a light where darkness was decreed

I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.

What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?

Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.

No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.

There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.

Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.

The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.

Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.

Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.

I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.

Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.

I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?

This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.

You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.

So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.

But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.

Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.

This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history...

That is the first sentence of The Fellowship of the Ring.

The prologue of the Lord of the Rings is iconic. Swept away by the story, we forget we’re reading at all. It's understandable. Who can resist the overwhelming charm of the writer, and the bewildering excitement of being taken by the hand and invited into The Fellowship of the Ring.

But even people with deeper takes on Tolkien tend to miss the significance of the Prologue. It’s a place where critical reading abilities and political processors usually turn off entirely - fair enough, it's probably a relief. Let's talk about the Narrator.

Meeting the Narrator: Time, Place, Person

The Prologue is narrated by a Mannish (Big Folk) Narrator, a modern human being, from an accessible academic standpoint. We are encouraged to think of him as Friendly Professor Tolkien, although you really do need to remember that he is clearly addressing us from within a fictional narrative world. He is a character. Even if he is Tolkien’s self-insert, intended to be read as Tolkien Himself, he is still a character who can be analysed and interpreted. This is a fictional character.

The Big Man deliberately addresses the reader as someone with a shared background, in what is presumably somewhere in the early-to-mid twentieth century. It is stated multiple times that you (reader) and Narrator are both Big Folk together - there is no chance that you, the Reader, are a scholar of another race.

It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves.

Pick out the “later estrangement” and park it for now.

The casting of the Narrator is a deliberate alignment with Professor Tolkien, and we are certainly intended to understand him as an academic, avuncular, rather unworldly male professor in the British Isles.

(Sidebar: for convenience I gender the Narrator as male. I think there's evidence for the Narrator being intended as male-by-default, which can be provided on request, and I personally feel the Big Man narrator is the translator/propagator of the silly convention of referring to modern humans as “capital-M Men.” )

The Prologue is written charmingly, a framing device of an academic translator giving the context of background information before presenting someone else’s text (the translated Red Book, etc). Later, this Prologue connects to the Appendices in The Return of the King, where the Narrator returns in his persona of the translator of the works. Our Narrator is certainly a strong, influential, deliberate character, with a specific and distinctive voice!

Anyway, whether or not you choose to picture the Big Man Narrator as Tolkien Himself doing a folksy Bit, OR as a character Tolkien created - Remember! The entire story is fiction and the Big Man Narrator is a created fictional character. Why would you assume he is telling the truth? Why assume that he is an expert? Where are his biases?

Look what the Big Man Narrator actually says. Look at what he chooses to tell, and what he finds unimportant. There are so, so many posts that pick over the fascinating bits of Concerning Hobbits, mining canon for more information, as if it is a pure source of truth. I suggest that the next time you do, you try this fun exercise.

Before we go into the Magic Thing, the narrator also notes AGAIN that hobbits exist today, but are shorter than they were;

They seldom now reach three feet; but they have dwindled, they say, and in ancient days they were taller.

This continues and reinforces the framing of “hobbits still exist now,” and sounds rather as if the Big Man has interviewed modern hobbits (“they say,”) which we’ll also park.

We move on, parking "it's assumed you're a Man, receiving information from a Mannish professor", the "future estrangement" and "diminished hobbits are available for interview."

The Magic Thing

I was provoked into writing this by a fun Tumblr post pointing out that "hobbits are said to 'not study magic' - does that mean that they don't HAVE magic?" which went off into a separate and funnier reblog chain.

I want to analyse this again, noting that this is information received from Big Man.

Let’s examine the “hobbit magic thing” noting that we are being TOLD all of this by a CHARACTER.

Here’s how the passage about "hobbit magic" starts.

Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today;

In our time, we’ve just been told, hobbits still exist, but had a population drop and are vanishing. To the point where a reader is not expected to have ever heard of them. Chillingly, in typical mid century British academic fashion, the Big Folk Narrator assumes that the reader is also British; when he later mentions that the remaining hobbits only live in the British Isles, it’s a little alarming. There’s a species of humans native to these islands, so rare and so politically silent that you’ve never seen or heard of them.

Hello?!

for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.

We are told here that Hobbits are going extinct because they cannot readily survive due to, essentially, habitat destruction. (we feel the Narrator’s annoyance about the Industrial Revolution spoiling the “peace and quiet” strongly here, more strongly than the buried implications for indigenous people).

