Tolkien and race

J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy writings have often been accused of embodying outmoded attitudes to race. However, scholars have noted that he was influenced by Victorian attitudes to race and to a literary tradition of monsters, and that he was anti-racist both in peacetime and during the two World Wars. With the late 19th century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline, some critics believed that the mention of race mixing in The Lord of the Rings embodied scientific racism. Other commentators thought that Tolkien's description of the orcs was modelled on racist wartime propaganda caricatures of the Japanese. Critics have noted, too, that the work embodies a moral geography, with good in the West, evil in the East. Against this, Tolkien strongly opposed Nazi racial theories, as seen in a 1938 letter he wrote to his publisher, while in the Second World War he vigorously opposed anti-German propaganda. His Middle-earth has been described as definitely polycultural and polylingual, while scholars have noted that attacks on Tolkien based on The Lord of the Rings often omit relevant evidence from the text. Some critics have found what they consider to be outmoded views on race in Tolkien's Middle-earth stories, generally based on their views of how his imagery depicts the relationship between evil and race (the main races being Elf, Dwarf, Hobbit, Man, and Orc). Robert Stuart begins his analysis by stating that Tolkien was a "racialist" since he writes of races with different attributes, before asking "Was Tolkien racist?" and analysing in turn Tolkien's use of black and white (including his antipathy to racism and apartheid from his mother's experience in South Africa), the nature of Orcs, the racial connections in his language, antisemitism, and the apparent hierarchy of races and lords within them. Stuart concludes that "Tolkien’s legendarium is suffused with racialist imagery and, at times, imbued with racist values." The scholars of English literature William N. Rogers II and Michael R.