The Wretched of Middle-earth: An Orkish Manifesto

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Anyone know this? It is from the 1980s. Here from the introduction:

I am suggesting that if we take Tolkien at his word and read LTR as a “true mythology” of our own earth, then we will find that the text metamorphoses chillingly from a quaint other-worldly fantasy into a literal transcription of one of the most malignant ideologies of the past millennium: the racist “Aryan Myth,” which, in one form or another, would ultimately justify both the conquest and mass murder of the non white world by Europeans, and the later Nazi genocide of Europeans themselves.

I wonder if any of the Tolkien scholars ever answered this?
There are some responses in Mythlore.

[Rivvy Elf]

Eh, Tolkien essentially blasts the Numenorean Imperial/colonialists in his narrative. There's also that famous letter where he blasts the Nazis.

Elves aren't Aryans and the legendarium directly warns humans of trying to be like elves, binding themselves to the Earth. Humans are supposed to leave Middle-earth. In NoME, population-wise, the Avari population rose much more quickly than the Eldar, and most of the elves either stayed in their homeland or went anywhere but west.

And it's Orcish, not Orkish. This ain't an aquatic hegemonic takeover! Tolkien spent so much of his time trying to change "dwarfs" into "dwarves." Perhaps the author should have done the same.

[Rivvy Elf]

From a historiographic perspective, the Red Book of Westmarch also isn't technically written by Tolkien, if we go by his word. It is written by those west of the Orocarni and north of Harondor, who have their own biases.

So it is a translated legendarium and mythology written by folk like Shire-folk, Gondorians, Rohirrim, and Arnorians. People like Rumil, Feanor, and Pengolodh were the elven historians and creators of the written language. But their knowledge is limited because we don't hear from the perspective of the elves who never left their homeland. Most dwarves refuse to share secrets so even their history is really told by others.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hoi Rivvy, I cannot tell you how relieved I am to read you above. I come to the thread fresh from reading the Mythlore responses. I have a sense of living in a world gone mad. I fed all the responses into an statistical amalgam machine that reduced the entirety to one sentence:

I feel so liberated to have read this essay by Mill and to now know the fantasy that I have loved since the movies came out is actually akin to Nazism; now I will know how evil is what I love when I go back and read about the nice Hobbits and ponies that I still admire, and will carry on teaching my college classes on, ya'know, cos i do still really love Middle-earth!

Seriously, on the one side the Tolkien scholars and on the other side this. Never mind the plaza, the whole of Tolkien fandom is doomed.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Eh, Tolkien essentially blasts the Numenorean Imperial/colonialists in his narrative. There's also that famous letter where he blasts the Nazis.

I think that famous letter is held up on the Mills side of the fence as evidence that Tolkien was doing his own version of Aryan/racial northern spirit - with a family resemblance to that espoused in Berlin.

[Rivvy Elf]

Another thing I want to point out is that I recall the Easterlings hate orcs too. And I’ll assume so do the haradrim.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

But I have to say, bit of a dialectic here. The same sort of interplay of two confused parties each getting something else right that we find with the friends and descendants in the allegory of the tower - the friends destroy it, while the descendants stand in the background failing to see what all the fuss is about. The friends do look the magic in the face, but end up destroying the work of art in which they rightly glimpse this magic. The descendants don't see the magic and so just don't get it at all.

But it is all so wonky, everywhere. Babel. Since I came upon the world wide web of people talking about Tolkien, and looked at Fimi's book with 'race' in the title, I have never understood how people think they can speak helpfully about Tolkien and race - and Aryanism - without reading how he draws out the meaning in history of these terms and ideas - which takes you to the very heart of Tolkien's scholarship!!! Mills had much more excuse, he had the posthumous volume of collected papers 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' before him, and he does use it fairly well - but he appears from my first reading not to have come to terms with the essay that gives the title to the volume. Today we have the translation and commentary, and much else, and I just cannot understand how people can consider Tolkien the human being as if he was only an author of fantasy and not also a scholar. It is from the (changing fields) of his scholarship that Tolkien took up these contested notions - and by and large he knew much more about them than anyone commenting since.

[Rivvy Elf]

@Chrysophylax Dives It always grinds my gears when I see elves as some sort of model for humans to follow when the legendarium specifically argues and shows the exact opposite. Heavily discourages talking to elvish spirits, elves going to the west, mortals not allowed to go to Valinor, “Age of Men,” Arda marred so why live so long in a marred world? Fewer details of a Dagor Dagorath and a rebuilding of Arda as Tolkien continued writing.

