Quote:
Originally Posted by Galadriel55
Thanks for pointing out the other meaning of squint-eyed. But it wasn't just the one Southener at Bree, he was just the first of Saruman's lot that we see of that physical description.
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'Sallow', for what it's worth, is defined in the OED as 'Having a sickly yellow or brownish yellow colour'. They include one reference to 'the sallow Tartar', so it was sometimes applies to Asian people, but mostly it's a sickly tone when used of white people.
Lord Byron (the very same) manages to hit the Tolkien Racism Trifecta in
his OED quote, from 'Corsair': "That man..Whose name appals..And tints each swarthy cheek with sallower hue."
And then, of course, there's the
other 'sallow' race:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 201
The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.
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You know, since we're discussing Tolkien on racism.
The view I get from all of these quotes is that
when he bothered to think about it, Tolkien was pretty good on racism. He specifically qualifies his Orc description as 'degraded and repulsive' - ie, this isn't what actual 'Mongol-types' are like - and throws in a 'to Europeans' on his 'least lovely', which seems to me an acknowledgement that it's the Europeans who are at fault in making that judgement. There hasn't been anything which jumps out as Tolkien thinking deeply about something and then making it unabashedly racist.
But, when he
doesn't think deeply - when he writes about the generic Elvish appearance, or makes everyone from the South and East into The Enemy - he mirrors the racist attitudes of the time, with white-to-olive Goodies and brown-to-black Baddies.
To come back to Beowulf: yes, Tolkien probably did view the poem through a white, male gaze, and may have had difficulty pulling back from that. But what I've seen
no evidence of is the notion that he insisted everyone else had to see things the same way he did, and
that (to my memory) is what the article baselessly asserted.
hS