Having spent a lot of time writing about Tolkien and racism on here, and having watched fanboys consistently misread Tolkien’s novels in various ways to justify their racist and anti-semitic imagery, I was looking forward to the inevitable backlash at the new Amazon Prime show, the Rings of Power. Being a big Tolkien fan, I was also very interested in seeing the Second Age of Middle-Earth given a big budget cinematic treatment. I have watched the first two episodes, and here are my opinions so far.
The setting is confusing
I know it’s meant to be set in the Second Age, but I don’t think it tells us that, and I don’t think it has done a lot of work establishing a timeline or a sense of the sheer scale of the time over which these events happen. There is no indication (that I recall) that the Trees of Valinor were destroyed in a different Age, or how long it was between the destruction of the Trees and Galadriel’s efforts in Middle-Earth (it also breezes over the kinslaying and exactly what Gally was doing there, but that’s probably for the best). They don’t really even give any clear indication that elves live forever, or of how old Galadriel is. That’s cool, we don’t need tons of exposition, but I think overall it makes the whole setting a little confusing to the uninitiated. This isn’t helped by having three seemingly unconnected stories take place at once in three very different places. I don’t mind, and it’s nice to have a story told without an infodump at the beginning, but I wonder if this is going to come back to bite them later on.
There is pointless conflict
The bit where Galadriel goes almost back to Valinor and then jumps off the boat is dumb and pointless. Yes yes we need to know she is confused and uncertain about whether to stay in Middle-Earth and fight, but sending her all the way across the ocean – especially after we have panned over the map and now how vast that ocean is – is just pointless. Now she has to swim all the way back, which you and I (being among the elite of fandom) know it is possible for an elf to do, but which lots of viewers will just think is dumb. Anyway she is just going to end up on a floating shipwreck where she learns about an orc raid on a community. All of this could have been done on the road to the Grey Havens: she could have changed her mind halfway through, run away into the forest, met the dodgy dude, learnt about his orc issue. Why put it right over near Valinor? This kind of pointless conflict doesn’t advance anything, it just serves to distract us and present a main character with a set of circumstances (looking dumb, swimming across a whole ocean, panicking under worm-attack, having to be rescued) that undermine the character traits so far assembled for her (smart, resolute, brave). I hate it when writers put this kind of pointless conflict into stories. I think we’re going to see more of it too – the rock smashing contest between Durin and Elrond was another example of five minutes of my life I’ll never get back, and it just serves to undermine Durin as a resolute leader. Durin! Also it makes him seem petty and emotional. This kind of pointless conflict almost always makes the characters involved look shallow, petty, indecisive or stupid and usually undermines them to no great end. Drop it!
It’s slow but sumptuous
I like the settings and the scenery, I thought Khazad Dum (and especially Durin’s house) was a really nice vision of dwarven life, and there are lots of grand shots and sweeping beauty. I’m hoping for a grand, expansive view of Middle Earth that takes us to places we’ve never seen before, and I’m hoping for it to do so with some sensitivity to the peoples and lives we may not have seen at all or only peripherally in Tolkien’s story. We’re already seeing things in Rhovanion, which gets largely overlooked in the Lord of the Rings, and “the Southlands” (the bordern of Harad) which is just a nest of bad guys in the stories we all know and love. Seeing things from the perspective of Harfoots or the descendants of Sauron’s servants in Harad adds a bit of richness and depth to Tolkien’s world – a post-colonial interpretation, if you will – and takes us to places we haven’t seen before. I’m looking forward to seeing the creation of Mordor, and I expect that the Rohirrim are going to be really cool if we go there. I hope we see a bit of Harad! So I don’t mind if it’s a little slow, if it shows us some of those things.
But showing us these other sides of Middle Earth – the poor descendants of the humans who fought for Sauron, the survivors of Orc raids, the Harfoots – and attempting to reimagine Tolkien’s world a little has unfortunately opened up an opportunity for the Tolkien Fanboys to align with anti-“woke” culture and outright fascists, to start a seething wall of outrage over the use of non-white actors. So let’s look a little at the central issue that has come up so far – the decisions about race in the show.
