/lit/ - Literature

>>17118963
This is a meaningless question and the concept of "race" and "racist" are almost entirely meaningless.

>race of short, ugly mountain dwellers that horde gold and have been displaced from their homeland
gee I wonder where he got that idea from

>>17118994
Kek

>>17118963
no, he disliked nazism if that matters.

>>17118963
Go fucking ask him. Oh right, you can't. Guess we'll never know beyond inferring from his writing. How bout you go fuck off and do some inferring?

>>17118963
he was a steadfast catholic, so he wasnt racist in any meaningful or absolute sense.

>>17119026
Merry Christmas

>>17118963
No not really, and if he was would it matter?

On a similar note, Tolkien, who was born in South Africa, was kidnapped by his African nanny as a baby. Apparently the lady wanted to show the white kid off to her neighbors.

>>17118963
No, Tolkien wasn't a racist. Not by a reasonable standard anyway. It's likely that he and his work can be read as racist using shallow idpol driven literary criticism, but this says more about the reader and our "intellectual" millieu than it does about Tolkien. What Tolkien did do was use race as ta driver of conflict between the peoples of his fantasy world. But he did this in a way that is more reminiscent of fairytales and myths and old ancestral grudges than it is of the fashionable ideas in 19th-20th century eugenics. The father of racism in modern fantasy fiction is by far Robert E. Howard, who similarly used race to generate conflict in his stories, but absolutely did not use abstracted and refined fairytale races... instead he played with very unsubtle racial stereotypes and racial anxieties in his stories. Conan the Barbarian himself is basically a valorization of all the old Irish racial stereotypes.

>>17118963
He had an old-school Orientalist perspective, though.

>>17118979

>>17119030
Are you implying he was sinless? Maybe racism was his vice.

>>17118963
Well he didn’t specifically describe Black, indigenous, Latinx, two-spirit genderqueer Elves in his novels, so yeah, he’s basically a white supremacist on par with Hitler.

Numenorians are a taller and a more noble race than common humans. Aragorn is the true king of gondor because of his heritage...

He wasnt a racist for sure, maybe more like a race realist

Tolkien was born into Victorian British society and undoubtedly was socialised into some of the thinking of that era and it does bleed into his books. While never explicitly racist, there is certainly an element of racialism in his works. Nevertheless, Tolkien also demonstrated a remarkable ability to develop his sensibilities on race and as the Nazis rose to prominence in Germany, Tolkien began to realise the folly of racial thinking. Notable example of this include telling the german publisher to fuck off when they tried to ask him if he was jewish. He also hated white supremacist thinking and lamented how words such as nordic had been appropriated by racists.

>>17118963
Yes, when do we cancel him?

>>17120567
As western nations get down to about 40% white you're going to see some serious shit.

>>17118963
Pretty much everyone of that era was 'racist'.
I doubt he harboured much in the way of hatred towards other races, but would have had the Imperial-Anglo paternal view of 'lesser races'.
>>17119552
Racism isn't a sin.

>>17118963
he was into racemixing (Aragon-Arwen) so he was based
>>17118994
oy vey
>>17120567
le onion shelf

>>17118963
>Open up ebook of LOTR.
>CTRL+F for "nigger"
>(234 matches)
Yeah, he wasn't racist alright.

>>17118963
No, he was classist like smart people are.

>>17121243
>le
>>>/out/

>>17119385
>valorization
don't know what the word means?

>>17118963
Super racist