"Characters of Color" in Tolkien

[martasfic]

Today I finally made the time to take dawn_felagund and Maria Alberto's survey on Tolkien fandom participation. You should take it too! It's long but the questions strike me as very reflective and nuanced, and I hope the survey results are useful to them. But I'd like to talk about this really interesting concept that popped up in a few of their questions: characters of color. Not to criticize the survey because I think it's useful shorthand and I understand what they're getting at (I assume), but just because I'm struggling to think through what that would mean in Tolkien's world. Who are the characters of color?

To start: I have no problem with people wishing Jackson had cast Polynesian hobbits or imagining African-American and other black actors as Lord of the Rings characters (Idris Elba as Aragorn? *grabby-hands*). But I also think this is fans bringing something extra into the world. I think Tolkien was writing a mythology for north-west Europe, so it just wasn't reflecting cultures we modern, global citizens would identify as giving us people "of color." If there are e.g. proto-Africans or pro-Malaysians, Tolkien's not really writing baout those characters.

Now, there's obviously minorities within the contexts of certain cultures, but that seems different from what we mean by people of color in the "real" world. Thanks to imperialism and colonization and all that, there's a tragic history of pointing to European culture and saying this is what it means to be civilized, with various non-European people (and peoples) pushing back from that. Lothiriel and Morwen Steelsheen marrying into the Rohirric royalty, or Arwen and Eowyn making their way in Gondor, they're certainly in the minority relevant to the dominant culture, but I'm not sure there's this universal "this-culture-is-the-default" assumption and all the harm that comes from that at play. Faramir obviously thinks Rohirrim are men of the twilight; but the Rohirrim of Fengel's time were probably just as suspicious of their new king who had gone and married one of those hoity-toity, overly pampered women of the south.

I suppose you could make a case that (say) Haradrim or Easterlings or even orcs were meant to be characters of color, but that seems to come down more to authorial bias than deep-seated racism. And even when they had a different color skin, you don't have the same history of slavery and using those biological differences to justify these great sociological injustices. I mean, assume for the moment that Gondorians represent the pinnacle of western-European Anglo-Saxon-ish "civilized" people, and the men of Harad and the Easterlings and that sort are... less white? Like Southern/eastern European, Arabic, Egyptian, that kind of thing? Even if you accept that analogy, the people of Gondor may think the Southrons are less civilized, and they may be less white, but those two beliefs don't seem connected the way they are in our real world.

So I'm curious. Do you think there's such a thing as a character of color in Tolkien's world? And if so who are they?

Comments

[mrowe.livejournal.com]

To start: I have no problem with people wishing Jackson had cast Polynesian hobbits or imagining African-American rangers (Idris Elba as Aragorn? *grabby-hands*)

Not to nitpick, but I wouldn't call Idris Elba African-American. As an Englishman of Sierra-Leonian/Ghanaian descent, he might object to that;-)

Other than that, a well-thought out cast of colour for LotR would have been interesting, certainly (and by well-thought out, I mean with some plot logic and respect for genetics, i.e. not cast a Japanese Elrond with Lupita Nyong'o as Arwen)

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

That line was a victim of over-editing I'm afraid. Bit of a long story, but I was originally thinking of a certain Tumblr post that dream-cast Lord of the Rings actors as black and mostly African American actors, but decided it required too much explanation and just left in the image of one of my favorite choices. Apparently my brain was still stuck on the African-American track, though, leaving something obviously inaccurate. I'll fix it.

I obviously love fan-casts of the characters with different ethnicities; it can really open up new ways of seeing the world. I also have enjoyed fanworks dealing with prejudices based on where they're from. But I think a lot of that is probably (good, useful) work the fan-creators are doing, rather than something that's in Tolkien itself. Which is what makes me a little hesitant to point to a certain character and say they're a character of color, in the same way that (say) Rue in the Hunger Games or Sam Wilson in the Marvel movies or the like very obviously is.

Thanks for catching my mistake with Idris Elba, btw!

[mrowe.livejournal.com]

I've appreciated the various fancasts I've seen at least aesthetically even where they didn't make a lot of story-sense, since they invariably picked rather good-looking people.

It would be hard to point at any main character as a character of colour yes, and for minor characters we only really have Sam's Haradrim warrior and his colleagues.

