Race in Middle Earth

In a very lengthy letter written to Forrest J Ackerman in which Tolkien comically but classically politely eviscerates a screenplay for a proposed The Lord of the Rings film adaptation, later published in 1981 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien as Letter 210, he at one point describes the orcs as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” He writes this in response to the fact that screenwriter Morton Grady Zimmerman describes orcs as beaked and feathered, which is not remotely what Tolkien had described in the novel or in his notes.

This depiction of orcs as Asian is consistent with Tolkien’s writings. They are frequently described as having “slant eyes” and some types of orcs have dark skin. I will note here that orcs as Asians is far from a one-to-one correlation. Tolkien uses racial coding to describe these creatures, but they aren’t stand-ins. Most orcish features have no correspondence to those of Asian people or Western stereotypes thereof.

This is most notable in the language of the orcs. While the languages of elves, dwarves, men, and hobbits take great influence from European languages, the languages of orcs and Uruk-hai (they don’t have their own language, but a pidgin of other languages in Middle Earth, mostly a deconstructed version of Westron, the language the Hobbits speak, plus lots of the Black Speech of Mordor) patently do not take influence from Eastern languages or stereotypes thereof. Instead the sounds are among Tolkien’s strangest and most expressive. Listen to this reading in Black Speech, and tell me if you think it sounds like Chinese.

It’s also worth noting that Tolkien is not talking about Asians per se, but the West’s historical perceptions of Asian people. Note that he doesn’t say that the orcs look like “the least lovely Mongol-types.” He says they look like “degraded versions” of what Europeans have regarded as unattractive Asian features. He’s thinking about the way that Europeans have thought about foreign peoples which makes sense because Tolkien had set out to write a European mythology. I don’t judge anyone for finding this depiction unsavory in our modern world, but the context is important.

Another point of contention in the Lord of the Rings is the fact that the men who fight for Sauron are largely Easterlings and Southrons, people who are described as having darker skin and correspond to south-east Asia and northern Africa. Most of the Easterlings, who are black, whom we meet are evil and in cahoots with Morgoth or Sauron depending on the era. However, Bór’s folk are a large group of Easterlings who fight on the good side. Many of them are described as noble just as Tolkien praises any other characters.

The Southrons are south-east Asian. They are dark skinned, and in the latter part of the third age, very evil. They are pretty obviously Indian, and many parts of their depiction haven’t aged supremely well. It is worth noting that while they are the bad guys in the time period depicted in The Lord of the Rings, they are often good guys in different eras of Middle Earth. They just had leaders who were corrupted by Sauron who led them into darkness. There are many Southron heroes. So while I think we can criticize the stereotypes used here, I don’t think that this depiction is quite as simple as people make it out to be. Also remember that many, many enemy groups of men throughout the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings are white and described in similar fashion.

Dwarfs by Alan Lee

In a 1964 BBC radio interview with Dennis Gueroult, Tolkien says the following about dwarves: “The dwarves of course are quite obviously - wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.” And he’s certainly correct about this. The dwarves have many stereotypically Jewish features, including an unending lust for wealth beyond anything. It is worth noting that the dwarves are usually the good guys, and Tolkien always has a lot of sympathy for them. In letter 176, he also compares the dwarfs to Jews in that they are both peoples cruelly dispossessed of their lands forced to wander the earth and adopt the languages of other lands, both “at once natives and aliens in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue.” There’s lots of room to criticize the way that Tolkien depicts Jewish people through the dwarves in his work, but I think that he was genuinely trying to represent Jewish people.

There is also some explicitly anti-racist messaging in Tolkien’s work. Much of the Lord of the Rings deals with the contentious relationship between Elves and Dwarves in the relationship between Legolas and Gimli. Both carry negative stereotypes about the other, but they learn to respect one another and appreciate the other’s culture. Prejudice against Hobbits is often depicted and criticized. The Númenóreans of Gondor fell because of a Hitlerian attempt at establishing racial purity.

Tolkien does use racial coding to create his world and often relies on stereotypes. There is room for criticism. He was trying to replicate European mythology and borrowed many things from it. Many values in Tolkien’s work are ones he himself did not hold. His work has ideas like “pure bloodlines” and praises hereditary monarchy. Tolkien, despite being a monarchist, was skeptical of these ideas, but saw them as important parts of a genuine mythology. He was the first person to try to do this, and his work isn’t perfect, but I don’t think it ought to be condemned out of hand.

As a final note, Tolkien unequivocally hated racism. When his works were to be published in Germany in 1938, he was asked whether he was of Aryan descent. Otherwise, he could not be published. He wrote the following to a colleague in Letter 29:

I must say the enclosed letter from Rütten and Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of 'arisch' origin from all persons of all countries?

Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestätigung (although it happens that I can), and let a German translation go hang. In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.

