Blake is Reading.

Note: I apologize in advance for wading into an already crowded discourse on the internet. However, as long as the pattern of criticism continues, it deserves calling out.

I have the blessing – and curse – of calling myself a fan of some of the biggest intellectual properties out there. Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Marvel rank among my favorites. Each of these come from decades of narrative and worldbuilding baggage that the fans^tm require more casual watchers to be caught up on at all times (see: Glup Shitto). Personally, I love it. I can spend hours on Wookieepedia or Tolkien Gateway reading about all the interconnecting narratives. When Nick Fury said “Mr. Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger universe,” in 2008’s Iron Man, he was talking to every pop culture title in existence.

Since then, everyone else seems to be trying to initiate their own ‘cinematic universe’. To put it briefly, a cinematic universe is a connected story over many films and other media. This was a natural development for movies from Marvel and later DC as this philosophy is how their physical comics have endured for decades. Star Wars Legends (the pre-Disney buyout canon) was a massive literary undertaking, with countless books, comics, and video games that told a largely cohesive story about the galaxy beyond the movies, many details of which are now bleeding into the Disney canon. Modern takes on the cinematic universe range from the more successful LEGO cinematic universe and Monsterverse to Transformers and the laughably ill-fated Dark Universe.

Forgive me if the syllable ‘verse’ has been overused already in this piece. Granted, it’s exhausting keeping up with all the universes as a fan anyway.

As soon as Amazon announced their now-released Lord of the Rings project, I was in equal measures ecstatic and apprehensive. They made it clear that The Rings of Power was to be incorporated into a cinematic universe. It was to include the original six Peter Jackson movies and this new Amazon show, with an implication of more to come. 

This announcement was of course met with all sorts of opposition, making my apprehension well-founded. The more genuine criticism concerned a perceived watering-down of Tolkien’s messages that had started with the Jackson films. A New York Times Opinion by Michael Drout avoids the emotionally charged rhetoric that colors the bowels of the Twitterverse so it proved a worthwhile read. His argument relies upon his fear that Amazon executives would misinterpret or abandon the “moral heart of his story” and become something akin to the long, drawn-out Hobbit trilogy. He ends by saying that if The Rings of Power fails, it “will be because the new adaptation lacks the literary and moral depth that make Middle-earth not just another cinematic universe but a world worth saving”. 

Regarding The Hobbit: I agree that Jackson’s movies lost their way somewhere in the production of the trilogy. I’m a fierce defender of the relevance of much of the content and plot of those movies, as they all have some basis in Tolkien’s writing. At the same time, though, I agree that the added storylines took away from the central focus that should have been on Bilbo Baggins and his journey with Thorin’s company of dwarves. I think Jackson wanted to deliver in The Hobbit trilogy a similar bombastic epic tale told to The Lord of the Rings, ultimately resulting in the mess that was The Battle of the Five Armies. The better move would have been to keep the focus on Bilbo and develop the dwarves more completely; as it stands more than half of them are pure caricatures with no identifying characteristics beyond the surface level. The much maligned elf-elf-dwarf love triangle was really the only character development addition made by Jackson.

However, I staunchly believe The Hobbit trilogy shines brightest in its quieter moments. Lee Pace is an imposing and austere Thranduil and I’ve always appreciated Ken Stott’s thoughtful and reflective Balin. Bilbo himself steals all of his scenes; his fateful encounter with Smaug and the screen adaptation of “Riddles in the Dark” are still moments I go back to watch regularly, thanks in large part to the performances of Andy Serkis, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Martin Freeman. Freeman in particular so purely represents what it means to be a hobbit in Tolkien’s world; fiercely loyal, exceedingly curious, and risk-averse to a fault. His interpretation of Bilbo Baggins makes the entire series a valuable watch.

Regardless of the extravagances of the series, The Hobbit still contained that spark of Tolkien. Tolkien’s books focus on the joy of camaraderie and discovery, of being a fierce defender of the natural world. Hobbits as a whole are an encapsulation of Tolkien’s themes; embracing the fear of the unknown but overcoming it nonetheless.