(and Harad and Umbar are something I will need to take at least a temporary position on for one of my fics *g*)

Something I have noticed over the last few years though, is that it is possible, if you squint at it in the right light, to read the story of Numenorean discoveries, expansion and conquest as a mostly veiled commentary on British colonialism and Empire; whether by authorial intent or not, I leave open.

Edit: we've probably all been there with the unfortunate edits LOL!

[dawn_felagund]

I am far from an expert on this topic, but there's been quite a bit written about what Tolkien actually says about skin color in the canon. In some cases, he directly states that a character is a color other than white (multiple mentions of Sam's brown hands come to mind ... this resource has a good breakdown of the canon); in [many!] other cases, he says nothing about what a character or group looks like, so fans have used that blank to cast characters as people of color ... and why not? We can get into the thorny issue of Tolkien's intent, but he's been dead longer than either of us have been alive, and we've both been around the Tolkien fandom long enough to know that the phrase "Tolkien clearly intended" has been weaponized to exclude certain interpretations, especially those by/about marginalized groups. I remember it especially used to exclude LGBTQ+ characters. (Having said this, I find it interesting that you honed in on "characters of color" when the same survey items were asked about LGBTQ+ characters as well, where I think it's far easier to make the case that Tolkien would not have seen them in the legendarium but where fanworks have reinterpreted and sometimes straight-up ignored-and-rewritten the canon to find places for these characters.)

I think so many people default to Middle-earth-is-white not because of anything Tolkien said but because of ... Peter Jackson. He created what one scholar termed a "double canon" by layering a visual default onto Tolkien's canon (e.g., New Zealand now equals Middle-earth to many people despite, as you note, a clear geographical orientation in northwestern Europe for LotR), and one of the effects of that is that many characters default in fans' minds to white, even if they explicitly weren't written that way or weren't necessarily written that way.

(And even without Peter Jackson, I catch myself in this default-to-white as a reader, where I will sometimes imagine a character in my mind as I'm reading as white, and then the author later notes a detail that shows that character as a person of color, and I realize how effortlessly I made the assumption that the person was white. So I don't mean to lay blame solely at PJ's feet--he is operating within a context of white supremacy/whitewashing much larger than any single work of art--but I do think he has an undue influence on Tolkien fandom because of the ubiquity of film imagery even among fans interested in the books.)

(Too long so continuing in the next comment ...)

[dawn_felagund]

But after I've written all of this, I came to say that I don't even think the canon matters. :D When speaking of fanworks, I think turning to the canon to explain whether "characters of color" are justifiable in Tolkien-based fanworks misses what I think is often happening when fans write a character as nonwhite. As noted above, Tolkien provides some canonical inroads (or canonical blanks) to be used, but I've also seen fans completely throw the canon out of the window and write characters who are described as white (like the Noldor) as people of color (e.g., I've seen a lot of fanart representing Fingon as brown-skinned). And I think that's an important and powerful act. Deepa D has an excellent essay written during RaceFail '09, I Didn't Dream of Dragons, that speaks to the pain and loss she felt, as a person of color, in reading fantasy that did not include her and the barriers that non-Western writers of color face in getting their work published. I see fanworks as something of a corrective to this (acknowledging that a fanwork does not carry the same status/legitimacy as a traditionally published story). Another scholar I find myself citing often, writing of Mary Sue, uses the words "make room" to describe how "Mary Sues" created space in Harry Potter fanfic for representations of LGBTQ+ children; I think that, similarly, writing Fingon as brown-skinned "makes room" for readers to see themselves in a text that is generally seen as excluding them. I love this particular phrase because it speaks to a forceful act of creativity grounded in the belief that, through fanworks, we can all find room for ourselves in beloved texts. Similarly, Una McCormick, in an essay about women in Tolkienfic, called it "reparative reading": readers using fanworks to correct aspects of the text that do not align with their own experiences of the world, that feel jarring at best and exclusionary/hurtful at worst. (I can scan and send any of these essays if you're interested! I just don't have them in digital form at the present moment.) The sum total, to me, comes down to one of the most powerful aspects of transformative works, which is rejecting the authority of the "canon" in favor of revisioning a fictional world in such a way that the reader-turned-creator finds they belong.