You are primarily concerned, and I cannot jeopardize the chance of a German publication without your approval. So I submit two drafts of possible answers.

He wrote this unsent letter to the Germans on the subject, but his colleague eventually convinced him to write a more neutral version.

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter. .... I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Flindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject – which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this son are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its suitability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.

I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and remain yours faithfully J. R. R. Tolkien.

Blogs

The internet has sped up the world to such a degree that I suppose it is reasonable for me to start feeling old at this point. But that doesn't make it feel any less strange. I'm sure I'm not alone in this feeling. People my age (under 25) have spent a substantial portion of their lives online. For us, the landscape of the internet is a real and vital one. It's a place where we live. But over the course of our brief lives, that landscape has changed radically more than once. Our connections have gotten faster. Our communities have gotten more complex. Social media has emerged. I've seen a lot of commentary about how the existence of many of the things we've experienced on the internet has impacted our minds and particularly the minds of children. It's an important field of study. But I haven't seen much about how the rate at which the internet changes can effect us. That's just as radical, and I'm among the first people to really experience it.

If you listen, you can hear nostalgic cries about an older, better, more comfortable yet somehow wilder World Wide Web from every corner of the net, not just from old nerds (old in internet reckoning) still moaning about the Eternal September of 1993. There's a general sense of a new internet trampling on a beautiful older internet. To the casual listener, this feeling might come across as young members of “le wrong generation” pining for an idealized internet that never existed, dismissing all the luxuries of living online today and all the problems technical, social, and cultural of internet past. And that isn't an unwarranted criticism. The web wasn't created with an instant understanding about how people should exist online. It was difficult to do things that are easy now. It wasn't accessible. The rules hadn't been established. There may have been beautiful moments there, but it was never stable. The “wild west” was never going to be forever. But to dismiss this sentiment entirely is a mistake. The evolution of the internet has partly been driven by clear technical and cultural progress, but a lot of it has not been motivated by straightforward goals to a better future net. It's been a messy development by the internet's very nature. So, trying our best to see beyond nostalgia, we should look at the past of the internet to see what good things we have lost, and how the internet could be a better place.

I hope to explore this idea in more detail another day, but for now, I just want to lament the death of the blog, and the personal web-page in general. This concept has been entirely taken over by social media. It makes total sense that it has. Social media is more accessible. It's easier to find people and quickly see what's going on. It's more addictive and gamified. But it's after your soul. It works all day every day to understand your individual human behavior and keep you online longer. It has added points to your experiences. It has turned lives into shows which need to keep up a level of quality. Everyone is expected to be an entertainer. And it's creating a lot of problems. Everyone is being fed the kind of news that keeps him engaged the most, whether that means biased news that appeals to his side, or outrage news to keep him angry. That doesn't make us better. It's bad for our souls.

But one of the things people want from the internet is to share their voices and their lives. The internet gives people an unprecedented ability to be heard everywhere. It removes distance as a factor in interaction. If the internet isn't giving regular people a way to speak about their thoughts and feelings, it isn't doing what it ought to. I think that blogs were a beautiful solution to this problem, if an imperfect one. Though blogs can be for anything, I'm mostly going to be talking about personal blogs here. Blogging encourages longer-form, more thoughtful content. It's not about notifications and constant engagement. It is focused more on content than social engineering. Blogging is about people understanding people, not robots understanding people.

When you read a blog, you enter into a person's space. It is created, moderated, operated, and owned by her alone. You can read at your leisure and understand the writer better. Blogging takes away that immediacy and urgency of social media and replaces it with something less flashy but more honest and real. It doesn't thrive of off dopamine micro-doses. Reading a blog feels more like reading a book than it feels like reading Facebook. It is positively one of the greatest tools for talking about the ways we live and feel.

Blogging, though only a shadow of what it once was, is near the roots of internet life. Many things have grown out of blogging. Some of these I would consider to retain the heart of what makes blogging interesting, but many I do not. For instance, Twitter is a form of micro-blogging, but when was the last time you read through someone's whole Twitter account to understand their life and perspectives? Twitter isn't about thoughtful content. It's about quick updates and hot takes. It can be fun, but it isn't usually very thoughtful or even very human. I don't think it's nearly as bad as Facebook, but it's still junk food. Tumblr is also a blogging website, but it's almost exclusively image-based and is a lot more about sharing content around than documenting feelings and ideas.

There is also video-blogging or vlogging. That term itself means many things. A classic vlog is somebody sitting in front of a camera talking about their day or their ideas or just something they've been thinking about. In my opinion, this retains the heart of what a blog should be, just in video form. This is the most alive form of true blogging, but it too has been on the decline for a long time. As much as I love the vlogbrothers, that just isn't the kind of content that's driving clicks. A video-based space gives way for very big, exciting content. It isn't all that surprising that a person sitting in front of a camera talking honestly isn't standing out. It also doesn't fall into the category of what people think of as great content on YouTube. It generally isn't really produced or researched. It isn't very entertaining. I'm not sure it really fits in the space anymore.

