Last April, a man named Oren Ashkenazi wrote a post on Mythcreants. It was titled, "Building Middle-Earth: What Tolkien Did Right – and Wrong". (Infrequent language warning.)
Right off the bat, I could see that I was probably not going to agree with the article. I am a huge fan of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien (surprise!) and I consider him the greatest writer of fiction ever, though there are some close contenders.
The article attempts to show that while Tolkien was a good author, he made some huge mistakes and was also a racist. I will analyze his claims, section by section (the sections are his own; direct quotes will be put in italics).
The Good
I don't have much to say about this section. He points out how awesome Middle-earth is. I think I agree with everything.
The Bad
Opening
For every reader who’s enthralled by Tolkien’s worldbuilding, there’s another who’s completely turned off. Again, some of this is down to wordcraft. Did we really need an aside about what some random fox is up to, Tolkien? Did we?! But there’s also a lot wrong with the way Middle-earth is built, and it’s important to recognize that.
I agree about the fox—it was a bit random. However, I disagree with the rest, excepting the fact that some people, for some reason, don't like Tolkien. (I understand, guys. Well, I don't, really, but I also don't hate you.)
Bigotry
There’s no gentle way to say this: Middle-earth is incredibly racist. First, there’s the racism against actual humans. The nonwhite “Easterlings” are all on Sauron’s side, for some reason. They’re maybe half a step above orcs. They’re even referred to as “Swarthy Men,” in case it wasn’t clear what about them signifies they’re evil. Gross.
The Easterlings are definitely way above Orcs. Tolkien even describes Sam seeing a fallen man of Harad (not quite the same as an Easterling, but close) and pitying him, wondering if he had really wanted to fight and kill. Oh, and the fact that the Easterlings come from Asia only adds to the horror of Sauron's deception. He has tricked and enslaved even the most honest people.
Tolkien did describe "men out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues". However, that doesn't sound like humans to me. White eyes? Red tongues? Like half-trolls? If you think Asians look like that, you are the racist.
And the fact that Tolkien described Asians as "swarthy" mean that that is what's evil about them? No, he's merely, you know, describing them. The fact that Mr. Ashkenazi takes dark skin as a bad thing is interesting.
The whole idea that LotR is a racist work is bogus.
Then there are the orcs. I’ve written about this before, so I’ll try to be brief. Tolkien’s orcs are exceptionally hateful, both in how they come across on the page and in how the author intended them. They combine all our worst stereotypes about people of color just so the heroes can have an enemy they can kill with a clean conscience.
A weird wrinkle about Tolkien’s orcs is that unlike a lot of later fantasy stories, LotR spends a fair amount of time developing orcish culture. Unfortunately, this doesn’t improve the situation. If anything, it’s worse because we’re shown exactly how these beings are inherently evil and why it’s okay to slaughter them without remorse.
See Michael Martinez's post on this. There is absolute good and absolute evil in Arda, and anyway I think few would object to the idea of killing beings who are trying to do the same to you.
Tolkien’s world is also pretty sexist, way more so than you’d think from the films. At least in the movies, Eowyn stands up to the patriarchy and forges her own path. In the books, she gives up all that warrior nonsense because she’s finally found a man. Also, Arwen has so few lines that she regularly fails the sexy lamp test. Most other marginalized groups aren’t represented at all.
(For those of you who don't know, the sexy lamp test is a way to diagnose sexism in a story by imagining what would happened if you replaced a female character with an attractive lamp.)
Again, Michael Martinez says this better than I can. Oh, and I'm sure this guy thought Tauriel in the Hobbit films was a much better character than Arwen, right?
Monarchist Propaganda
Fantasy gets a bad rap for idealizing feudalism, a time where hereditary kings ruled because supposedly God said they should. In Tolkien’s case, this criticism is completely merited. It’s not simply that most of Middle-earth is ruled by kings;* it’s the level of emphasis he places on a “true king” and the power of bloodlines.
I think Ashkenazi has confused feudalism and monarchism, the first being an socio-economic system, and the latter being a political one. I do not think Middle-Earth is a good example of feudalism.
The note reads, "No queens that I know of." This is absurd. Every Gondorian king's wife is known as a queen in Middle-earth, and several women have actually ruled themselves. Númenor was ruled by queens on three different occasions, and none of the queens were evil (there was one evil queen of Gondor). More info on Tolkienian queens can be found here. The rest of this paragraph is refuted below.
