The following essay was kindly submitted by contributor Ruth Lewis, a British zoologist, writer, and illustrator with a strong interest in Tolkien. It is presented below with only minimal editorial adjustment.
A version of the call for papers to which the essay responds can be found here.
'ℑs Tolkien racist’ is an ‘old chestnut’ which should have long since been consigned to Frequently Asked Questions lists, right alongside ‘Do Balrogs have wings?’ and ‘Is Tolkien anti-feminist?’. That it is still being asked in as serious a forum as the Kalamazoo meeting is probably due in part to the phenomenon that Tom Shippey remarked on in Author of the Century with the example of Germaine Greer, who ranted on about Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings with total certainty – only to admit afterwards that she hadn’t read the book.
It is well worth remembering that Victorian and Edwardian Britain were not one single block of opinion about ‘race’. Ignorance and knowledge, distaste and interest, distant theory and on-the-spot practicality were all present, all muddled together, all subjects of discussion. Theory was tested in the hardest of practical exams, the unforgiving real world. Practical superiority of British forces over non-European peoples was not guaranteed until very late on indeed, within living memory for much of Tolkien’s lifetime. For every runaway victory such as Omdurman, there was a cracking defeat such as Isandhlwana. It is also worth remembering that Empire was not a foregone conclusion, but a matter of hot debate. As Tolkien grew up, as he wrote, every possible shade of opinion about ‘empire’ and ‘race’ that we can imagine – and some that might surprise us – coexisted within British society and thought. Only by recovering that historical reality can we understand how J.R.R. Tolkien could think with or against the turbulent intellectual currents of his own time.
The other reason why we are still asking questions such as ‘Is Tolkien racist?’ is, in fact, a backhanded compliment. We are still reading The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, unlike the works of most of Tolkien’s contemporaries and even many of his juniors. So it is a little too easy to criticise as if Tolkien were a living writer who could be expected to come up with a ‘woke’ bestseller next, and not someone born in 1892, who died in 1973. Stop and think about that for a minute; how much have attitudes changed since the 1970s? We don’t say half as much about the woeful presentation of women and non-Western European characters in books by the likes of Ian Fleming or Dennis Wheatley. They are dead in both senses, physically and culturally (the James Bond movies long since departed from any serious relationship with Fleming’s writing). Tolkien in contrast is still a living influence in our culture, and therefore we do ask these questions.
The problem with asking ‘is Tolkien racist’ one more time is that it blocks consideration of more interesting questions – such as ‘how do readers actually respond to books from outside their own culture?’, or even ‘what kind of book is The Lord of the Rings?’.
Now, I know that last looks like another old chestnut – but if we want to ask why Tolkien does not have the sort of ‘active female characters’ we prize, or any obvious non-European ones, in The Lord of the Rings, we need to ask it. Yes, on the surface The Lord of the Rings is fantasy. Scratch the surface, though, and it is amazingly realistic in some ways… such as moon phases, times and distances covered, and, yes, the composition of the Fellowship. At no point in time prior to the First World War would such a group have included women unless the setting explicitly included unusual peoples such as the Sarmatians who did have Amazons. That, by the way, is exactly what we find in the Silmarillion-tradition, with the Second House of the Edain and their women warriors. The same goes for people from outside the immediate geographical point of origin of a group such as the Fellowship of the Ring. It could happen, but the circumstances would be unusual.
The irony is that the very history and medieval fiction that gets cited as something too parochial to be useful in creating exactly such unusual circumstances and wider views is often much more diverse than we think. Even in recent times, ‘alternative’ voices do exist but don’t often get heard – such as the Dundee house-husband who told one 1920s journalist that it was harder work looking after one baby than being a riveter in the shipyards. Go back further and things change in strange ways. In the 3rd century CE a Greek author named Heliodorus could write a novel (yes, they did exist back then) called Aithiopika which is filled to the brim with active women, non-European characters, and cultural diversity, where nothing goes quite as we expect. To give just one example, in the final act the day is saved by ‘naked philosophers’ teaching a non-violent Way who persuade the Ethiopian king to change his mind by force of argument, not force of arms. There are men in skirts and women with weapons in Anglo-Saxon graves, ‘traditionally queer’ people obviously accepted by their community as such to be buried that way. There are medieval romances that cheerfully take their characters across seas and cultures, that don’t just see everyone different as an evil ‘other’, that do include surprising figures. Modern accounts of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival don’t often mention his half-brother Feirefiz, son of a Grail knight and an eastern princess, his piebald appearance showing his mixed ancestry, who may start out bringing an army to claim his heritage but ends up as a Grail Knight and the husband of a former Grail Maiden. Even on Munsalvasche, it seems, there may be many ways up the mountain.
Our current perceptions of ‘the medieval’ are the problem, far more than the real material. To present this material as ‘racist’, or to use it as a basis for secondary writing in that mode, is, bluntly, a perversion of the facts. That it can happen is regrettably not a surprise, given the nationalist ideas at the heart of much of the 19th century rediscovery of medieval literature. Just as serious if not more so has been the repeated narrowing of our view of medieval writing that has happened across the 20th century.
Stories like Bevis of Hampton (a medieval bestseller which I believe exists in a Yiddish translation, a copy of which turned up in Cairo – a lesson take by this!), which were available in versions for primary-school use in Britain before the First World War, are barely accessible for postgraduate readers nowadays. Eastern and Southern Europe is largely excluded from our perceived ‘medieval’ world of writing at the moment, let alone anywhere further away.