Both Aragorn and Arwen died and permanently left Arda before their body failed them. Some readers still don’t see the significance of this.

Whiteness, according The History of White People (2010) formed on a foundation of race-based slavery. So the “white people” certainly are not the first age men, as Labadal makes clear to Túrin that being a thrall (slave) is one of the worst fates.

If anything the “White People” of middle earth would be entities that had race-based slavery. And the closest thing to that would be the corrupted Numenoreans. And we know how Tolkien destroyed them.

The Elves would never classify themselves as “White” because they don’t subject people to thralldoms as they were victims of enslavement by Morgoth.

Can some of these “Tolkien Scholars” please research more?

[Rivvy Elf]

Location-wise, human beings were the most connected to Eru (God) when they were in the East, not the west. The gift to the Numenoreans was choosing when to leave Middle-earth, not stay in it. The corruption of humanity in the legendarium is the result of not thinking for ourselves and then binding oneself to Middle-earth, Morgoth’s Ring.

The orcs are bound to Sauron and Morgoth, with the ringwraiths representing what could happen if we bound ourselves to middle earth through something like the One Ring.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I could sit here and read this stuff all day... Don't stop!
In the meanwhile, here is the passage at the heart of things, it seems to me, which is outrageous, even impudent and yet must be looked in the face for what it is.

And this brings us to what is, in a sense, the climax of LTR: the final solution to the orkish problem. After all the preceding discussion, it should now come as little surprise if I reveal that the well-known twentieth-century author cited at the beginning (note 20, above), whose views on Aryans so closely describe the racial hierarchy of Middle-Earth, is Adolf Hitler, and that the excerpt is from Mein Kampf. In a letter written to his son in 1941, Tolkien would assert that, “There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the ‘Germanic’ ideal,” and then went on to bewail Hitler’s “perversion” and “misapplication” of “that noble northern spirit” which he had “tried to present in its true light.” But how much of a “misapplication” was it, given LTR’s own racial analysis of language, culture, and personhood? I am not saying, of course, that Tolkien was a Nazi. My point is rather that Hitler’s racial fantasies were not idiosyncratic, but grew out of a central tradition within European thought, and that Tolkien’s book is itself fully within that tradition. And, appropriately, ends with its own final solution.
Charles W. Mills

[Rivvy Elf]

Language: If I recall, to the elves written language is at the bottom of the totem pole because in an unmarred world, elves can use Ósanwe-Kenta (telepathy) and no meaning would be lost in translation by transferring the meaning to verbal and written language. This is specifically inferred in the written records of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears because the elves stated there isn’t enough room to compile all their lamentations of that battle through writing. Elves in an unmarred world would also remember everything.

I’ve inferred that because the world was marred, and they were born on a marred earth, elves invented their languages.

Personhood for humans as stated from Eru: Take your time in learning about the world, the journey itself will be joyful, don’t leave your childhood too early.

Culture is an invention associated with both retaining past communication and learning from past peoples’ pursuits of personhood.

Yeah it’s a clear misapplication!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Everything you say makes sense to me. I think it is what I think but said in different words. Including this one:

I’ve inferred that because the world was marred, and they were born on a marred earth, elves invented their languages.

Having given the passage by Mills above, it is only right to give the letter in the 'Letters' from which it is taken:

45 To Michael Tolkien
[Michael was now an Officer Cadet at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.]

9 June 1941 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

My dearest Michael,

I was so glad to hear from you. I would have written earlier to-day, only Mummy carried your letter off to Birmingham, before I had time to do more than glance at it. I am afraid that I show up badly as a letter writer: but really I get sick of the pen. Lectures ended on Thursday, and I hoped to get a little while (a) to rest, and (b) to put some order into the garden before 'Schools' begin on Thursday (Corpus Christi). But the everlasting rain has prevented my outdoor work, and lots of extra business prevented any rest. I sympathize with Govt. officials! I have spent most of my time of late drafting rules and regulations, only to find all kinds of loopholes as soon as they are in print, and only to be cursed and criticized by those who have not done the work, and won't try to understand the aims and objects!....