The note reads, "No queens that I know of." This is absurd. Every Gondorian king's wife is known as a queen in Middle-earth, and several women have actually ruled themselves. Númenor was ruled by queens on three different occasions, and none of the queens were evil (there was one evil queen of Gondor). More info on Tolkienian queens can be found here. The rest of this paragraph is refuted below.
Aragorn is the obvious example. He’s lived his entire life as a ranger stalking through the woods, but LotR takes it as a given that he’ll be a great leader because of his ancestry. In contrast, the Steward of Gondor is a terrible ruler who will lead to ruin and destruction, despite being the one with actual experience and training. The Steward’s eldest son, Boromir, has similar problems, while his younger son, Faramir, avoids them by bending the knee to Aragorn. It’s worth noting that the Stewards are also effectively kings, but the wrong kind of king because they don’t have that sweet royal blood.
Some of this comes from the story’s plotting, but it’s baked into the setting as well. One of the ways we know Aragorn is the true king is that he has magic healing hands, and Gondor is described like it has some sickness that will be magically cured by some guy with the correct 23andMe results.*
The royal blood of Númenor is royal indeed. It isn't that the kings are a higher race, it's that they're a line of rulers who were gifted their kingship by the Valar. It is Aragorn's right to rule, and I doubt anyone questions his wisdom and strength. Oh, and Aragorn's healing powers are a gift, and gift from above. Does Ashkenazi doubt the right of the Valar to bestow power upon those they choose, a line founded by noble leaders who will teach their children well?
(Also, in the Appendices, Tolkien describes how many lines of kings turned to evil.)
To be clear, a conflict over royal succession isn’t automatically monarchist propaganda. You can even have a firstborn heir as your main character and be fine. The problem with Lord of the Rings is that Aragorn’s status as the “rightful” ruler is all that matters. This isn’t a conflict over family politics or what different rulers want for their country, but rather over Aragorn being denied something he deserves.
Many times Tolkien refers to Aragorn's wisdom, his ability to rule, and his efficiency at skewering wolves. Aragorn is nearly a perfect choice for king.
A Static World
For all Middle-earth’s rich history and wondrous mystery, it often has trouble feeling like a real place where people live. Most of that comes from how static the setting is. No humans outside of Bree seem to know what hobbits are, even those who likely received a noble’s education. Humans are an incredibly rare sight in the Shire, and the dwarves almost never seem to leave their underground kingdoms.
Guess what: people of different races (not different skin tones, but species) would probably be unlikely to be comfortable around each other. The hobbits (with the exception of the Tooks and some of the Brandybucks) are entirely homebodies—why would they be seen by Men? Humans stay out of the Shire both because the hobbits watch the boarders and because humans have no reason to travel through the Shire, as they don't have mountain-halls on the other side like the Dwarves do. And speaking of the Dwarves, they are described as recluses, so why would they march thousands of miles south for no reason? Trading is profitable, but not when you get eaten by wolves and orcs ten times on the way.
This feeling extends to politics as well. Other than the evil Easterlings, it’s easy to feel like Gondor and Rohan are the only human countries around, which is bizarre when dealing with an apocalyptic threat like Sauron. It makes the various areas feel like hermetically sealed bubbles rather than parts of the same world.
You will have to elaborate on that, with some hard economic data. I never got that feel. I think the political and racial atmosphere of Middle-earth could make its countries more isolated from each other than our human nations have been in the past.
(Note that before the Crusades, the West and Middle-East were in contact, but rarely interacted.)
In a living world, people move around. It’s been a consistent facet of human civilization for as long as there has been human civilization, and fantasy species would probably work the same way. Take the Shire for instance. The hobbits use metal tools like anyone else, but I don’t see any mining operations around. They’d have to trade for that metal, and even if most hobbits choose to stay home, there would always be exceptions.
As a side note, this is a major problem for anyone trying to use Middle-earth for their own purposes. Do you know how well players take it when the GM says no one can play a hobbit or a dwarf because this campaign takes place in Minas Tirith? It’s not pretty.
Hobbits are supposed to trade with both Dwarves and Men! This is canon, mentioned multiple times (however, it's no surprise he doesn't remember it, since it contradicts his isolation argument). Also, do you think a culture that builds many houses underground would mine no ore? Few modern nonfiction authors mention water purification, but it happens anyway.