Whole areas of story widely familiar throughout the medieval era and across continents – such as the persistence of the Trojan legends that linked authors as various as Guido Delle Colonne in Sicily, Snorri Sturluson in Iceland and the Gawain-poet in England – have disappeared from view. Mehmed Osmanli bynamed Fatih, the Ottoman sultan who conquered Constantinople, could use an ‘heirs of Troy’ strategy in propaganda and expect to be taken seriously, not laughed at – but we’re just puzzled. Snorri was using an ‘It’s Trojan, really’ strategy to rescue Norse myth and legend, but we don’t even see that far less ‘get’ it, either. We have lost sight of material that created important links across time and space, rather than being local and restricted. (And there is an even more crushing restriction in publication of medieval manuscripts; secular rather than sacred books barely get a nod. The Victorian ‘monks and missals’ idea persists to a ludicrous extent in the popular view of medieval books. That shapes people’s idea of where it is appropriate to use medievally-inspired styles, while books of history and legend languish unnoticed and rich possibilities for modern book art are ignored.)
In a very similar way, at the moment we really do not see the sheer spread of ‘medieval romance’. This was a web of story that in its day reached from Iceland to Baghdad and beyond, with readers eager for new stories translating and reworking tales across languages and cultures.
That takes me back to the question of reader response. There is a definite tendency to see Tolkien as a very English writer, whose local inspiration is perceived as shining through his writing. We have somehow lost sight of the possibility that it doesn’t always work like that. For some reason, useful critical ideas such as ‘the implied author’ or even ‘author writing in character’ have not made it into discussions of Tolkien’s work as far as I know. Preserved footage of the man himself, as well as some of his letters, makes it very clear that Tolkien is a ‘slippery’ author, a man whose distaste for Drama in theory is not matched by inability in fact or on paper – a man with a sense of humour about himself and the world. That makes ‘straight-faced’ interpretation awfully dangerous. In The Akallabeth, for one large example, Tolkien is channeling the Gildas of ‘On the Ruin of Britain’ quite successfully. The ‘implied author’ of that work is a decidedly unreliable chronicler whose position within the fiction needs to be thought about quite as much as the flesh-and-blood person holding the pen. ‘The mask of the actor’ can be ‘the mask of the author’ too, and where we can see it happening once, we really ought to be watching out for it elsewhere. Consideration of reader reaction, ideas about how we read and what we can do with (or to!) a text which we read, are another set of critical concepts which I for one have not seen brought into discussion of Tolkien. Teek-aye – sorry, let me translate; OK – I know I’m increasingly out of touch with, especially, American writing on Tolkien, and out of date on literary theory. The book at my side as I type this is Margaret Anne Doody’s The True Story of the Novel, Fontana/HarperCollins 1996. But just perhaps some of these ideas might still be useful to think with, before we start throwing babies out with the bathwater.
There is or was plenty of anecdotal evidence that people who read Tolkien can see his books quite differently to the ‘Englishness’ paradigm. On the specific question of ‘how do you think of hobbits’, for instance, the reader with an ‘innocent eye’ does seem to imagine them as people of their own country and culture. That doesn’t sound so odd from countries so closely connected we forget how different they are, such as France or the Netherlands. But encountering somebody from India who thought of hobbits as Indians, as my husband did, really shakes up the ‘Englishness’ idea. How far does an author impose ideas and how far can people adapt the text in front of them as they read? Any postmodernist critic would say yes of course that happens – but even they don’t quite seem to see how deep and strange the process can be. Fantasy of all genres should be open to wide and wild reader re-interpretations – just like medieval romance.
It is one of the deeper ironies of modern Tolkien fandom and scholarship that in a supposedly global world, we rarely hear other voices. Nor do we see creative work from outside a narrow band of ‘acceptable fantasy art’. The Dutch artist Cor Blok’s Tolkien calendars ran headlong into that problem, for one example – and that’s a European artist whose style just happened to be too unusual for many people to accept it. Diversity does not get encouraged. The work involved in doing it differently is not recognised. That could change. In fact, all of what I have written about could change.
Criticism of the ‘Is So-and-so a such-and-such?’ variety is only worthwhile in my view, if it takes into account the specifics of real lives and real books in real time, rather than the nebulous realm of ‘everybody knows’. Anything else is unfair to authors who can’t answer back. There is also often an implied ‘…so should we be reading this?’ hanging off the end of questions like that. We laugh at fuddy-duddy judges in 20th century censorship trials asking if the jury want their servants or their children reading this – and fail to see it when we get close to the same position.
If we want to understand the reality of life and of fiction in ‘the medieval era’, however we define that, we need to look back past the 20th and 19th centuries. We need to stop reading secondary sources and start reading original works, with as fresh an eye and as wide a scope as we can manage. The medieval web of story may be tattered and torn, but far, far more of it still exists than most people realise. In our own particular area, people have been much too ready to trust what Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman about there being nothing but ‘chapbook stuff’ left of English medieval literature. Tolkien was not on the witness stand in court under oath there, he was trying to sell two very difficult books to a sceptical publisher. Anybody of Waldman’s age at the time who had been educated in Britain would probably have realised they were being handed the proverbial ‘pig in a poke’; we certainly need to beware of the cat in the bag. If we want to see new, different approaches in both scholarship and creative work, we mustn’t take anybody’s word for it – not even Tolkien’s.
We have a moment just now where there is a wish for change, for difference, for a wider, more diverse and more interesting world. As in all moments of change, we need to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If we put in the work that is necessary, we could see genuine and beneficial change in both scholarship and creativity that draw on the medieval world. Doing things differently is not easy, but it can be very rewarding.
The Tales after Tolkien Society welcomes contributions to the blog from members and from interested parties. Please send yours to talesaftertolkien@gmail.com, and thank you!
Thank you very much for this post, it highlights quite a few of my hopes and fears on how we are going to move forward in Tolkien fandom and research - wonderfully written!
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