One War is enough for any man. I hope you will be spared a second. Either the bitterness of youth or that of middle-age is enough for a life-time: both is too much. I suffered once what you are going through, if rather differently: because I was very inefficient and unmilitary (and we are alike only in sharing a deep sympathy and feeling for the 'tommy', especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties). I did not then believe that the 'old folk' suffered much. Now I know. I tell you I feel like a lame canary in a cage. To carry on the old pre-war job – it is just poison. If only I could do something active! But there it is: I am 'permanently reserved', and as such I have my hands too full even to be a Home Guard. And I cannot even get out o'nights to have a crack with a crony.

Still you are my flesh and blood, and carry on the name. It is something to be the father of a good young soldier. Can't you see why I care so much about you, and why all that you do concerns me so closely? Still, let us both take heart of hope and faith. The link between father and son is not only of the perishable flesh: it must have something of aeternitas about it. There is a place called 'heaven' where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet...

Did you see Maxwell (the 'tobacco-controller's') account of what the wholesale dealers were doing! They ought to be in quod. .... Commercialism is a swine at heart. But I suppose the major English vice is sloth. And it is to sloth, as much or as more than to natural virtue, that we owe our escape from the overt violences of other countries. In the fierce modern world, indeed, sloth does begin almost to look like a virtue. But it is rather terrifying to see so much of it about, when we are grappling with the Furor Teutonicus.

People in this land seem not even yet to realize that in the Germans we have enemies whose virtues (and they are virtues) of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the mass. Whose brave men are just about as brave as ours. Whose industry is about 10 times greater. And who are – under the curse of God – now led by a man inspired by a mad, whirlwind, devil: a typhoon, a passion: that makes the poor old Kaiser look like an old woman knitting.

I have spent most of my life, since I was your age, studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the 'Germanic' ideal. I was much attracted by it as an undergraduate (when Hitler was, I suppose, dabbling in paint, and had not heard of it), in reaction against the 'Classics'. You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil. But no one ever calls on me to 'broadcast', or do a postscript! Yet I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this 'Nordic' nonsense. Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge – which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized. ....

Pray for me. I need it, sorely. I love you.
Your own Father.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

So I do know that I sound like a broken record, on occasion. But having expressed mild disgruntlement with the state of so-called Tolkien scholarship, check the first sentence of the Mythlore abstract.

Nine Tolkien Scholars Respond to Charles W. Mills’s “The Wretched of Middle- etched of MiddleEarth: An Orkish Manifesto”

Abstract
In spite of being written over three decades ago, Mills’s posthumously published “Manifesto” not only
anticipates but transcends the majority, if not the totality, of the scholarship on Tolkien, race, and racisms
which has been published since 2003.

What this abstract states, as I read it, is that nothing out there in 'Tolkien scholarship' can answer Mills's 'Manifesto'. Is that really true? You know, I suspect that it is. But here on this site nobody batted an eyelid, Rivvy knocked it every which way without breaking a sweat, I did not even begin, and Aiks in Gondolin rolled her eyes.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

We speak, pause, and then what? What do we think after we have spoken? For my part, more often than not a flash of honesty lights up the only half-acknowledged motivations of the speaking. Usually, what is revealed is just how narrow-minded and petty I am. In this case, the whole deal with this wider world of Tolkien fandom/scholarship irks my pride.

On the plaza I never link to my published work because I know there is no point - only Aiks would ever read it (and better she reads 'Beowulf' and 'B: M&C'). But these people are the people out there in the world who are supposed to have read my work. And none of them have. I already put my thinking on 'Beowulf' out there in Tolkien Studies back in two essays of 2015 and 2016, but nobody - certainly not Tom Shippey - ever said anything in reply, at least not to my knowledge.

These TS essays ('Peace of Frodo' and 'Cauldron on the Edge') can be found if you patiently scroll down my academia.edu page (another online site that began with promise and I have now stopped bothering with - it has come to reflect all that stinks about the academy). At the bottom of the Tolkien section you will find an essay published on the Tolkien Library site titled 'Concerning Hobbits' and an essay 'looking for a home' titled 'On Welsh Marches: Identities and Hobbits.'

'Concerning Hobbits' explores Hobbits precisely from the point of view of then current academic notions of race and Aryanism - only I employ the categories of the time and so do not write a sensationalist expose - this is a genuine historical inquiry that merely continues the essays in the earlier section on Edwardian anthropology and the idea of the contact of peoples.

