insight, often the insight of others. At the very least, our rich treasury of ‘Tolkien Studies’ has repeatedly saved me from error—alerting me to lacunae in my understanding, deepening too-hurried readings of Tolkien’s texts, reprimanding my more over-confident interpretations. I could not have accomplished more than a poor fraction of my purpose without intellectual capital inherited from my predecessors and contemporaries. I owe them a great debt.
But, further, part of my project has been to elucidate how Tolkien has been comprehended, critiqued, and appropriated,5 as well as to discover what he intended—to understand, as Tolkien himself put it, ‘what stories have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them’ (Tolkien 2008, 39). Texts that survive for any considerable period, as Tolkien’s have, grow, evolve, and metamorphose into entities sometimes as different from their origins as Homo sapiens is from Australopithecus. The Cambridge-School hermeneutic of origination is here insufficient. Even the most catastrophically anachronistic misreadings of Tolkien’s texts, the pollution-products generated by failed ‘alchemic processes’, are still inescapable aspects of ‘the meaning of Tolkien’ ground out by those inexorable ‘processes of time’. Such meanings have accumulated over the decades via Eco’s intentio lectoris, ‘the intention of the interpreter’ (Eco 1992b, 64), intentions that have often diverged dramatically from anything that might be credibly attributed to Tolkien himself. The good people of Middle-earth imagined by the enthusiastically carnivorous Tolkien, who thought the prohibition of meat-eating would be ‘unnatural’ (Tolkien 1981, 60), do not tend to be vegetarians (contra, e.g. Spacks 1959, 33), but the assumption that they do so tend, and that Tolkien intended such a reading, tells us much about the more impassioned Green readings of the author. Some critics, indeed, unabashedly admit that Tolkien himself, along with virtually all his many millions of dedicated readers, would categorically reject their own interpretation, as when a Freudian tells us that ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s escapist fantasy novel, The Lord of the Rings, is an extended treatment of the castration complex,’ arguing that most of the book’s ‘aficionados are quite incapable of noticing what it says’ (Jackson 2014, 77, 80). Critical sovereignty indeed, imperiously dismissing all of us oblivious to Frodo’s penis-anxiety! My study, then, investigates, exploits, and appreciates a vast, fascinating, and often confounding scholarly domain (with some fannish outliers) that has remained surprisingly unexplored.
Studying readers’ responses to Middle-earth has proven both enthralling and maddening, particularly when the field extends beyond scholarship. How can the Silmarillion fandom on Tumblr, in celebrating ‘Noldor Independence Day’, applaud Fëanor’s disastrous defiance of the Valar, thereby transgressing the fundamental narrative-line of the War of the Jewels legend and travestying Tolkien’s theistic values?6 As for online Fan Fiction… What would the prudish Tolkien have made of his wholesome Rosie Cotton reimagined as sexual wanton, vampire, or Ring-possessing dominatrix? (Sturgis 2006, 175–176, 180, and 182).7 And, even when reading more scholarly studies, I’ve encountered some very strange scholarship. Why do simple errors emerge so easily into critiques of Tolkien’s work? Hobbits are not ‘semi-human hoofed creatures’ (Evans 1973, 256). How often I’ve ground my teeth!
At the same time, I’ve revelled among brilliant works honouring virtually every discipline and mode in the Humanities—from human geography to queer theory, from Marxism to libertarianism, from new criticism to new historicism. Reading Mallorn and Mythlore , those long-time house organs of British and American Tolkienists, for instance, from near-fanzine origin to peer-reviewed prestige, has been a great joy, not least because even the early fannish issues are so rich in insight. The English-language offerings from German and Dutch Tolkienists proffered in Hither Shore and Lembas Extra have often proven as invaluable as the fine scholarship available from the Anglosphere’s Tolkien Studies and Journal of Tolkien Research. Surprising riches also lie buried in the obscure archives of amateur productions such as Minas Tirith Evening-Star or Beyond Bree. The tortuous course of Tolkien’s reception has been endlessly fascinating. Even the most perverse readings of Tolkien’s works have rewarded engagement, since they’re sometimes the most revealing of the obsessions, pieties, and prejudices that have peopled the stranger shores of Tolkien readership. Noldor Independence Day reflects American libertarianism; Rosie as dominatrix tells us something about contemporary gender politics. That ‘alchemical process’ of appropriation that Tolkien noted may often have generated toxic residue rather than golden treasure, but ours have sometimes been toxic times, and Tolkien scholarship and Tolkien fandom have taught me much about both the golden and the toxic in recent cultural history.