The Tolkien and Race Debate Goes Mainstream
The producers have decided to cast non-white actors in all possible races in the show, so we have black actors playing elves, dwarves, and hobbits and the only Orc we have seen so far was white. There’s also apparently some scandal over the decision to show female orcs and dwarves.
First of all I want to say that it is absolutely true that having non-white elves, dwarves or humans is completely throwing out Tolkien’s idea. He wrote these books with a strong racial essentialist ideology, and it was an iron clad rule of his world that darker=more evil. The humans who fought for Sauron were called “dark men” and were created without a sense of good, orcs were dark-skinned and created evil, and Sauron’s primary allies in the human world were black-skinned humans from Harad, or yellow-skinned Easterlings. The Dunlendings were also dark skinned and their colour was even in their name. This isn’t something that’s up for debate as far as I’m concerned: Tolkien wrote this way intentionally, and having a black-skinned elf is a complete rejection of the aesthetic of his races, and the ideology underlying it.
I also think it’s a good thing. This part of Tolkien’s work is explicitly, clearly racist and he says so himself. By having non-white “good” races the producers have rejected the racist ideology underlying the world, and that’s good. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Tolkien’s work and watches it for the first time, it’s not even noticeable – having non-white characters in lead roles or as good guys is becoming increasingly common and in a modern cinematic context dominated by superheroes it’s completely normal. The only people it could possibly annoy are people who are deeply invested in Tolkien’s specific aesthetic linkage between skin colour and morality. These people have ganged together with the fascists and online nazis who see LoTR as a text book for their bullshit racist opinions and are review-bombing it on all the major sites, but they’re wrong and we should proudly tell them they’re wrong. They aren’t wrong about what a change this decision is, but they are wrong about why it matters.
The only problems I can see with this decision to cast non-white actors is that it weakens the distinction between races, in the sense that we can’t tell what makes elves different to humans visually. They don’t even appear to be a different height and they certainly aren’t more beautiful. This is going to mean that unless the writers <em>show</em> us somehow that elves are different to humans – through their super human feats, resistance to cold, etc – the viewer will find it hard to believe that they’re actually not just a weird type of human. This is already a problem with the Harfoots, who until the Stranger appears are not easily conceived of as super short. I don’t think this is going to be a big challenge, but other than this minor detail I think the decision to cast non-white actors in non-human/non-orc racial roles is good. Yes, it’s a break with Tolkien’s original intent and yes, that is a good thing, and we should say so. Middle-earth cleansed of its stupid racial essentialist ideology is better than Middle-earth with it.
Conclusion
I’m not convinced this show is going to be good, I think it could be a little slow and perhaps a bit weak, but it has a lot of potential and I’ll be watching with interest to see how they change the original world building. The decisions they have made so far have been positive interpretations of, or outright changes to, the original work. Let’s give them some time and see what kind of magic they can build up in this world – and ignore the racist losers who want us to slavishly worship a racist 1930s ideal.
Compromise and Conceit 
September 19, 2022 at 11:17 am
‘The original is unfaithful to the translation’ (Borges)
September 21, 2022 at 7:59 am
I remember having a chat with a geek online about how obviously nobody could write really good REH pastiches because he believed things such as racial essentialism which no educated person today could believe, and the geek coming back with “well maybe he wasn’t wrong, did you ever think of that?”
Even Tolkien backed off on some of the racial aspects of his imaginarium as he got older, such as the antisemitic stereotypes in his initial concept of dwarves (“Antisemitism and the Dwarves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Writing”, Mythlore 2010).
September 21, 2022 at 9:10 am
Yes, lots of people today still believe this stuff, or defend its presence in older work rather vigorously while claiming they don’t believe it. Also a lot of the ideas have seeped into our culture shorn of their original origins and still have a sway over us, little fragments of racial essentialism that we don’t realize we’re doing (one drop of blood definitions of racial origin, Indigenous genes being weaker, Aryan theories of history). I think I’ve seen a lot of defensiveness about many aspects of this over the course of writing about Tolkien.
What do you mean by “REH pastiche”?
September 21, 2022 at 11:35 am
I mean stories set in the Hyborean Age in the style of Robert E. Howard, like the L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter ones or Stirling’s “Shikari in Galveston”. One of the reason why REH fans hate de Camp is that in fanzines he was honest that REH was crazy in a different way than de Camp and his co-writers were (there are other, more justifiable reasons).
