[Pitchwife]

The thing is, whether any given group of people in Tolkien's work is described as pale or swarthy or what-have-you-got, ascribing certain qualities or character traits to somebody based on their hair and skin colour is a racist mode of thinking either way, positive or negative; and explaining that away by saying that e.g. the Vanyar just happened by coincidence to be both the most fair-skinned and the most holy/noble of the Elven kindreds is IMHO opinion just a cop-out. He chose to write it that way, nobody forced him to.

When Sam is described as brownish-skinned (and I remember, off the top of my head, a passage about the light of Galadriel's phial in his brown hobbit-hand, somewhere in the Cirith Ungol chapters, that I can't be bothered to look up right now), I read that as the natural tan of the gardener used to working outside all day, as opposed to the pale, posh Bagginses sitting in their studies poring over their books and letters. Nothing to do with race.

But whenever people of clearly non-European racial phenotype show up in Tolkien, be it Hunnic Easterlings or Moorish Haradrim, they're presented as faceless mooks of the Enemy, little better than Orcs. There is, of course, Sam's one moment in Ithilien, a glimpse of the enemy as a human being who perhaps would rather not have fought in this war if he had a choice, which I suspect may be an echo of Tolkien's WWI experience, reflections that may have occurred to him at the sight of a dead Boche; but before and after that, the Haradrim exist only to be slaughtered by our heroes in a just war. Of course this is rationalised in the legendarium by presenting those peoples, by the sheer bad luck of their geographical position, as far removed from the enlightening influence of the Valar, Eldar and Númenóreans, and thus long steeped in the corrupting influence of Morgoth and Sauron, to the extent of worshipping them as God-Kings; whence the need to send the Ithryn Luin to them as missionaries. I find it hard not to see a colonialist discourse at work here.

Now I think mindil has it right that Tolkien, like most white people of his time, thought nothing of these matters and saw no evil in writing what he wrote (which I suppose you could say is part of the problem). But we don't read LotR in the 1950s, we read it today, and I think if we wilfully blind ourselves to the parts of it which might be problematic in this respect we become part of the problem.

(Note that this is no longer about Beowulf and Tolkien's interpretation thereof, which I'm in no way qualified to comment on, unlike other posters on this thread like WCH and Squatter. But I'd like to note that I found the knee-jerk hostility at the suggestion that there might be anything the matter about Tolkien and race earlier in this thread rather disturbing.

Also, Adorno rocks. Pity he wasn't more relaxed about movies and jazz, but he totally rocks, and let nobody tell you otherwise.)