There are thus multiple good readings of any ‘large and alive’ work, readings that were not always intended even by ‘the writer himself’. At the same time, however, most of us know that there must be limits to unconstrained interpretation. Tolkien himself, despite his supposed tolerance of others’ readings of his work, could be incandescent about the more stupid of them (e.g. Tolkien 1981, 305–307). He may have genuinely believed it when he wrote that ‘The L.R. [The Lord of the Rings] does not belong to me. It has been brought forth and must now go its appointed way in the world, though naturally I take a deep interest in its fortunes, as a parent would of a child’ (Tolkien 1981, 413). But he treated bad interpretation of his work as a parent would a child molester. Indeed, on one occasion, he irritably repudiated any interpretive research into his life and works. ‘After all’, he complained, ‘I hold the key’ (Tolkien 1967, 38). One sympathises. There can be multiple good readings of any complex work, but there can also be a multitude of bad, sometimes very bad, interpretations. Some interpreters (certainly some who have interpreted Tolkien) are manifestly lazy, or obviously incompetent, or blindly fanatical, or deviously malicious, and sometimes all these in malign combination. Good interpretation, in contrast to such malignancy, requires a profound understanding of Eco’s ‘intention of the text’—with such understanding dependent upon close reading, careful rereading, awareness of and control over one’s biases, the dogged search for instances that might contradict even one’s most treasured interpretations, and an honest willingness to surrender oneself to the work in hand.have the same ‘meaning’ for [other readers] as for me. But that does not trouble me. These pictures or visions that come in such tales are large and alive and no one who sees them, not even the writer himself, understands the whole of them. (Tolkien 2005, 72)
Following this good guidance has directed me down seemingly endless and endlessly convoluted pathways, but also into rich fields of understanding.Every person, every feature of the imagined world that seemed significant to its author is…worthy of attention in its own right. Manwë or Fëanor no less than Gandalf or Galadriel, the Silmarils no less than the Rings; the Great Music, the divine hierarchies, the abodes of the Valar, the fates of the children of Ilúvatar, are essential elements in the perception of the whole. (in Tolkien 1983b, xv–xvi)
Over the years, then, my study of Tolkien in his time crystallised into a strong sense of his intent as an author; my engagement with libraries of Tolkien criticism evoked delight and provoked fury, along with much insight; and my reading and rereading of Tolkien’s works spiralled back through the hermeneutic circle to further inform my understanding of both Tolkien and his critics. Years passed, pleasantly on the whole, despite multiple methodological challenges, as I read fascinating material and deepened my understanding of Tolkien’s meaning: his original meaning for his time, and the meanings that have (often wrongly) since been attributed to him. They were pleasant years indeed, however taxing. Less pleasant was an implacable Dean of Arts demanding publications that were always deferred by further research.
