travelling north

James Wynn · 07 Jun 2010, 21:02 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:02:34 -0500
Subject: (urth) travelling north
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W32A92E5ABD17EC8D289E38CFD50 at phx.gbl>
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Message-ID: <4C0D5E6A.4040001 at gmail.com>

> Well, I am a Tolkein lover and was only being tongue-in-cheek critical. Still, he
> couldn't help being a man shaped by his time and his culture. Why couldn't his
> southern elephant riders be blondes or red haired with freckles? Why were his
> "Easterlings":
>
>    
>> ...Men who lived in the east of Middle-earth, who mostly fought under Morgoth
>> and Sauron.The Easterlings were short and muscular; they were dark of skin, eye,
>> and hair. .they are armed with long halberds, scimitars and rectangular metal
>> shields. Their armour is inscribed with a script which resembles Tengwar mixed
>> with Persian...In early design concepts, the Easterlings wore turbans and their
>> helmets bore crescent moons, but director Peter Jackson requested that references
>> to real-world cultures be avoided.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlings
>>      
>
> And I would think a British author writing during and just after WWII would use hawks or
> harriers or falcons or any bird of prey other than eagles if he was hoping to avoid
> all hint of allegory. 		 	   		
>    

The Eagles were a motif of Tolkien's Valinor from the beginning. It is 
hardly likely that when the Eagles rescued Bilbo and the Dwarves in The 
Hobbit, Tolkien intended that as some sort of patriotic statement.

Tolkien's stated purpose in creating his world was to create an English 
mythology. So he was drawing from the myths of the people who settled 
England...Scandinavian and Germanic people (with some Finland mythology 
thrown in for good measure). Avoiding terminology such as "Fair Folk" 
(pale people) for elves along with their pronounced physical height and 
strength was really unavoidable. Tolkien compared the overall geography 
and breadth of western Middle Earth to being essentially that of Western 
Europe (the Shire being Cambridge and  Gondor being Rome). So, the 
people East and South of that kingdom are described along the lines of 
the people in our world. England in the first half of the 20th century 
was simply far less multi-ethnic than it is today.

Let me try this from another angle. Tolkien and Lewis definitely 
harbored politically incorrect attitudes about non-Western Europeans. 
But in their world, it was unnecessary to have any other attitude. It's 
not that dark-skinned characters are portrayed as evil. They simply 
don't exist except as fodder. The ultimate allies of Sauron are not 
Easterlings or elephant riding-Southerners. They are Western Kings...the 
Ring Wraiths. The default "race" are English-type people (the novel's 
original audience). Everyone else is from somewhere else, naturally, and 
so they look different. Unless he chose to make those other people 
green, he has a limited palette to choose from. That's not racism. It's 
simply not multi-ethnic. They viewed non-western Europeans as "those out 
there". It might be racially exclusive "in-effect" but not true Racism 
per se.

Wolfe does the same thing in tBotNS. There are very tall people. There's 
a green man. But I can't recall any black men, good or bad, in the 
story. They don't exist for the story, right? But because Wolfe's 
geography is generally racially homogeneous, the charge of racism 
doesn't come up. If Disney had done Song of the South entirely with 
white people the NAACP it would not have denounced it and it would not 
be controversial today. The Harry Potter stories has a "Dark Lord", but 
all the non-white characters are relegated to bit roles. And of those 
there is nothing especially distinguished about them beyond their racial 
features. They are fodder in a multi-cultural war.  In a culture of 
aggrieved advocacy groups, we've become thin-skinned about presenting 
racial differences at all in literature. I'm not sure that's better.

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