This bit wasn’t in the books.
Neither was this.
Or this, or this, or this.
Or Legolas being a ninja, or jokes about ‘dwarf-tossing.’
In the books, there’s an incident where an evil oak tree eats several hobbits. They left that bit out. They cut Tom Bombadil, Goldberry, the Old Forest and the Barrow-Wights. Twenty years pass between the birthday and the big quest. Frodo is 50. They compressed all that just a little.
They cut the hobbits singing in the bath. In fact they cut nearly all the songs, and most of the twee hobbit banter.
They dramatically simplified the big battles, and dramatically expanded the smaller-scale fights. They added little side-adventures and contrived arguments.
They turned ‘the fellowship ran down a flight of stairs’ into this.
And nobody really minded. It was mostly great.
Now,
Take a deep breath.
Because in 2022, in the TV show Rings of Power,
They gave speaking parts to 3 or 4 black actors,
…and suddenly a lot of people on the internet were very worried about ‘staying true to Tolkien’s vision.’
Funny how that was the deal-breaker!
Not this,
or this,
or this,
or this.
A screen adaptation that was ‘true to the spirit of Tolkien’ would have a lot more sing-songs in the bath, chipper hiking dialogue and obscure melancholy poems. The camera would linger for hours on trees and shrubs.
There’s every reason to have a diverse cast in Middle Earth. Tolkien described characters as ‘dark’ or ‘ swarthy’ in almost every chapter (good guys are usually dark, bad guys are swarthy. And yes, they’re all guys).
And if, just for the sake of argument, he did write, ‘by the way, categorically, none of these people were black’, why should we care 70 years later? Why would you care about skin pigment, if you don’t care about the scouring of the shire, the Dúnadain, Elladan and Elrohir, Prince Imrahil, Ioreth, Erkenbrand, Ghan-Buri-Ghan, the Dunlendings..?
By the way, Tolkien was sometimes racially insensitive in his writing. There are a few features and examples you can point to. There is a preoccupation with heredity, and there is a vile phrase in Book V Chapter VI. Yes: I’m sure you’re shocked to learn that an aging English Catholic professor who was born in South Africa and wrote in the 1930s to the 1950s was sometimes racially insensitive. Though at times he was surprisingly OK.
(Those Peter Jackson movies are actually dodgier on race for their time than Tolkien was for his time).
But that is not really a ‘gotcha’ for either side in these online debates.
Because when you adapt something, you make a choice about what to focus on. With Tolkien, there are themes like compassion, redemption, comradeship, self-sacrifice in struggle, and humble people rising up to change the world; and features like invented languages and histories, melancholy hints of a deep past, tense chases and battles, fantastical creatures and places.
Then there’s the ring, which poses the question of whether you would really have the integrity to destroy some great source of evil.
The movies nailed a few of those things, and that is why nobody really minded about the skull avalanche.
You could focus on some of those things, or you could make a fetish of skin colour, as if the Lord of the Rings was just a more upmarket version of 300. Then you would be putting a minor and unattractive feature of Tolkien’s writing up on a pedestal. You shouldn’t worship Tolkien, but if you insist on it, don’t be worshipping his backside.
And don’t be a racist, but if you insist on it, you’re not fooling anyone by pretending it’s about pious respect for a mid-century Oxford academic. If he could see us, or any of the screen adaptations, he’d tell us all where to get off.
The 1919 Review 