There are two other major kinds of vlogging, and each of them is less of a true blog than the former. First is the vlog as redefined by Casey Neistat and other brilliant filmmakers. Casey didn't tell you about his life, he brought you along with an exciting and distinctive film-making style. I think that this is really interesting content that works well on its own merits, but it does lose some of the things that make a blog by substituting verbal language for visual language. Casey is constructing a narrative, but he isn't creating it out of nothing. It's closer to an entertainment program than a log. It's just a different animal. Second is the vlog as redefined by Jake and Logan Paul. These began as "slice of my day" vlogs, but everybody knows that isn't what they are anymore. They are daily television programs with questionable content aimed at monetizing the attention spans of young children. I think this is the natural life cycle of the vlog, movement away from slow, personal documentation to dramatized entertainment.

Text doesn't have the same capacity to be flashy, and I have more hope for reading to be the basis of a healthy online life. Reading what were essentially essays from people all over the world used to be a bigger part of being on the internet. It's slower and more intimate. It's a way to fight the robots working night and day to overstimulate us and hack our brains into viewing more and more content. Of course video can be slow and images can be thoughtful, but those media are instantly translated by our minds and have a unique ability to control us. In a world that runs on attention, everything is going to be as big, fast, and crazy as it can possibly manage to be. Short bits of text in quick bursts can do the same thing, thriving more on social interaction—replies, quotes, likes, retweets, re-blogs, etc.—then content or ideas. Long blocks of text don't force you to read them. You are in charge of all the progress you make or don't. You can leave. You are free.

Blogs aren't perfect of course. They are generally pretty amateurish. They are hard to keep up. They are stereotypically associated with attention-hungry people who overvalue their own ideas for a reason. They also lack a lot of the tools they should really have in the modern internet. It is very difficult to browse or find blogs. Created in the pre-social age, blogs were more about creating your own website to share yourself than it was becoming part of a singular blogging community. There are not a lot of great tools for blog-making. Blogger might be the best free option, but who knows when Google's going to decide it isn't worth the investment? Blogs are dead. I doubt they are coming back, and that makes me very sad.

So why on earth am I creating a blog in the year 2018? I'm going to have to take off my nostalgia-corrective goggles to answer that. Blogs were the way I really entered into the internet. I was a very young kid living in a foreign country with a desire to create and a fascination with but a total lack of understanding of the internet. Sitting in the back of the computer lab, goofing off, I searched “how to make my own website.” After lots of dead ends, I learned how to create my own blog on blogspot.com to promote me and my friend's made-up company. I ended up creating and running several blogs. We were so excited about it, the school ended up making blog-making part of its fourth-grade curriculum. I learned a bit about web design and HTML. I know these experiences in part led to my eventual career-path in Computer Science.

I love all the little quirks of blogs. I love how ugly they are. I love how dated they look. I love the weird drop-down archive menus. I love the “contact us” form and the unhelpful “about me” page. I love the HTML tags and the old, early-00s themes to select from. I love the old debates and flame-wars and walls of text. I love the bad art and the embedded flash games. I love hopping from link to link across a vast, unnavigable blogosphere stuffed with interesting distinct voices talking about topics that interested them just because they wanted to.

Over the years, I read many, many blogs from people of many different backgrounds, and more than any other type of media I've ever seen, these blogs let me feel what it was like to be another person. They let me understand what was going on in other people's heads. I got to know a bit more about what the world—something huge and unimaginable—felt like. Being away from my country made me feel isolated and confused as a kid. I had an overwhelming sense that my life was weird—not bad, but weird and hard for me to understand. Blogs showed me that the world itself was big and weird, and that it was okay and even exciting in all its overwhelming normalcy.

Now, as a (sort of) adult, I feel a bit disconnected from that part of my life. My kid self was absolutely right. He speaks with a kind of lucidity that shocks me. My experiences were weird. That time was weird and unique and exciting. My life is a bit more normal right now. Even where I deviate from norms—which I do quite a bit of—the world isn't quite so amorphous, even though it remains incomprehensible. So much of that time has nothing to do with the way I think about myself today and the way I regularly feel. But I can go back to those old blogs and understand myself intimately. I can see parts of myself shouting that now hide in the corners of my brain. So much of that time might be lost but it was real. And I don't have the password. So long as Blogger stays up—long may it reign—I will have access to read, but never to modify that lost and found part of my life.

