NP Tolkien Picks Up A Few More Bits Of Cultural Baggage

[jbor]

on 8/1/03 1:27 AM, Dave Monroe at davidmmonroe at yahoo.com wrote:

> On the one hand, well, duh.  It's a fantasy novel.
> But without rehearsing teh hsitory of critical thought
> on such matters in re: fantasy, SF, et al. ...
> 
> --- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
>> 
>> The orcs, just like the dwarves, elves, trolls etc,
>> are *not human*.
> 
> ... on the other hand, nor were, say, Africans, Native
> Americans, "Moors," "Mongols," "Japs," Jews, heck, the
> Irish, et al., not rhetorically, at least, not by
> prevaling definition, at various times, in various
> places, in various situations.  But more often than
> not they were, if not "swarthy," marked as often as
> not by a skin color different than those defining
> "human," or "good," or ... well, you get the picture.
> Well, no, you don't, but ...

Yes, I understand the argument, and yes, actual human ethnic groups were and
are sometimes referred to in a "racist" way in literary texts - demonised,
dehumanised, as it were. In Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_, for example.
Kipling. But the point is that Tolkien's orcs are explicitly not humans, and
for a reader to see them as having a particular (or even general) human
ethnicity, well, that's that reader's problem, not Orwell's, nor the text's,
nor anyone else's for that matter.

best