'On Welsh Marches' was an attempt to think through the notion of 'race' in Interwar scholarship, so providing a context to any discussion of Tolkien and race. The paper was submitted to Mythlore, and the editor was very enthusiastic. She then forgot about it for many months. On reminder it was sent to a reviewer who wrote the second worst peer review of my life (top place), accusing me of being 'academic in the wrong way.' The editor of Mythlore sent me a rude email telling me she might consider the submission if revised substantially. I decided not to engage with Mythlore again.

I am a narrow-minded and vindictive dragon. But I do resent being called 'a sort of online troll' by Tom Shippey on his academia.edu page. I would take it from plaza members, or at least the Goose + any rogue Admins. But not on an academia.edu or Facebook page, please.

Here is my not-Mythlore/lost-on-academia.edu essay on Tolkien and race. Essay = an attempt, and another reason I don't link to this stuff on the plaza is that these were first attempts from near a decade ago. The scholarship is good, but I cringe a little to see how little I then knew about the stories of Tolkien that, back then, and having been an avid childhood and adult reader, I naively believed I already knew something about.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: My approach and respond is precise over the middle. It is an objective analysis. And through the same spectacles, this abstract is a huge claim and all nine scholars share a same sentiment, unrelated what they truly think. Except perhaps what the seventeen year old Miss Krauz says the most on the matter as she is a student only. Except for Mr. Stuart I haven't heard of any of them. I had hoped there would be one of two responders who would shine a different light, but that hope was vain. I read always two sides of a matter, if I can, pro and contra.

I understand you feel quite hurt. Narrow-minded I don't believe you are, and neither you write bad stuff. If you would write badly, I wouldn't bother respond. But the scientific establishment, same here in Holland, is tight-knitted on academic rules and how to write a peer-worthy article. There are norms that have to be met, and if you don't do correctly in their eyes, you'll hear of it. Have your resources right. But I am not a part of that world, I don't write academic papers. I do know how to write them, takes a lot of time and is painstaking work. But well they did read your articles, because their curiosity was triggered, and they spent time to analyse it. That is an honour too, you know. There are lots of people out there, who write (academically) and are completely ignored. Tolkien's essays are full with footnotes or a list with notes at the end. In this world is it pretty hard to find people who are a bit like-minded as you are, and they are quite hard to find. But in a place like this, yes it is possible to meet them.

One War is enough for any man. I hope you will be spared a second. Either the bitterness of youth or that of middle-age is enough for a life-time: both is too much. I suffered once what you are going through, if rather differently: because I was very inefficient and unmilitary (and we are alike only in sharing a deep sympathy and feeling for the 'tommy', especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties). I did not then believe that the 'old folk' suffered much. Now I know. I tell you I feel like a lame canary in a cage. To carry on the old pre-war job – it is just poison. If only I could do something active! But there it is: I am 'permanently reserved', and as such I have my hands too full even to be a Home Guard. And I cannot even get out o'nights to have a crack with a crony.

Above Tolkien's voices his frustrations to his son Michael, but in this academic establishment he was too valuable at 49 years old for the battlefield, and they gave him so much work, he hadn't time for the Homeguard. So he feels like a lame canary in a cage. That is another side of the penny, as one would say.

[Silky Gooseness]

I honestly am quite baffled and disappointed by Tom Shippey’s reaction here and his assumption that this is trolling and not a good faith argument.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Thank you both. Your replies are appreciated. Just for the sake of clarity may I point out that I am in danger of colliding two distinct online discussions out there in the wider world: (1) My 'Fawlty Towers' SWG post and Shippey's response; (2) the recent Mythlore set of responses to the Manifesto of Charles W. Mills, apparently composed in the late 1980s but only now (posthumously) published. The two are quite separate discussions but (as is my way) I'm complaining about both - the one responds to me (after 10 years) only to call me a troll while the other presents the Manifesto of Mills as opening up a discussion of race nowhere found in Tolkien studies, thereby ignoring my own work.

But I also suggest these two discussions are two sides of the same coin - on the whole, the accusation that the Tolkien scholars have sidestepped the uncomfortable issues is quite correct. (I'm just jumping up and down because I am fed up being ignored by everyone - or cast as a troll.)