Which is why I don't see a lack of precise parallels with real-world history of racism/marginalization/colonization as necessarily relevant to why "characters of color" still belong in Middle-earth. (I say "precise" because there is definitely some skeevy business afoot in the canon: the colonialist-flavored settlement of the Noldor in Beleriand, the hunting of the Petty-dwarves by the Sindar, the dehumanization of Orcs throughout the canon, the colonialist-flavored ventures of the Numenoreans to "dark" Middle-earth, the tendency of villainous characters to come from places where people are "dark" or "swarthy," to name just what comes off the top of my head.) I think it's about the very human drive to see oneself in the stories one loves and fanworks creators using canon or blanks in the canon or just straight-up defying the canon in order to "make room" for people more diverse than how Tolkien is usually read.

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about your comments all afternoon, and trying to work out what more I can say without coming off as sounding (or worse yet, being) racist. As a while person, it does feel a bit like I'm skating perilously close to telling other fans, especially of the other than white variety, how they're allowed to see characters like them in the canon. Which I'd really like to avoid, obviously.

I think I'd start by drawing a distinction between writing (drawing, imaginging, etc.) a character as of color and that character being of color. I do think we're coming at this from two slightly different perspectives: you were clearly discussing fanworks, fans' using fandom to explore racial and ethnic issues, etc., whereas I was more using this as a springboard to thinking about the canon and what it would mean to be a character of color given the differences between canon-Ardaverse and our lived modern reality.

I certainly don't have any objections to fans imagining characters or races as being from non-European cultures. I had a lot of fun writing a Gondorian-Haradric wedding borrowing wedding customs from (my outsider understanding of) Hindi Indian weddings, and I can well imagine that would have been much more meaningful if that was my actual racial background. And as you say, equating Middle Earth with white Europeans can be pretty exclusionary for fans from non-white, non-western backgrounds; obviously that's not idea. Even drawing the distinction this way between fannish creation and canon is a bit hinky, because a lot of fans equate being consistent with canon as good; I'm not sure how to correct for that, except to remind people (and myself) that canon isn't special or better, it's just the details we can assume the reader already knows unless we tell them otherwise in the course of our stories.

What makes me stop short is the idea that the Haradrim had to be sort of proto-Indians. Or that any culture on the south or far east of Middle-earth would necessarily correlate with Africans, Asians, what have you. I won't deny PJ's influence here (though for me it's another, equally-white adaptation that probably shaped my default impressions), but the bigger drive is actually not wanting to dip too far into Allegory. To identify certain races in Middle-earth as stand-ins for real-life cultures and ethnicities. And that's a very Tolkienish concern, I think.

[contd below]

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

[contd from above]
That said: I'd be a fool not to point out the natural follow-up point here: it's a very comfortable fiction and lets me off the hook for quite a bit of racist complacency. If the Easterlings and Orcs and the likes are meant to actually stand in to the people to the east and south of Western Europe, then there's something quite horrible about the precise way Tolkien villanizes them, token humanizations like Sam's questions about the mumakil-soldier be damned. It seems decidedly less racist to say this is just Tolkien dealing with fairy-tale motifs and no, he isn't talking about actual peoples from those regions relative to modern-day Europe; and to say the real work to be done is in dealing with racist themes in the work that don't rely on direct correlations of fictional to real-world cultures: the imperialism of the Noldor and the Numenoreans, Oropher's and Thingol's appointing themselves as rulers over the Moriquendi, even the light-to-dark hierarchies in the meaning behind the names of certain classes of Elves (and men, in Faramir's descriptions of Gondorians, Rohirrim, and "lesser" men in his conversations with Frodo at Henneth Annun).

All of that may be true, but it also is one heck of a sidestep if Tolkien actually was being racist in his geography. It's a bit odd. I'm not entirely blinded to the truth that this read of canon is clinging to a bit of a fig-leaf, but it somehow feels that admitting the fig-leaf status somehow makes the canon objectively much worse on this point. It's one of those things that seems dangerous to think too much about, which probably involves equal bits of cowardice and readerly wisdom. It's certainly complicated and uncomfortable, at least for me.

Thank you for the link to Deepa D's essay. I will certainly read it. Always good to consider other perspectives and how my own starting-places might affect other fans.

[dawn_felagund]

Sorry for the long delay in replying! The students returned to school on the 8th so this conversation was perfectly timed to a few weeks of being underwater at work. We were discussing this article among the SWG mods today, and it made me think of this conversation and that it might interest you, and I remembered that I'd never replied.

I do think we're coming at this from two slightly different perspectives: you were clearly discussing fanworks, fans' using fandom to explore racial and ethnic issues, etc., whereas I was more using this as a springboard to thinking about the canon and what it would mean to be a character of color given the differences between canon-Ardaverse and our lived modern reality.