They no longer have any land. Not only have they lost the Shire, they have no towns, small villages or even farms. “Was” is very much past-tense, and they “haunted” land in the past, ghosting lightly and leaving no traces of their presence, rather than living there. so in our modern day there’s certainly no Shire, no Bree (mixed human/hobbit town) and no Michel Delving, which in its time was a market town with above-ground buildings and a museum. For context, it takes a decent amount of work for the British Isles to lose towns, especially on the level of development that Hobbits had - famously anachronistic, they have waistcoat buttons and watermills and good china and museums and smoking habits, while all the rest of medieval-ish Middle Earth is not as developed.

It’s hard to lose all that, without any trace at all, in crowded countries. Wholesale loss always means that Something Happened.

They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.

“Do not and did not” is further reinforcement of a still-living people. (I love the “understand or like” thing, which is charming - the implication that hobbits are perfectly capable of UNDERSTANDING machinery in textile factories, but would hate it.)

Something that makes the Big Man nuanced as a character is that he obviously adores hobbits, and studies them because he likes them. The fondness and admiration comes through, even as he is showing his own privilege and bias.

To me, the way this passage about machinery is framed - lumping together those machines as “about the level of technology hobbits are comfortable with” - is something that someone standing post-Enlightenment, probably post-Industrial Revolution, would do. The implication I take from this passage is that this is a modern writer describing the current status of modern hobbits; a mid-century British scholar, a self-insert of Tolkien.

This sense of time matters, because of everything else he says, and the temptation people will have to excuse the Big Man narrator as “a product of his time.” This isn’t a medieval writer looking back on Middle Earth. It’s a highly educated man writing in the 1940s: computers existed, there were several Disney films out, women had the right to vote, and feminist essays were published from Tolkien's own workplace.

Even in ancient days they were, as a rule, shy of ‘the Big Folk’, as they call us,

We then proceed to see, across three books, examples of hobbit behavior in “the ancient days”, which may serve as an example of this shyness. Several different relationship with Big Folk are outlined, in which fairly chirpy hobbits, characterised by their ready emotional availability, cohesion, and incredible abilities to build relationships and form massive political alliances, seem to do well on the strength of that. Hobbit shyness may involve glaring ferociously at Big Folk for a moment, but within a few days they are sitting on your lap, and then it’s all over. With this evidence in our memory, casting a coy “shyness” as the reason for their avoidance of “us” becomes uncomfortable.

and now they avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find.

The Narrator is handwaving, in avuncular fashion, why the Reader has never seen a hobbit in their lives, and needs to be lectured, from first principles, on a living indigenous people of the British Isles. Do marinate on it for a moment, though. The tone of a professor or a parent, whimsically explaining to Victorian children why you don’t see the Tooth Fairy - she hides! Teehee.

They avoid us with dismay.

Behind this airy statement, what happened? Massive betrayals, the loss of their land and political power, loss of the conditions they need for their survival, massive loss of their people, and a total breakdown in trust. Humans and hobbits, in the prologue and main story, are shown as natural allies; close kin who understand each other well; humans are shown owing a tremendous amount of their own political influence to hobbits, and even cold/reserved humans end up liking them after a conversation. Hobbits are especially shown for being loyal friends who do not break down under war; noted for retaining cohesion and resisting corruption; who, under unimaginable conditions, will still resist harming or betraying friends.

Hobbits and humans have clearly had some significant breakage of our kinship since the events of the LotR cycle. The Big Man knows this.

Earlier in the essay, when the Big Man told us that “hobbits are closest to (us)” he gave us a lot of additional information, didn’t he? He refers to “later estrangement.” (He also tells us clearly, in that subtext of that sentence, that no hobbit will ever read the book in our hands, no hobbit will ever be addressed as a reader, no hobbit will enter academia, no hobbit will be able to fill in the gaps that the Big Man waves his hand over. Certainly no hobbit scholar contributed to the Big Man’s translation of the Red Book. They’re not just going, they’re functionally GONE. This is what I mean!) Anyway, even the Big Man notes that there was “an estrangement.” Something that has caused them to flee from contact with us in dismay.

whatever happened in that estrangement probably doesn’t reflect well on the Big Folk. A species facing extinction and hiding, dismayed and estranged, from their closest kin, is not having a pleasant time on this earth. Especially when we understand that they’re basically trapped in the crowded and inhospitable British Isles (and still managing to hide from us to the point of the public not being aware of their existence!)

The Big Man Narrator isn’t interested. This is the point where you ought to start wondering about academic bias on the part of the Big Man Narrator. He's fond of hobbits, and has interviewed/met them, but would never treat one as a colleague.