My life feels more disconnected than I ever expected. I wish that I had journaled my entire life, but I never would have. It is very difficult to write to an audience of only yourself, and it is so easy to lose a journal, even a digital one, or place it somewhere out of reach and forget about it forever. There is a different feeling to posting it online. Writing for an audience, even one that doesn't exist—I don't expect anyone to read this—forces me to think about my life in a fundamentally different way. Thinking about communicating who I am is different than talking to myself in an attempt at self-definition. I only ever blogged for a short, lucid time. Most of my life is undocumented, and I feel more disconnected from it by the day, and thus more unsure about why I am who I am today. I wish, perhaps more than anything else, that I had blogged continuously from fourth-grade to now. But I didn't. That time is going to be lost to me, except for what I retain and write down as quickly as I am able. I want to stop that from happening any more. I realize more and more that the self isn't continuous and that anything resembling a soul is tragically fleeting.

I imagine a future in which my current self exists only far in the back of the mind of someone nearly-entirely disconnected from me and saved only as images in the minds of those who have known me, even if only in passing a long time ago. I imagine him wondering about the way that he felt in this wild time, and being able to call it up in a place exactly as it existed when it was posted. I can't lose any more. I imagine him sharing it with someone to show the past not as a memory, but as something present and tangible. It's not an old photograph. It is someone talking to you. I imagine for the first time in my life understanding something about what makes me what I am.

In this blog, I want to be vulnerable and frank without using emotion as a means of sensationalizing the mundane or anonymity as an nonconstructive way dumping my feelings onto the internet. I want to tell my life without either creating a coherent narrative where there is none or pretending that my life is of great importance to the world or that what I say matters cosmically. I want to share my ideas and write essays to share what I'm thinking about and to improve my writing abilities. I want to use the internet to improve myself as a person instead of wasting my time. So for now I will blog into the void.

DisneyNow

This post was originally written for a scholarship application under a different name.

The final crystals melted from his dead gaze, and the mouse looked over its maker. The room, which had been lit by harsh red lights, shifted to a dim blue glow while those on the other side of the walls watched closely. Soft ultraviolet lights rose, brightly illuminating the many glow-in-the-dark Buzz Lightyear figurines on the desk in the corner. The man’s spiritless eyes blinked for the first time in half a century. A muffled thudding could be heard beyond the insulated walls as celebration began. Another low pulse of equal force emerged from the man’s chest. Then, his ears detected an electric buzz as the table on which he lay rolled itself out from the tube.

“As you said, Walt, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it.’”

Before him towered a woman in a Mickey Mouse suit, though it was not her voice he heard. A speaker lodged deep in the throat of the costume’s smiling mouth brought forth Mickey’s cold voice. His eyes glowed white in the black light. Walt Disney shook, and meant to shout but found his breaths shallow and his voice weak.

“It’ll take a while to acclimate to the new lungs, but they’ll last centuries longer than the ones you mucked up. You’ll be back at it in no time, but let’s start with something easy. Just follow the teleprompter.”

The mechanical gurney wheeled Walt Disney in front of the shining-green plastic spacemen and sat him up slowly. A blinding light suddenly beat into his face. He squinted and in a low voice muttered, “DisneyNow is the app for watching your favorite Disney movies and shows…”

Big Wraps

In my job, I make wraps that people can order via an app. There's no limit to how much shit you can put on a wrap, and the vegetables are free. So some folks think they're smart.

Jesus Christ, could you pause for one goddamn minute to consider whether this is physically possible? Is that so hard? These are 12'' wraps. What the fuck are you doing ordering double spinach, romaine, iceberg, banana peppers, pickles, green peppers, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, and more? How do you suppose that works? Do you think you're gaming the system? Because you don't have to pay for the veggies? Bet you're feeling smart when your wrap is just a 5000 calorie "salad" on a fucking burrito wrap. How are you going to eat that? By the time it's wrapped up, the thing is wider than my calves. I'd tell you to stick it up your ass, but I doubt that's physically possible.

Maybe the vegetable extravaganza is a form of self-trickery. Don't make yourself think this is healthy. You and I both know you put a double order of fried chicken and bacon at the bottom of this wrap. I don't judge what you put on your food. I'll put olive oil, vinegar, and extra mayo in your wrap if that's what you want (which is uncomfortably common), but when I'm through my third burrito wrap trying to get around your pile of free leaves without tearing it, I start to wonder about you.

Then I reach the bottom of the ticket. From here we're in the clear. It's just spices and shit now, easy. Except, at the end of every monster wrap with a ticket that hangs from the ceiling to the goddamn floor, at the very bottom of the order it says the most dreaded phrase.

Add fries to your wrap - 1.15

How? HOW? How.

You're clearly hungry. I get it. But you can't eat this. First of all, it is barely staying together. I've barely managed to get one end of the wrap to touch the other. Second, you could never fit this shit in your mouth. Not possible. Or if it is, I want to see it. Why not just get two human-sized wraps? It's more expensive, but hey, it's fucking edible!

I judge you people.