Perhaps the most predictable thing about the new Amazon Prime show The Rings of Power was how mixed the initial reactions were. As someone who’s read The Lord of the Rings multiple times, enjoys annual revisits of Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy, and spent long hours poring over the novel’s appendices as a teenager, The Rings of Power—loosely based on those appendices—was a show I was looking forward to.
Many have already gushed over the show, with one Guardian reviewer describing it as “astounding”. Most people on the various Tolkien subreddits seem to have enjoyed it, too, though Reddit is very progressive and maybe that’s not the most accurate barometer of fan feeling.
Originalism and The Living Document
The most compelling criticisms of the show, ever since the actors were announced, have related to casting choices. One side doesn’t like that hobbits, elves and dwarves now come in white and black flavors; they are approaching the issue via the legal concept of originalism—the view that Tolkien’s world should be portrayed as he likely imagined the characters at that time.
The other side views Tolkien’s work—indeed, all literature—as “living documents” that should adapt to and evolve in response to new circumstances. Racial diversity is now en vogue, particularly in the entertainment industry, so the result is racially diverse casting for any big show (though in practice this really just means more black people as they are the most culturally prominent racial minority in the US/UK). Resistance to the living document school of Tolkienism is usually interpreted as “racism”, with originalists being viewed as “racists”.
Referring to these originalists—though not by the name I’ve given them—Lenny Henry (who plays a black hobbit in the show) said that
They have no trouble believing in a dragon, but they do have trouble believing…a black person could be a hobbit or an elf
This is the kind of facile belief that predominates among those on the living document side. They believe that the originalists simply don’t like black people and they don’t want to see them on-screen. This just doesn’t pass the smell test—black entertainers (particularly from the US and UK) are arguably the most influential and admired of all entertainers on the planet, per capita. People—and I assume he’s referring to white people specifically—have no issues enjoying black actors in all manner of roles; nobody cared that the white character Red was played by black Morgan Freeman in the movie adaptation of The Shawshank Redemption, because the character’s race genuinely made no difference to the story. An Afrofuturist racial hagiography with a largely black cast, Black Panther, made $1.3 billion at the global box office.
How fantasy works
Tolkien had fantastically detailed maps to complement his legendarium.
This kind of attention to detail is one of the reasons why his work is so beloved. Painstakingly drawn maps such as these, along with the creation of grammars and huge vocabularies for his invented languages, meet readers halfway in their desire have their belief suspended and help them briefly enter another world. It seems trite to say it, but the genre is called fantasy because it’s about fantasizing. Viewers can engage with a fantasy if the dragon is breathing fire, because fire-breathing dragons have a long history in European story-telling. If the dragon breathes blocks of Lego, the fantasy falls apart and the audience won’t buy it—this is despite the fact that both scenarios are equally remote from reality.
Anyone who has actually read The Lord of the Rings will know that dark-skinned people do exist in Middle-earth. However, the bulk of the novel is set in the temperate zones of the northern part of the world, and as such most people in it are fair-skinned. Tolkien did mention that darker people live in the hot lands to the south, such as Harad, which may have been analogous to the Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa. In principle I would have no issue with a spin-off show set in Harad with a predominantly black or Arab cast, because it would be geographically coherent. Any issues I might have with such a show would be solely content-based.
Having black hobbits and elves and dwarves is an attempt to make the demographics of Tolkien’s fictional races a mirror image of American and British cities in the early 21st century. Most black people in the US are there because their ancestors were brought as slaves several hundred years ago. Most black people in the UK are there because their ancestors were brought as slaves to the Caribbean initially, before later generations moved to Britain. This unwilling mass migration of West Africans to the Americas is a significant chapter in the story of the real world we actually inhabit. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of human history knows that a person of West African origin in New Orleans or London is ultimately there because of slavery, an institution idiosyncratic to our own reality rather than that of Middle-earth.
The impossibility of black hobbits
The differences between human races, like variations in skin color, were determined over long periods of time by our ancestors’ adaptations to the environments they inhabited. In hot and sunny places, like sub-Saharan Africa, humans evolved (or retained) dark skin. In cool and cloudy Northern Europe, humans evolved lighter skin, as the vastly different climate made dark skin unnecessary.
Hobbits are an “ancient people”, according to Tolkien, and the regions where they lived
were doubtless the same as those in which they still linger: the North-West of the Old World
These are Tolkien’s own words from the prologue to The Lord of the Rings: hobbits originated in a specific region and as such would have had physical characteristics that united them. The same must have been true of elves and dwarves. The existence of black hobbits and white hobbits in The Rings of Power posits the idea that, squeezed into the hobbits’ compact homeland (i.e., the Shire), are wildly different climatic regions—including at least one that produces hobbits with black skin. Tolkien does say one of the three hobbit “breeds” (this is the actual word he uses) had “somewhat browner skin” than the other two, but how can any thoughtful Tolkien enthusiast accept that in the Shire there emerged breeds that look both Northern European and West African with no in-between? Why are there no Arab and Mediterranean analogues in the Shire? Why no Asian- and Polynesian-looking hobbits? Their absence, and the ubiquity of blacks, is a constant reminder of Hollywood casting agency box-checking.
Buying into the racial vision presented in The Rings of Power requires applying the theory of multiregional origin to Middle-earth. If black hobbits, elves, and dwarves exist, it means white and black versions of each emerged independently of each other. It requires disbelieving in evolution and approaching the series with the mind of a biblical creationist. Even august institutions of higher learning such as the University of Oxford appear to think West African blacks—rather than tribes like the Taino— are “of Caribbean descent”—so human migration and origins are obviously things most people don’t think about at all.
It often seems to me that, despite the elegance and simplicity of Darwin’s theory of evolution, most people don’t really understand it. This is particularly true when it comes to how it affects humans, and even many quite intelligent people think race is merely “skin deep”. Anti-evolutionary blank slatism is so common, in fact, that people even apply it to dogs. It is therefore quite easy for the average person to see past such things: It’s just a movie. Who cares if there are black hobbits? What are you, a racist?
Lenny Henry wondered why some people “have no trouble believing in a dragon, but they do have trouble believing…a black person could be a hobbit or an elf”. I hope I’ve explained why. Henry correctly points out that people can “believe” in a dragon, but just as with demographic projections of modern American cities onto Middle-earth, a dragon covered in pink feathers rather than green leathery scales would be hard to swallow.
> black people as they are the most culturally prominent racial minority in the US/UK
Maybe in the US, but I thought in the UK "Asians" (meaning South Asians) were more prominent.
I disagree that if a person in London is black it's because of slavery. There's been a lot of immigration directly from Africa (even if the West Indies provided the first such wave), which isn't that odd if you remember that the UK colonized a decent amount of Africa, including the most populous country on the west coast of that continent. You might notice that the names (particularly surnames) of black UK actors tend to be less Anglo than African-Americans actors, and this reflects that greater portion of recent African immigrants.
South Asians are perhaps more well-established in English society, but in terms of the culture black people are much more influential. If you look at British television almost every ad features a black person. South Asians are invisible by comparison. In terms of the arts--actors, musicians--again, South Asians are dwarfed by people of African ancestry.
I take your point about recent immigration, but I think my point still stands; such mass immigration could only be possible in a world of empire, modern transportation, and the kind of economic systems that are absent in Middle-earth.