The Hobbit films continued Jackson’s innate understanding of what it means to be a hobbit by making Bilbo’s courage shine in opposition to his natural timidity. 

We arrive now at The Rings of Power, the first cinematic undertaking in Tolkien’s world for nearly a decade. The story being adapted reached further back into the legendarium than before, telling an origin story for the titular rings of power and taking place millennia prior to The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien fans hold his works to be paragons of literature, insofar as there being a proto-academic field of study populated by ‘Tolkien Scholars’. This study is held almost to the point of biblical reverence. Tolkien’s writing is often seen as infallible, perfect in its portrayal of its fictional retelling of Western European history, yet at the same time immune to analyses modernizing it to the world of today or worse, abridging Tolkien’s own stories to be more inclusive. Any criticism of Tolkien’s writing should accordingly be isolated as a result of the times that he was writing in; any adaptations of his work should be done sparingly if at all and not reflect these criticisms, no matter how valid.

The immediate backlash to the earliest images of Amazon’s The Rings of Power was as vitriolic as it was sadly predictable. It was clear that the showrunners were altering the narrative to some extent by focusing on characters original to the show and having the audacity to put Galadriel into a suit of armor. The loudest, most abrasive criticisms were to the characters of the Dwarven Disa and Elvish Arondir. Both of these characters were original to the show, though Disa existed at least in implication as the wife of Durin IV. 

The fact is both characters and their actors are non-white. If you’re not familiar with the discourse of Tolkien, understand that there is a long history of racialization in his writing. In Middle-Earth, and Arda at large, races are homogenized; Men of the West, Elves, and Dwarves are never described as anything other than white. Accordingly, objections to these characters are often laid beneath a veneer of scholarship as they rely on evidence from Tolkien’s writing that this sort of racial diversity shouldn’t exist in Middle-Earth.

Sociologically speaking, racialization is ascribing to groups certain inherent, immutable qualities that don’t reflect reality and that the groups did not choose for itself. Dwarves are a race of mountain- and cave-dwelling miners that covet gems and gold. Men (the term is herein an analogue for ‘human’, yet is always gendered unnecessarily) are ambitious and short lived, susceptible to acts of greatness and darkness. Elves, the most civilized and powerful of races, are uniformly fair-skinned and haired. Meanwhile, Orcs are a race of dark, twisted creatures who speak the “Black Speech”. 

Further, the only members of the race of Men in Tolkien’s legendarium that appear to be non-white are the Men of Harad. The desert-dwelling Haradrim run the gamut of descriptions in Tolkien’s writing. At times they are “fierce dark men of the South”. Other times, they are described as “black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues” and “troll-men”. In The Two Towers, they are described as having “brown skin”, with black plaits of hair braided with gold. With their massive war elephants and curved scimitar blades, they are clearly coded after all sorts of stereotypical and historical examples of Middle-Easterners and Africans. Most importantly, they are all depicted as being servants of evil.

The Haradrim and other denizens of eastern lands in Middle-Earth are separated from the heavily European-coded “Men of the West” where all of our heroes of Men come from. This separation damns the Men not from the western lands; they are servants of Sauron and therefore evil. It is key to note that this treatment depicts them essentially as perpetually in error and separated from their brethren.

It’s well known that Tolkien may very well be the most influential writer of fantasy. Accordingly, his use of racialization has had a profound impact in the genre. The modern high fantasy concept of what constitutes an ‘elf’ and a ‘dwarf’ comes from Tolkien and has been adapted in countless settings since. We are still reckoning with this today. Recently, the Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks have begun removing racialized language that essentially mirrored Tolkien’s approach to ‘evil races.’ Before now, D&D has had all sorts of monstrous and evil races that have been natural fodder for the ‘good guys’. In the source material, most D&D elves are separated from their siblings the Drow, or dark elves. Yes, their skin is literally black and they are naturally evil. Ouch. More recently, the evil races have been granted leniency in their writing, leaving it ultimately up to the players to decide who the characters are.