On the upshot: should be clear now why I shifted publication targets from the institutional Tolkien journals out there to the Silmarillion Writers Guild, the plaza, and my own blog. Utterly ignored for 10 years, and now with one SWG post the world has changed and I can post on the plaza a link to my Tolkien and race essay, 'On Welsh Marches', and hope that eventually, one day in the not too distant future, one or even two people might now actually read it!



Edit. 'On Welsh Marches' is quite good! I had not looked at it for years. It is me when I was still in full scholar-mode, but it makes a coherent argument (I think) that Tolkien's generation mark the point of pivot in the English academic discourse of 'race'. A seachange had occurred in the 1870s, when the scholars learned for the first time to distinguish 'race' and 'language'; for the next half century, of the two 'race' was deemed the essential component of identity, but in the 1930s 'language' became the unit for understanding culture and social organization, and so identity, and Tolkien's scholarship reveals the first generation of this shift from race to language. The other side of the coin is that by removing race as a serious category of scholarship Tolkien was free to do something strange with it, which has to do with accounting for aesthetic idiosynracies among family members.

But it is astonishing how much I have learned about Middle-earth over the last few years. I really did think back then that because I had read LotR several times I knew what was what about his stories. The plaza, as other online spaces (but most of all the old plaza) were very useful in curing me of this illusion, just as it still is today. What I'd say now about 'On Welsh Marches' is that I still hold it more or less right about the English, Hobbits, and British aborigines (and as such a key also to Bombadil) but the author of that essay (me almost a decade ago) had no clue about Elves.

I still have no clue about Elves. And am mighty heartened by Rivvy's point above that mortals had better stear clear of elvish spirits, for our paths are sundered and the elves care not for our mortal sorrows. But still, to actually comprehend Tolkien on race and on the spirit of the North you got to look an Elf in the face, one time, one way or another. Never quite got there myself, but I had a friend who told me that he did once.

[onthetrail]

I honestly am quite baffled and disappointed by Tom Shippey’s reaction here and his assumption that this is trolling and not a good faith argument.

It is a very modern defense against any deeper engagement and one I did not expect from Shippey. I thought that he would engage with and present an argument against it, fine, but when a seasoned scholar dismisses another persons responses to them, and then a group join in without themselves fully treting the article, we end up with a situation like now where one group is pitted against another. It needn't be that way. Tolkien scholarship is wide enough, and strong enough to take such debates and cross-examination.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@onthetrail, the two groups pitted against each other is just one of the several thousand storms in a tea cup that is the daily swirl of the internet, and will be forgotten soon enough. It is irrelevant. The 'Fawlty Towers' post was one of a series on the SWG, and I quote below from the first:

The arguments of the 1936 lecture are framed by a story told in two acts: A man takes some old stones and makes a tower. Then his friends turn up and, eager to inspect the stones, destroy the tower; meanwhile, on the sidelines, the builder’s descendants stand and complain, one to the other, about their ancestor’s sense of proportion. The second act is something of a snare, inviting readers to remain on the ground discussing the shortcomings of other readers. The first act illustrates the poet’s design: An audience in some little Anglo-Saxon kingdom are to climb the stairs and look out upon the world as it was imagined by their heathen ancestors.

Whatever one may say about Shippey and the Tolkien Scholars, I initiated this exchange. When I commenced the SWG series I had the noble intention of skipping the second act, of only climbing the stairs and surveying the panoramic view upon a world now past - a world that was past already in Anglo-Saxon days. But after two posts I came to the conclusion that nobody was climbing the stairs with me - almost nobody was reading closely. So I came to the conclusion that we live in a fallen world and people need to begin with a punch-up on the lawn outside the tower. Obviously I intended it more metaphorically than Shippey received it, but I don't really feel I can complain too much as I basically pointed out that he fails to read the 1936 lecture and especially the allegory within it, which he is hardly going to take with a smile as he hands me tea and scones.

But the real point now is for everyone else: don't get caught up in school-yard excitement of gathering around a punch-up in the playground. Because it is what all academic readers appear to have done since the 1970s on reading the 1936 allegory of the tower. Academics cannot resist a tale of other academics who are naughty vandals - they get caught up in it and forget all about the tower.

That, my dears, is why we all require a Hobbit's Guide to Stairs. But as the second floor is still some months away, for now look up and ahead to the next SWG post (which actually remains on the grass with another punch-up, but is moving inexorably to tackling the stairs in the new year).

[Saranna]