[…]They possessed from the first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently, when large folk whom they do not wish to meet come blundering by; and this art they have developed until to Men it may seem magical.

so hobbits have an inherent ability of being invisible/undetectable, which they still practice today (teehee, that’s why it’s okay that you’ve never spoken to one) and which is pretty damn effective. Effective enough that people in modern times are completely fooled, effective enough that it still counts as “disappearing,” and the elusiveness of hobbits is so perfect as to conceal their existence from the general public. Effective enough that the few adults who DO discuss hobbits could conceivably think it could be magic. The Narrator has probably rolled his eyes over a rival’s paper about “Slipping Into The Shadow-Realm: how hobbits shift space and time to conceal their vital signatures” (Sayers, 1934).

further, they’ve specifically developed this “art” - from what’s implied to be an instinctive/animal ability - to a higher skill, indistinguishable from magic. The “art” is SOMETHING material and quantifiable, if it was innate-and-continually-developed.

But Hobbits have never, in fact, studied magic of any kind,

Here is a point that’s been discussed on tumblr, and it is correct to note that “studied” is doing a lot of work. Especially when contrasted against the previous sentence, with the interesting term “art”. “It isn’t science/magic, it’s an instinctive art”.

To me - remembering that this is intended to be a mid-century British academic speaking to us - it resonates with how romanticism of marginalised cultures was treated by academia, in the generation the Big Man Narrator would’ve studied in - full of romantic, unexamined, politically revealing statements like, “The Celts are skilled in the art of music, but have never properly studied it.”

What I’m saying here is that we should not assume the Big Man is a good judge of the difference between “art” and “study,” especially since the next bit reads:

and their elusiveness is due solely to a professional skill that heredity and practice, and a close friendship with the earth, have rendered inimitable by bigger and clumsier races.

Hobbit invisibility is an “art” through “heredity,” but also a “professional skill” refined through “practice.” It has been “developed” until it is mistaken for “magic,” but against this, we are told that hobbits “have never studied magic of any kind.” In the cleavage point here, we can see the definition of “study” that The Big Man is working with. This definition is possibly what makes something “magic” or not. Have you seen this before?

The point I am making here is that the Big Man is speaking to us from the position of a “coloniser.” There are some worldbuilding implications to unpack from this. One is that the Big Man is speaking from a place where magic can be studied, not even requiring hereditary aptitude (if hobbits were excluded from magic by physiology, This Fuckin Guy would’ve said it) but that it is an academic practice. Hobbits are not just nearly-extinct and terrified out of contact with humans; they are fully excluded from academia (they do not translate or contribute to translations of their histories; they do not study) and if they cannot formalise their practices in acceptable study as the Big Man defines it, it cannot be magic. This is exactly the tone in which majority cultures dismiss other practices of culture/medicine/science, by stating it is NOT a form of science, because it is not practiced with the academy, because it is definitionally not allowed in the academy.

We can then go to a higher level of political analysis and reading, and ask: who benefits from a definition of “magic” that includes (academic study) but excludes (hobbit arts)?

You can certainly do some delightful worldbuilding answers for yourself, and say that “perhaps magic is spells, material changes, great works as performed by Elvish or Maiar Ringbearers, etc.” But if we look at the political stuff I’ve just pointed out, why not examine the definition and who it serves and why? Given that we’ve seen this pattern before - colonisers deliberately bundle, define and dismiss marginalised practices as primitive, animalistic, instinctual and unschooled, as part of the PURPOSEFUL WORK of colonisation - I read the Big Man definition as: “Magic is formalised by the bigger races and defined by excluding the practices of the smallest race.”

Who does this benefit? Well, the Bigger Races could in some ways. Magic must be studied, hobbits don’t study, hobbits don’t have magic, hobbits are The Only Unmagical Humans - despite having practices indistinguishable from magic - this could be something. Big Men would have some reason to define “magic” to exclude hobbits. Normally this is done in order to take resources or drain resistance from marginalised people, but as hobbits have had virtually no remaining resources or resistance since long before the Industrial Revolution, you could open this up to other worldbuilding implications - maybe, Big Men didn’t really MIND hobbits going extinct.

An interesting point here is to re-read sections of this work with different interpretations of who the Big Man is. Where are his biases? Who is he as a character?

I personally read him as a friendly, Tolkienesque academic who likes hobbits, follows his linguistic interests, and is too blinded by his bias to think about their political position. He seems unaware of the horrors he's talking about. Perhaps that's down to innocence.

A character crying out to be analysed.

Landless and Dismayed

That sums up a lot of information that can be mined from one of the very first paragraphs of the Fellowship of the Ring. But here's another message to toy with - hobbits exist in the modern space; landless, estranged, fleeing from us in dismay. Quite likely to have been betrayed.