The most prevalent defense of Tolkien’s depiction of race in Arda generally relies on an argument that it is modeled after medieval Europe. As if Europe in 900 A.D. was perfectly racially homogenous, populated purely by white people. Of course, Tolkien could very well have been writing his world based on his understanding of systems of power in the Middle Ages which, admittedly, was heavily white-favored.

That doesn’t mean we can’t call out his writing as
incorrect and make changes to it. 

In fact, historians alive in the 11th century made note of the diversity of the largest cities in England. The Medieval writer Richard Devizes describes London as being “populated by ‘Garamantes’ (Moorish Africans), and ‘men from all nations’ that ‘fill all the houses.’” Devizes goes on to describe the various terms used to refer to these people, including “‘Black’, ‘Ethiopian’ (a word used at the time to describe all Africans), ‘Moor,’ and ‘Blackamoore.’” Englishmen of African descent continued to populate England spreading to smaller and more rural towns into the Tudor era. Further, if we are going to rely on the Medieval allegory, then the conflict between Men of the West and their ‘evil’ eastern and southern brethren necessarily brings to mind the long and bloody conflicts of the Crusades.

When The Rings of Power ultimately released and these criticisms resumed, I said to myself, “not again”. Just months had passed since the debacle of Reva in Kenobi, another “written-in” black character who was deemed illegitimate for all sorts of cursory reasons. Suddenly thousands of Twitter users decided they were formally trained screenwriters and could judge Reva’s story as complete trash, even after just the first two episodes. Yet, even as her story and motivations continued to unfold (and honestly told a compelling and well acted narrative), the same accusations continued. The internet exploded for a few weeks, with official Disney and Star Wars channels branding all critics of Reva as racists, something that only inflamed the discourse.

Both Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings are hallmarks of 20th Century (science) fantasy. Both were originally conceived and portrayed with limited or no racial diversity. The original Star Wars trilogy fared better than Tolkien on this front, showing some improvement in the four decades separating their debuts, but it still included very few non-white or non-male prominent characters. To its credit, Star Wars has continued to promote diversity. Now, we’re at the point where the franchise’s most popular character, Ahsoka Tano, is played in live action by a black actress. 

Why should Tolkein’s writing and its modern adaptations be immune to these sorts of improvements to tell a more inclusive and frankly more realistic story? It hurts no one to include an Afro-Latino elf, an Afro-Iranian dwarf, or a Jamaican-British hobbit.

Insisting that Tolkien’s adaptations remain white is racist. Plain and simple. There is no argument to be made about maintaining the spirit of the text. Tolkien’s books can be both masterful experiments in fantasy and racially exclusionary at the same time. Was Tolkien racist? No, I don’t think so. He, like many others of his contemporaries, just lived in a world where educated white men controlled everything. We know that this view is wrong and we don’t have to maintain it in some twisted example of historical accuracy.

The vocal minority in the Marvel, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings fanbases are very loud lately. All three of their most recently completed shows, She-Hulk, Kenobi, and The Rings of Power, have faced criticisms of their characters based on gender or race, or both. I haven’t watched it, but House of the Dragon seemed to also encounter the same headwinds as a result of casting black actors. It’s tiring having to wade through this discourse on Twitter and elsewhere, to the point where I’ve now written off content creators based on their suddenly anti-diversity views.

Before I sign off I just want to take this opportunity to say that Sophia Nomvete’s Disa and Ismael Cruz Córdova’s Arondir have immediately become two of my favorite characters in this new Lord of the Rings-verse.

Nomvete particularly gave a stirring performance as the Dwarven princess, providing a level of sympathy and humor to Khazad-dûm’s drafty halls that played well off of her emotionally closed-off husband Durin and her attempts to provide hospitality for Elrond. Disa encapsulated a first season of The Rings of Power that focused on the message of crossing ingrained cultural boundaries and finding common ground. Personally, I’d say paragons of character like Disa would be perfect for Middle-Earth’s continued development in the 21st Century.

I think I’ve rambled enough at this point. Racialization in fiction casts a long shadow from the founding works of modern fantasy that we clearly still have to deal with. I hope to continue to see showrunners push the envelope and try new ideas.