In any case, after more than a decade of intensive reading and intense thinking, after three expeditions to the northern hemisphere to access esoterica in the British Library and to delve into the magnificent Tolkien collections held in Oxford’s Bodleian Library and at Milwaukee’s Marquette University, and, finally and decisively, after retirement, I began writing that very big book on Tolkien’s ideological vision that had rested for so long in utero. More than half way through the project, I commenced a chapter on ‘Tolkien and Race’. The history of racism had been a central part of my scholarship for many years, above all while teaching the ugly origins of the Holocaust and researching the disastrous Marxist encounter with French ethnicity (Stuart 2006). And I’d been disturbed even during my first youthful reading of LOTR by what seemed to be the work’s racist moments, not least when I tried to imagine Middle-earth from an Orc’s-eye perspective. Later immersion in Tolkien’s oeuvre only worried me the more, as I came across obscure but telling texts such as ‘Tal-elmar’, with its overt racism (Tolkien 1996, 422–438). Tolkien’s life-experience also puzzled. How could he have possibly enjoyed Robert Howard’s viciously racist ‘sword and sorcery’ tales? (De Camp 1976, 244; Shippey 2019, xiv) In one particularly fraught encounter, I’d been delighted to discover (alerted by Burns 2009, 22–23) that Tolkien had donated a boy’s book with its adventures set in my own Western Australia to the King Edward’s School library…until I read it and encountered its ‘Nigs’—Australian indigenous people viciously described as ‘more ape than man’, and blasted into oblivion by intrepid White explorers (Macdonald 1907, 211). Engagement with Tolkien criticism then exposed me to critics who alleged Tolkien’s quasi-fascist or White-Supremacist proclivities, while the vagaries of Tolkien fandom introduced me to fans whose malignant politics seemed to confirm the critics’ allegations. The Tolkien Society itself, usually so warmly supportive of its tight-knit membership, has been accused of resistance to racial inclusivity (Choi 2020).8 Was it really possible that Tolkien had been a racist? How could it be that his legacy has apparently empowered racism, even neo-Nazism?
At the same time, as I immersed myself in Tolkien’s Christian-humanist ideological persona, I found it impossible to believe that he could have sympathised with the often fascist and usually imperialist ultra-racists of his time, an incredulity reinforced by Tolkien’s own anti-racist testimony in correspondence (Tolkien 1981, 37–38) and in scholarly essays such as ‘English and Welsh’ (Tolkien 1983a, 166). Then, of course, there were the many passionate vindications of the author by well-informed critics, who categorically refuted the charge of racism. How to reconcile Tolkien’s testimonies against racism with his racist fantasy texts? Who was right among the critics, given their utterly conflicting views yet seemingly equal scholarship? It was a controversy that couldn’t be avoided in any study of ‘the politics of Middle-earth’. My long-planned book had to address the issue.
After only a few months of writing, however, the incipient chapter on race and racism had blown out to over 20,000 words of drafting, without end in sight. ‘Tolkien and Race’ was obviously the subject of a book, not a chapter, and the original project on ‘The Politics of Middle-earth’ was temporarily set aside for a subsidiary one: the work before you. It has proven to be some of the most challenging writing I’ve ever attempted, given the intricacy of Tolkien’s thoughts on race, the brutally conflicted nature of the relevant Tolkien criticism, and the necessity of further contextual research in particularly challenging sources. I soon discovered fascinating work debating racism in the medieval literature that Tolkien had so obsessively explored, and endeavoured to incorporate its insights into my understanding of his lifework. Challenged by the ambiguities of Tolkien’s texts, I engaged in more depth with critical race theory and other recent modes of studying race and racism. And, inescapably, I delved more deeply into works by the racist and anti-racist thinkers of Tolkien’s time, while further probing the scholarly literature on British racism. Many months passed, but then, with my retirement, so had the dean’s campaign for publication.
