You think you've read drivel? You haven't read drivel until you've read this

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

In all fairness, the presence of football is not what I look for in a pub.

I don't see how it's possible to address a highly racially charged article (which in my view is deeply and intentionally racist) without engaging with the politics that seem to lie at the very core of its being. This obsession with identity has largely driven me from the internet, because it insists on reducing every individual person to inborn characteristics over which they have no control; every relationship to an inevitable clash of those identities in abusive power dynamics. I've seen it before, from the opposite direction. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now.

Tolkien was very much opposed to literary criticism in his subject and was a champion of the linguistic approach. I'm sure that the lit side of the English School would have welcomed with open arms the modern critical techniques approach, but it was not Tolkien's way. If you want to make it about race you have to earn it. You have to prove that Tolkien didn't want to hear a black man's perspective and that it had nothing to do with his well-documented distaste for contemporary critical theory. Throwing in all those references to Tolkien being South African, which are intended to dredge up memories of Apartheid, is blatantly disingenuous. Tolkien wrote a letter to CRT (Letters #61) in which he explicitly condemns that system, saying "...the treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain, & not only in South Africa. Unfort[unately] not many retain that generous sentiment for long."

That, however, wouldn't suit the author's purposes. Her story is the racist famous academic holding back the Jamaican-born Rhodes scholar. Because those are the only grounds on which anybody can judge anyone, apparently. I prefer the provable story of a language specialist trying to hold back the ever-encroaching tide of literary criticism in English schools. Odd, since Tolkien champions in his essay the treatment of Beowulf as literature rather than a mine for information. It was a bitter struggle, though, and hard fought. I'm sure that such injustices were committed by both sides of it.

Writers of articles like these are professional activists. They make a living by declaring prejudice to exist, and arguing against them is considered proof of prejudice that invalidates opinion. You might as well debate theology with Matthew Hopkins as get involved in their game.