September 21, 2022 at 11:42 am
On second thought, “Shikari in Galveston” was more a response to REH than a pastiche. Its been a while since I read it.
September 21, 2022 at 12:03 pm
There are a few essays about how British TV and films tend to cast pale-skinned northwest Europeans as ancient Greeks and Romans, even when the cast is international. There was a giant fuss a few years ago about a BBC animation with a black Roman (when any Roman historian can tell you that solders left inscriptions in Aramaic near Hadrian’s Wall, and at least one Roman writer mentions a dark-skinned “Moor” at Roman York- the idea that some powerful people in Roman Britain came from West Asia and Africa should not surprise anyone who pays attention, that is just how empires work). I think Bret Devereaux of the acoup blog had a post on this.
September 21, 2022 at 1:28 pm
Yes I remember the Mary Beard brouhaha, I had a (now defunct) Twitter account at the time and I got blocked by Nassim Taleb (who was losing his absolute shit at the idea of black romans) for telling him a famous guy had written a book about what happened to scientists when they were presented evidence that something they always thought was white could also be black, and maybe he should read it. Fun times. There’s a definite set of rules for how people in fantasy are presented (e.g. northern British accent is peasant/low class/salt of the earth, Scottish is a kind of psychotic dwarf, etc). It’s nice to see the Rings of Power not following those standards, and also interesting how when they diverge from them it is hard for them to keep a coherent sense of who is what (the elves are barely identifiable as elves, even when they’re white!)
I quite liked Ron Howard’s Conan stories, very fun. But him and all his ilk were pretty terrible when it came to race and gender …
September 23, 2022 at 4:50 am
Spending time unironically on twitter seems to damage people’s minds. J.K. Rowling could have been so much happier if she had stayed off social media and just worried about weird ideas that people she actually knew believed! I don’t know Taleb but ten years ago I had the impression that he was a Twitter person.
Corporate social media seems to reward ‘gurus’ with big ideas over experts quietly sharing the state of knowledge and adding a little piece to it.
September 23, 2022 at 1:20 pm
Actually I find Twitter a really helpful source of information. It’s amazing how much minor news hits the newspapers after someone tweeted about it. It’s also amazing how much journalists beclown themselves on there – just yesterday the Guardian US correspondent tweeted her realization that Trump overstates the value of his assets when applying for loans and understates them when paying taxes, something the rest of us have known since 2015. You really get to see how dumb our “betters” are from their behavior on Twitter, and Taleb is a really good example. Also I don’t think anyone who is terrible on social media isn’t terrible already in real life (Taleb has a reputation as a really vicious and anti-social person in real life academia) and Rowling is a good example of that. There’s a lot wrong with the morality described in her world, as I’ve referenced before here, and many others have noted elsewhere. Twitter just gives her a clearer platform to make her true opinions clear. (It is funny how she has basically burnt the goodwill of a large part of an entire generation when she could have just shut up and drowned in cash…)
September 23, 2022 at 2:36 pm
Yes, it is weird how many journalists write as if they don’t know what anyone who reads a few papers a day knows. Journalists are supposed to be the news junkies right? And journalists have gone from whining that bloggers are stealing their work to stealing the work of random twitter posters (apparently, it was already a custom in US journalism for prestigious outlets to paraphrase work from less prestigious outlets without acknowledgement).
I know some academics whose ‘published self’ is much more thoughtful than their ‘social media self’
October 27, 2022 at 7:46 am
There’s a distinction made between ‘Near Harad’ and ‘Far Harad’, most of the Haradrim featured are from Near Harad, and one brief reference to the physical appearance of people from Far Harad implies (strongly, at least to me) by contrast that the people of Near Harad are coloured (in a broad sense of that term) or non-white, but not black in a narrow sense of that term.
This fine distinction doesn’t (at all) affect the important point you’re making, but since the text is explicit about the blackness of people from Far Harad, the distinction obtrudes itself (to me, at least).
October 27, 2022 at 9:29 am
Yeah I guess “POC” would be a better description.