One vexing issue throughout this enterprise has been the word ‘race’ itself. My very use of the term can seem to make me complicit with racism, implying acceptance of ‘race’ as a foundational reality rather than a cultural prejudice, as something ‘naturally given’ rather than ‘socially defined’ (Malik 1996, 4–5). I must, therefore, as a White academic myself potentially liable to that ‘colour-blind racism’ (Bonilla-Silva 2003, 275–277) endemic to Whites, here at the beginning, affirm my own anti-racist convictions, increasingly sensitised by engagement with a generation of impassioned critique. Like Elisabeth Leonard, ‘I can no longer pass over references to “Black Elves” without thinking about what they meant and where they come from’ (Leonard 1997, 2). Racist bigotry—I’ve always been convinced, but now more so than ever—is the ultimate narcissism of minor differences. Growing up in Hawaii, even in Tolkien’s time recognised as a place where ‘the code of racial separatism has been conspicuously lacking’ (Benedict 1943, 48), I had been utterly indifferent as to whether my friends were Haole (White) like me, Korean, Japanese, or one of the many other peoples who cohabited happily on the Islands.9 If I’d bumped into the little brown kid who would one day become President, I wouldn’t have noticed his colour.
Over the years, youthful Hawaiian experience has been translated into mature theoretical conviction. We humans, I know, are a remarkably homogenous species, so that the tiny physiological distinctions between us are virtually irrelevant by comparison with our commonalities. And the cultural associations of those minor physical differences are entirely contingent. As British imperialists discovered to their consternation, one doesn’t need sandy hair and freckles in order to play brilliant cricket. Race, if we must have such an identity, is an acquired (and often enough imposed) trait: historical and cultural, but never inherent. The only real race, surely, is ‘the human race’ (Appiah 1996, 32). I fervently believe that ‘the process of using genetics to define “race” is like slicing soup. You can cut where you want, but the soup stays mixed’ (Isaac et al. 2009, 29)—an insight already available to Tolkien’s time (Huxley and Haddon 1935, chapter 3), albeit an insight then rarely heeded. Nonetheless, however thin the soup of genetic racial difference, race-thinking has been substantial enough. Roger Scruton, that incisive conservative philosopher, having scathingly dismissed the racism of inherited genes and lineage ‘blood’, has conceded that ‘nevertheless, it is difficult to avoid terms like “race”, not least because they accurately reflect ways of conceiving social reality’ (Scruton 1990, 58 emphasis in original). Millions have died because of such conceptions, heroic solidarities have emerged from struggles against them, and they have suffused great works of literature. Race in this sense is well worth studying, not least as it has emerged from Middle-earth. In exploring Tolkien’s richly imagined ‘secondary world’, as here in our mundane primary one, no one should ever be ‘colour-blind’ to race.
This study, then, examines Tolkien’s oeuvre for its conceptions of race, whether racist or anti-racist. It seeks to discern Eco’s ‘intention of the text’—searching out the good readings that Tolkien’s works empower, even if they were not Tolkien’s own, and discrediting the bad readings that have been inflicted on him. At the same time, doubting Barthes’s ‘death of the author’, this book cares deeply about Tolkien’s living presence in his texts. What, it asks, was the ‘intention of the author’? That question demands that Tolkien be placed in context. What traditions had he inherited from the racist nineteenth century? Indeed, what traditions had he inherited from the medieval romances he so obsessively studied, immersing himself as he did in an antique genre that, according to one of its students, was particularly conducive to ‘the creation of races’? (Heng 2003, 7) And how might he have related to the racial discourse of his own terrible époque? What had he meant, writing from his time and for his time? Finally, this study surveys Tolkien’s legacy. Unlike most studies of the author, it engages systematically with the vast range of writing about Tolkien. How have so many scholars and fans (not always separate identities in Tolkien Studies!) made sense of race and racism in Middle-earth? How goes the war of critics between those who charge the great fantasist with racism and those who repudiate the indictment? What Tolkien means (rather than what he meant) depends, after all, on ‘the intention of the interpreter’, on the passions and prejudices of Tolkien’s multitude of readers as they have appropriated his works for their own purposes during the many decades since Hobbits10 first invaded the world’s cultural consciousness. Overall, then, by rigorously engaging with text, context, and critique, this study answers vital questions about ‘the author of the century’. Was Tolkien a racist? Does the most popular author of our times really empower the neo-Nazis and White Supremacists who claim him?