As for the second part, too bad. Sorry if Tolkien's world isn't perfect for RPGs. The bottom of the ocean isn't optimal either if you want a human character. (Neither is his post optimal for an intelligent being.)
Repetitive Terrain
I’m a big fan of northern European wilderness. Icy fjords, primal evergreen forests, snow-capped mountains – they’re all great. But that seems to be about all Middle-earth has going for it, at least judging from Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom. Sometimes, when there’s evil afoot, we get a spooky forest. Mordor itself seems to be the only variety, with its blasted heaths and scary swamps.
All told, Frodo and Sam cover a distance roughly equal to traveling from Kansas to Florida.* If you made that journey in real life, you’d cross plains, mountains, dense forest, river deltas, and then some not at all evil swamps. The same distance in a different direction could take you through scorching deserts or up to the frozen wilds of Canada.
Ashkenazi has gotten the distance about correct, but he ignores the fact that Middle-earth is basically Europe in a fictionalized 4000 BC. Here's a forest map of modern-day Europe, which is heavily deforested compared to thousands of years ago. How boringly forested! Also, man, for a guy who goes on and on about the Easterlings, he doesn't seem to know much about the vast deserts to the east of Mordor.
In Lord of the Rings, it’s mostly forests. Don’t get me wrong, Tolkien is really good at describing forests. But in a travel story, it’s important to have variety, since terrain is what provides a lot of the novelty. Middle-earth would be a lot more interesting if the Fellowship had to navigate something like the Badlands or sail down a coastline once in a while. Even sticking just to forests, there are a lot of options beyond pine and oak. I’d pay good money to watch Aragorn pole a skiff through a mangrove forest.
How many mangroves are there in Europe? I am sorry if our world does not fit your present needs. Actually, I'm not.
Orcish Agriculture
Here’s a question to tickle your noggins: What do orcs eat? The books are pretty clear that they’ll eat any kind of meat, including captured prisoners, and that they have bread. But where does that meat and bread come from? The orcs can’t possibly capture enough enemies to be a reliable food source, even if they’re constantly at war, which the books say they aren’t.
They could also hunt deer and other animals outside Mordor, besides farming.
The obvious answer is agriculture, the same way everyone else grows their food. Orcish agriculture would have to be quite advanced to feed such a large population, and I for one would love to meet an orc farmer. But this scenario has two problems.
First, since orcs are inherently violent and malicious, it seems like they’d have a lot of difficulty with a profession like farming, which requires a great deal of patience. Second, Mordor is clearly no breadbasket. I don’t have soil samples to test, but from the near total absence of plant life, I’m guessing the pH levels aren’t great.
I believe that the Orcs probably farmed to some extent, or had slaves farm for them. And yes, these are intelligent questions Ashkenazi asks. Volcanic ash is a great fertilizer. Plants don't grow on volcanoes because of the heat, among other reasons. Having slaves grow the food would solve the first problem. There may also have been fertile regions to the east.
If Tolkien didn’t go into so much depth about evil orc culture, it would be easier to imagine that Sauron feeds them through some kind of sorcery. But once we learn that the orcs have complex inner power struggles, it’s impossible to treat them as evil mannequins that go into hibernation when they aren’t being used.
I've already addressed everything here.
These Weird Mountains
I’m not much of a cartographer, but I do enjoy looking at fantasy maps. No author should ever depend on them, of course, but they’re a nice extra to help readers get immersed in the world. Middle-earth’s map appears pretty good at first glance, at least to my untrained eye. The coastline looks natural, rivers crisscross the land, and we can see where forests give way to grasslands. Then we get to Mordor’s bizarre mountain borders. Seriously, look at these things.
What is going on here? In the corner of this otherwise excellent map, we have three mountain ranges that just happen to run in nearly straight lines to completely box off Sauron’s domain from the rest of Middle-earth? This area sticks out like the artist worked super hard on most of the map, then did Mordor in the last five minutes before deadline.
Not only does this not look natural, but it’s just ugly. There’s a lot of speculation that these mountains were raised that way on purpose,* but so what? Even if chapter one contained a long explanation about who made these mountains and why, they’d still be ugly. You can technically justify anything by saying “a god/wizard did it,” but that doesn’t make it a good idea, which is why Avatar’s earthbenders don’t go around drawing [explicative]s across their continent.