Yeah, but the post started with a survey item, which is specific to fanfic, not the canon. And I keep coming back to the fact that there is even less evidence in the text for canonical LGBTQ+ characters, an identical survey item (except sub in "LGBTQ+ characters" for "characters of color"), and yet not the same interest in ultimately demonstrating that people who do create fanworks involving LGBTQ+ characters are doing so beyond the bounds of canon. I don't say that to make you or anyone feel bad (because the survey data from 2015 certainly points to the fact that, while there was interest in writing/reading about women and LGBTQ+ characters, there was not the same interest in writing/reading about characters of color, so this is a broad phenomenon in the fandom, which is why I suspect "characters of color" feels offbeat where "LGBTQ+ characters" does not--contrary to actual canonical evidence for the existence of one group over another). But many people in fandom are going through a reckoning right now about how we have intentionally or inadvertently created spaces that are hostile to BIPOC fans, so I think these are important--essential--conversations to have, despite the discomfort they produce.

To identify certain races in Middle-earth as stand-ins for real-life cultures and ethnicities.

I don't think you have to, though. I've already said my piece about "Tolkien's intent" and trying to infer that; I won't. However, people much better versed than me in the history of race and racism point to language Tolkien uses that codes various characters and groups similarly to the language used support racist and colonialist ideologies: as indistinguishable hordes, savage, aggressive and morally irredeemable, dangerous to civilized society ... and always dark-skinned or possessing other features that aligned them with real-world groups that Tolkien's readers at the time would have comfortably accepted as, if not subhuman, at least possessing inferior moral and intellectual faculties. (The article I linked provides some examples of this from the texts, as does the project by Ask Middle-earth I linked last time.) Does that mean that I think Tolkien intended Orcs to equal people from Africa? Not at all. But I do think he was exploiting racist/colonialist imagery and understandings in his readership as a shorthand for villainy, to serve as a justification for the political domination of those groups and realms by the books' protagonists.

[dawn_felagund]

But, in fandom, I really think all of this is beside the point. There is ample evidence of "people of color" in Middle-earth, and in roles other than those of the villains. I think it's interesting that "mythology of northern Europe"--an extracanonical detail that fails the test of consistency at myriad points having nothing to do with race (the Hobbits' umbrellas, for one)--often supersedes actual descriptions of characters in the books (e.g., Sam) in fans' minds. And I'm as guilty of it as any white fan. I remember when artwork showing Silm characters as POC first began to cross my dash on Tumblr, I remember being a little taken aback at first, followed quickly by the thinking, "Well that's cool if that's what people want to do! It's not canonical because these stories are anchored in northern European myth but whatever." And while I never put this in writing, I saw other fans make the same argument and felt comforted by it, by the canon that upheld my own white supremacist readings of the text.

Then later I learned more about what the canon actually says about race: about characters who are described as POC, characters who are never described at all, and characters who are explicitly described as white (e.g., Aredhel). And I reached the point of, "Okay, cool, there's a lot more in the canon than I thought but it's still not really my bag for my own writing."

And now I'm personally at the point of reconsidering that because I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with my work perpetuating a whitewashed version of M-e. When I resume writing fiction (because I'm currently on hiatus to rebuild the SWG's website), I can see myself dipping my toes into that water now. It's actually very much the trajectory I followed with slash: initially taken aback by it, quickly coming to see it as acceptable and starting to read it, then seeing it as something positive and worth celebrating (but not anything I planned to write myself), and then writing my own slash stories because I didn't want to a world without LGBTQ+ people. Same with writing that focused on women (except substitute "taken aback" with the usual noises made about Mary Sue in the mid-2000s). Now with characters of color.

Anyway, I think the canon is much more permissive on this question than it tends to be given credit for but I really do think, in fandom, that the more important point is what can be done to stop and heal the actual harm that has been done/is being done to BIPOC fans by the consistent message they have received that the canon doesn't include them and therefore they should be a footnote in the fandom as well. It breaks my heart when I read in the article I linked, "I no longer engage directly with white-centered fandoms/fan spaces and, instead, participate largely in Black-centered and led community spaces for fans of fantasy/sci-fi works," not because it's a loss to her but because it's a loss to us, and it's not the community I want to be a part of, nor the community that I've worked so hard in my own little corner hoping to build.