Why They Hate Tolkien

This is a recurring theme. Whenever the Left needs a villain, the Traditional Catholic and anarcho-monarchist Tolkien is a convenient target.

From The European Conservative

By Lauren Smith

Woke scolds are once again decrying Lord of the Rings as racist, far-right propaganda.

Poor J.R.R. Tolkien. This titan of English literature and high-fantasy heavyweight can hardly go five minutes without being branded racist, far-right, or otherwise evil. The usual suspects are routinely accusing Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings franchise of promoting right-wing extremism and Christian radicalism and threatening to scrub it from the fantasy canon. 

The latest attack on Tolkien comes from the University of Nottingham, specifically in a course titled “Decolonising Tolkien et al.” The module, led by historian and writer Dr. Onyeka Nubia, aims to uncover supposed racial biases in the fantasy classics of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. It also intends to instruct students how to “repopulate” the British literary canon. One way Nubia wants to do this is by teaching young people that Tolkien demonises “people of colour” in his books. One of the course’s key texts argues that orcs—those gruesome, villainous henchmen created by Tolkien—and other evil, dark-skinned creatures are the result of “ethnic chauvinism.” Dr. Nubia also claims that Middle Earth’s eastern races—Easterlings, Southrons, and men from Harad—are depicted as having darker skin because Tolkien wanted us to view them as being less moral and virtuous than the fair-skinned men, elves, and dwarves of the west. According to Dr. Nubia, this is all part of a long-running “anti-African antipathy” in the Western canon, in which Africans are portrayed as “the natural enemy of the white man.” 

If you think this sounds bonkers, that’s because it is. But what else should we expect from Dr. Nubia? This is, after all, the same man who once wrote for the BBC claiming that Mediaeval England “had diverse populations and Africans lived there,” but that the literature at the time maintained an “ethnic chauvinism,” such as in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. He has a similar gripe with the works of William Shakespeare, who he believes peddled an idea of a “fictional, mono-ethnic English past,” with his plays “missing direct references to Africans living in England.” Presumably, it had never occurred to the Bard that, hundreds of years after his death, people would accuse him of being racist for not explicitly mentioning every ethnic-minority group, no matter how vanishingly small, that lived in England at the time of his writing. 

Nor does Lord of the Rings’ more kid-friendly cousin, C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, escape the shadow of decolonisation. According to Dr. Nubia’s course, this fuzzy fantasy tale about magic and talking animals is crammed full of racism, too. The module criticises the fictional Calormen for perpetrating harmful stereotypes, as this pretend race of humans are described as “cruel” people with “long beards” and “orange-coloured turbans.” Just like his friend Tolkien, Lewis is often the victim of woke bores, with his work regularly being decried as reactionary and extremist. spiked’s Georgina Mumford reminds us that Prevent, the UK’s counter-terror programme, once included the works of both Lewis and Tolkien on a list of books that might encourage radicalisation. And Philip Pullman, author of the explicitly atheist His Dark Materials series, pulls no punches when he calls the Chronicles of Narnia “one of the most ugly and poisonous things I’ve ever read,” “religious propaganda,” “racist,” “misogynistic,” “vile,” “life-hating,” “nauseating drivel,” “loathsome,” “disgusting,” and “so hideous and cruel I can scarcely contain myself when I think of it,” He is talking about, let’s not forget, a series of children’s books about escaping into a magical land through a wardrobe. 

Why is it that the fantastical worlds of Tolkien and Lewis inspire such rage and loathing among our cultural elite? Part of it, surely, is the knee-jerk backlash against anything produced by the ‘male, pale, and stale’ authors of yore. We see all the time how our once hallowed institutions now have a tendency to bristle against the traditional British canon (old-fashioned, out-of-touch, unrelatable) and to instead replace it with whatever drivel can be found that is penned by nonbinary, disabled, polyamorous hijabis (modern, inclusive, eminently relatable). This goes some of the way to explain the bizarre and frankly baseless accusations of racism so often thrown at Tolkien and Lewis. 

Of course, when it comes to Tolkien and Lewis specifically, the content of their works plays a role, too. Namely, their Christian faith is at the heart of the stories they tell. This is most obvious in Narnia, where Aslan the lion takes the role of Christ, being killed and later resurrected. And in Lord of the Rings, the themes of redemption, temptation, and good versus evil dominate. Tolkien himself described it as “of course, a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” The strong moral messages of Narnia and Lord of the Rings could not be more out of place in the modern fantasy genre, filled with works like Pullman’s militantly atheistic His Dark Materials and George R.R. Martin’s cynical and ‘gritty’ A Song of Ice and Fire series. 

But Tolkien and Lewis commit yet another, even greater sin—unapologetic patriotism. Lewis, born in Northern Ireland, cherished a Britain of “beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it.” Tolkien similarly captures the charm and warmth of the English countryside in the Shire’s hobbit holes, pipeweed, and second breakfasts. Today, we confuse that praise of the local as hatred for the outside world. In the modern mind, it is impossible to love one’s country without hating someone else’s. This isn’t true, obviously. But Tolkien and Lewis’s works hark back to a time before mass migration and globalism, when this country was quieter, safer, more high-trust—an idea that is as good as fantasy now. 

We cannot let the censorious woke scolds taint some of Britain’s greatest authors. Lord of the Rings is not racist, and Narnia isn’t far-right. What Tolkien and Lewis offer is not extremism, but good art with good morals. The only radicalisation to be had here is against the ugliness of our cultural elites.