'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:
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