Take a look at the mountains of northern Greece, which is roughly the modern equivalent of Mordor. Yep, there's a (sort of) similarly weird mountain range there. Though the match isn't perfect, Tolkien admitted that Middle-earth did have some differences to modern Europe. Also, just because someone raised the mountains on purpose (which seems possible though not likely to me) doesn't mean that it has to be beautiful. Everything about Mordor is ugly.
Of course, we know the real reason for those mountains: to make Frodo’s journey to Mt. Doom harder. But that could have been accomplished without the use of perfectly rectangular mountain ranges. This is one area where Tolkien could have particularly benefited from varying the terrain. If the land north of Mordor was barren, Sahara-like desert, then crossing the western mountains would have been by far the easier path for Frodo and Sam to take.
I've already answered all this above. Your personal literary and geographical preferences are not reality.
What We Can Learn
So after going through the pros and cons of Tolkien’s worldbuilding, what should our takeaway be? How can we emulate what makes these books so popular without making all of their mistakes as well?
What mistakes? I've already debunked the rest of the article.
Don’t Justify Racism
I’m hopeful that most people reading this understand why it’s harmful to put in racist portrayals of actual humans in their stories. None of this “everyone who’s not white sides with Sauron” nonsense, thank you very much.
But there’s a subtler lesson we can learn from Lord of the Rings, and that’s not to use the world’s supernatural elements as a justification for racism. Technically speaking, orcs are corrupted elves, and this is often used to excuse their portrayal. LotR isn’t really being racist, the argument goes; it’s just showing how an evil Sauron created evil servants.
The truth is that none of those justifications matter. Even if Tolkien made a big deal about the orcs’ origin, and he doesn’t, it would still just be an excuse to create an enemy that it’s always okay to kill. This strategy doesn’t work in Lord of the Rings, and it won’t work for anyone else.
Lots of whites side with Sauron—ever heard of the Black Númenoreans? They were white (the "Black" is for evil, not skin shade) and they joined "the Dark Side". Also, I would argue that when Orcs are overrunning your lands, pillaging, killing, raping, and burning, it's okay to kill them.
The other points are refuted above.
Take Out Pointless Sexism
Beyond the racism of orcs and the Easterlings, Middle-earth is home to extremely strict gender roles, which isn’t doing the story any favors. It doesn’t make the world feel more realistic, nor does it give us any kind of insight into prejudice faced by women. Instead, all this sexism does is serve as an excuse to keep women out of the story. I’m glad the films changed Eowyn’s story so she actually pushes back against the patriarchy, but even that’s not worth a cast of wall-to-wall dudes.
In any discussion about sexism in stories, someone will always argue that it’s necessary in order to send messages about sexism in real life. While there are stories that pull this off, most authors aren’t actually interested in taking the time to do so. Tolkien certainly wasn’t. There’s no brilliant message to be had from Arwen not joining the Fellowship or from Galadriel being mostly described for how hot she is. It’s just regular sexism.
So unless you’re writing one of those rare stories that actually uses sexism to further the cause of liberation, just leave it out of your worldbuilding. A story where women join the adventure like it’s no big deal will do a lot more to fight sexism than a half-hearted commentary on how women aren’t actually inferior to men.
This is all discussed in a Michael Martinez post. (Yeah, he's pretty awesome.) And Galadriel was also noted for her wisdom, her kindness.
(The rest of the article is basically a summary of the first part, so I will ignore it, except for the following paragraph.)
Near the end, LotR even depends on this bizarre isolationism to make the plot work. After destroying the Ring, Frodo and company return to the Shire and find that Sarumon has taken it over. While it’s fun to see how much the hobbits have grown as they do battle with an evil wizard, it also feels a little pointless, since King Aragorn should be able to easily deal with the situation if the hobbits fail. That’s not something you want to emulate.
Do you know how far away Aragorn is at this point? It would take months to tell him about it, let alone get an army all that way (and he might be too late to save a lot of trees). Also, he specifically says later that he will not allow any Man to enter the Shire, not even himself.
Overall, I give Ashkenazi credit for intelligence, as well as skepticism and literary competence. However, he speaks of what he does not know well.
Thank you! It took me a grand total of two days.
Thorough analysis, son!