There Won't Be A Shire
The Ethnic Cleansing of The Lord of the Rings
They are coming. In the end, it was inevitable. Sooner or later, the dark forces of our decadent modern age were going to set their sights on The Lord of the Rings. There were plenty of warning signs. In 2018, a screenshot of an article featuring the headline ‘Amazon Studios confirms that their Middle Earth will include elves of colour’ went viral on Twitter. The screenshot was satire, the ‘article’ a hoax, but the reactions to it were very real.
As a storm of responses began to brew, a common take from the progressive liberals on Twitter was to say ‘Well, the appearance of the elves is never really specified, so why can’t some of them be black?’ Answer: first of all, the appearance of the elves is, in fact, specified in The Lord of the Rings and the rest of the source material written by J.R.R. Tolkien. For example, there is a race of elves called the ‘Vanyar’ and in Tolkien’s world that word means ‘the fair’. There are multiple references to the elves’ hair colour: fair, yellow, silver. There are multiple references to their fair skin and almost divine beauty. There is also another race of elves who typically have brown or black hair, but they are also described as being fair skinned. At no point are they described as having brown or black skin.
Putting matters of fact to the side for a moment, let us just reflect on the claim that if something in the source material is not specified, that gives a corporation like Amazon Studios the right to take certain liberties. It is so vacuous, so arrogant, it exemplifies how modern culture is so beholden to current trends and the fads of the day, and it gives no thought to the timelessness of source material or tradition. Imagine saying ‘it’s never specified that Aragorn isn’t transgender. It’s never specified that Aragorn truly identifies with the sex he was assigned at birth, so why can’t he be portrayed as trans?’ You might laugh at such absurdity and think that such a question could never be uttered, yet just last year the British Tolkien Society proposed a conference during which blue-haired dysgenic schizophrenics were to apply transgender theory to The Lord of the Rings, with one discourse entitled ‘Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of The Rings.’
Another reaction to the 2018 satirical ‘headline’ provided us with further opportunity to see through the looking glass and enter the twisted mind of the social-justice liberal. At one point, writer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw tells us ‘this hoax relies on a temptingly viral headline, provoking reactions from both sides of the debate over diversity in fantasy fiction’. Again, let us pause for a moment and allow that language to sink in. ‘Diversity in fantasy fiction’. Specifically, diversity in The Lord of the Rings, which is what we are discussing here. If we consider The Lord of the Rings, we are talking about a world which is inhabited by men and elves, dragons and dwarves, wizards and wargs, and a multitude of other creatures and races. Yet that, all of that, is not diverse enough until Tyrone and LaQueesha show up.
Baker-Whitelaw continues by saying, ‘racists see the phrase “elves of color” and start yelling about the white purity of [The] Lord of the Rings (ew), while progressives retweet the post with snappy comebacks’. In her mind, the two sides are polar opposites, with evil ‘racists’ on one side and the oh-so-clever righteous progressives on the other. We also see a tactic that has become very familiar. She simply strawmans any objection to Amazon’s elves of colour as racist yelling, rather than taking a moment to appreciate the Tolkien fandom’s legitimate concerns regarding the source material and the respect it deserves.
The sentences in Baker-Whitelaw’s article that were most revealing and a harbinger of things to come are these: ‘On the topic of casting choices, you should probably brace yourselves for this kind of controversy to resurface. While Peter Jackson’s Tolkein [sic] movies were overwhelmingly white, it would be a PR disaster for Amazon to launch an all-white fantasy series in the 2020s.’ The argument boils down to ‘it’s current year!’ and we must simply get with the times, and in these times it is nothing short of a ‘PR disaster’ to have an all-white cast.
Baker-Whitelaw asserts, ‘That kind of casting is unethical and exclusionary, and comments about “European fantasy” settings just don’t cut it any more.’ What can we make of a person who believes that the appearance of White people is ‘unethical’? Would it be unethical for any other race to be the singular representation of a cast of actors, or is that sin reserved only for the peoples of Europe and European ancestry? The film Black Panther has a cast which is over 90% sub-Saharan African or descended whence, and was described by NowThis as being ‘hella diverse’. Is such a cast also unethical? If not, why not? What percentage of racial homogeneity makes a cast unethical? Such questions are never pondered by folks like Baker-Whitelaw, yet notice how she is happy to decide for you that concerns about European fantasy settings ‘just don’t cut it anymore’. Well, thank you very much madame, for sparing us the trouble of any serious thinking and deciding for us all that things such as the setting of a work of fiction no longer matter and arguments that the setting of a story should be respected ‘just don’t cut it’. The progressive SJW must make such proclamations, because pausing even for an instant and contemplating the opinions of the evil ‘racists’ would expose her and the fragile house of cards which she has constructed. Because of course the setting of the story matters, but if you acknowledge that, then you will be forced to acknowledge the foolishness of diverse casts.
The Importance of Setting
So let us do just that. Let us acknowledge the setting of The Lord of the Rings. It’s very interesting, actually.