Quote:
Originally Posted by The Mouth of Sauron
Tolkien wrote sentences like: ".... Still, you may at the least disturb the Orcs and Swarthy Men from their feasting in the White Tower......". If he had written stuff like that today would LOTR have ever been published?
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You're kind of asking three questions here:
1/ Would LotR be banned (after publication) for this? No, because it takes about five minutes to find out that the people actually banning books are the ones offended by "WOKE" books. Indeed,
when it has been banned, it's been for promoting witchcraft and Satanism, which comes from the same segment of the population as those who think reading about people who aren't straight or white will somehow harm them.
2/ Would LotR be accepted for publication in 2022? Probably yes! Tolkien had already published a very successful children's story (
The Hobbit), and had done so long enough ago that the children who read it would now be prime targets for marketing an adult book. It's a bit on the long side, but George R.R. Martin proves you can still get away with that. And despite what you may have heard, "WOKE" books still face an uphill climb to get published; it's mainstream, "Tolkienesque" fantasy which still dominates the market.
3/ Would Tolkien be asked to edit lines like the one you mention? Probably not! It depends on the editor, but "Swarthy Men" is not a Primary World slur, and is pretty clearly a deliberately archaic form of reference.
That said, a book where the enemy are literally just black people in a featureless horde would probably raise
some eyebrows from editors. He'd maybe be asked to tone it down a bit - perhaps he could make it clear that the enemy armies are actually enslaved by the Dark Lord, and make sure that the heroes deal fairly with them after the war, perhaps by pardoning and releasing their Easterling prisoners, making peace with the kingdoms of Harad, and granting the inhabitants of Mordor all the most fertile lands of that realm as their own. Maybe he could even have his characters experience moments of sympathy and common-feeling with the enemy, or - it's a bit extreme, I know - make most of them
non-human. (To avoid any implication that "non-human == black", it'd probably be best to make it clear that there
are other human races out there; maybe this could go back to the "enslaved by the Dark Lord" concept?)
Oh, and if he could cut out all those lines about how his heroes whitely whited their way through with their incredible whiteness, maybe replacing his descriptions with the likes of "tall as a young tree, lithe, immensely strong... endowed with the still tremendous vitality of elvish bodies, so hard and resistant to hurt that he went only in light shoes over rock or through snow, the most tireless of all the Fellowship," that would be grand.
Fool of a Tolkien. If only he'd thought of that.
hS