Tolkien’s canon supports a racially diverse portrayal of Middle-earth
I’m tired of people complaining about diversity in depictions of Tolkien’s work, and I’m tired of these people calling themselves “Tolkien purists”, as if they have canon on their side. They don’t.
People who are actually Tolkien purists: have strong feelings about what the LOTR movies changed and omitted from the books; can quote the source material with scary levels of accuracy; have extremely strong opinions on obscure topics; probably taught themselves how to read tengwar… things like that.
People who are not Tolkien purists, and should never be called Tolkien purists: anyone arguing that all of Tolkien’s characters have to be portrayed by white people.
To start off with, most people already know that some characters in Tolkien’s works, like the Haradrim, are coded as people of color. But they’re generally unnamed antagonists and they appear in the story briefly. I want to talk about whether or not there are people of color among Middle-earth’s protagonists. And the answer is yes.
So-called “Tolkien purists” often dismiss the idea that people of color exist in Middle-earth because, they argue, it’s a sort of “fantasy Europe.” The problem with this argument is that Europe has never been 100% white. So, this line of faulty reasoning can be ignored completely.
Second, Tolkien never stated that all of his heroes were white. Some of them, for example some of the hobbits, are described as having brown skin, which could apply to people of a variety of ethnicities. Others, such as the Elves, are described in ambiguous ways that could also describe people of various ethnicities. Other characters have no visual descriptions at all. People who think that all of Tolkien’s heroes must be white don’t actually have any grounds to prove it, and it reveals a lot more about them than it does about LOTR.
Third, people dismiss the idea that people of color exist in Middle-earth because, they argue, Tolkien based his stories on Northern European myths and cultures—and he did, although they should refer back to my first point: Europe has never been 100% white. But if you’re one of those people who says, “There can’t be people of color in Middle-earth, because Tolkien based his stories on myths from Northern Europe, and wanted to write a mythology for England!” then you’ve just revealed that you actually know very little about Tolkien’s worldbuilding.
Because, yes, Tolkien did draw inspiration from many Northern European myths, cultures, and languages, but he had other inspirations as well. According to one of his maps, Tolkien envisioned Gondor lying at about the latitude of Italy. Do you really think there’s no one of African or Middle-eastern descent in Italy? And that’s just the beginning. Tolkien also based the crown of Gondor on the crown of the Pharaohs of Egypt, and likened its architecture to Egyptian architecture—that means Gondor canonically takes aesthetic and cultural inspiration from an African kingdom. In a letter, Tolkien also identified Minas Tirith with the Byzantine Empire, which at one time included parts of modern-day Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Crimea, Turkey, Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria—if I haven’t missed any. He also drew inspiration for Adûnaic and Khuzdul from Hebrew.
You can’t have it both ways: if you believe that Tolkien’s inspiration from Northern European myths, cultures, and languages means his characters have to be white, then you are forced to concede that if he also drew inspiration from North African and Middle-eastern civilizations, cultures, and languages, then some of his characters have to be people of color, too. You can’t use canon to prove that all of Tolkien’s protagonists were white, because he never said they were, and if you do some research, you’ll just find more and more evidence that actually fully supports a diverse Middle-earth. There is an undeniable influence on Tolkien’s worldbuilding from places outside of Northern Europe, and all of this would suggest that he envisioned at least some of his protagonists to be North African and Middle-eastern. Not only that, but people move around; the Byzantine Empire traded with China and India, and was most likely full of people from all over the place.
I want to add that, although this post was sparked by the discussion going on about The Rings of Power, don’t mistake this for a gesture of support for the show. While I’m strongly in favor of more diversity in portrayals of Middle-earth, Amazon systematically discriminates against people of color and has sold racist material on their website for years, so they shouldn’t receive praise for doing the bare minimum to create a diverse cast. They’re selling the aesthetic of diversity in a fantasy world while remaining hostile to it in reality.
And I’ve said a lot about Amazon elsewhere, but the main point of this post is that people have no right to call themselves Tolkien purists if they think all the heroes of his stories have to be white. I will also note that so-called Tolkien purists are up in arms over the very idea of a Black Elf, but they don’t seem very concerned with Amazon’s significant changes to Tolkien’s actual stories—compressing the timeline of the Second Age, for instance, which is an extreme departure from canon. Anyone who’s more upset about people of color playing Elves and Dwarves than they are about changes to actual canon is not a Tolkien purist at all, and they don’t know very much about the canon they claim to respect.
As a final addition, I don’t think readers need permission from the source material to interpret the characters the way they want to. If you want to draw Tolkien’s characters as people of color, you don’t need to write a dissertation with footnotes proving that it’s exactly what he intended. But I do see a lot of people creating diverse fan art and saying, basically, “I don’t care if this contradicts canon!”—and there’s nothing wrong with that approach, but are you sure it contradicts canon? Or is canon actually quite vague and open to interpretation when it comes to characters’ ethnicities? It’s important for Tolkien fans to remember that the actual source material here is way more friendly to these interpretations than a lot of people believe, and we need to reject the exclusionist rhetoric of the so-called “purists” who think canon is on their side when they claim that Middle-earth is exclusively white. They’re wrong. Canon is not on their side.
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