Is Lord of the Rings Racist?

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I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don’t care what they tell you in school, Frodo was black.

while the worldbuilding itself is undeniably inspired by england and norse mythology, i always got the impression that the actual storytelling in lotr was heavily influenced by tolkiens experiences as a ww1 soldier. you can see it in the way sauron, the ultimate bad guy in the story, doesnt even show up at any point, the heroes never ever see him just like how ww1 never actually got to see the ultimate bad guy leading the enemy nation. likewise, while the heros do get to see the enemy army up close, they only get to see them as this massive wave of evil soldiers, they cant know them as individuals, they cant make friends with them, they cant think of them as anything other than an massive wave of evil soldiers. only sometimes will they allow themselves to look at a fallen soldier and wonder what the mans name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather stayed there in peace. thank you for making this btw, loved the video!!!

Sam's compassion isn't 'modern', it's timeless.

8:30 This bit about how we would interpret the same words differently as written by Tolkien vs some ancient Anglo-Saxon reminds me of Borges' short story of Don Quijote being rewritten word for word by a modern Frenchman and how that results in an entirely different work

I'm a little disappointed that this video essay doesn't mention the commentary in the books about how the orcs of Mordor loath their lord Sauron, nor of the conflicts between the orcs, which are described in the books.

At least for me I've always found it important to look at the intent of someones work. When you read the passage in a modern context, sure it can be read as racist simply due to the skin colour but you have to ask if that is the intent to Tolkien writing it. My first thought that comes to mind are svartalfr from norse mythology, literally called black elves and are almost categorically evil in all appearances yet most people can agree that its probably not born from a racist intent but rather a way for a skald or poet to inject some mystery and otherness in their story. Another important note is the perspective the book is written in which is that of the men of the west. In universe they would lack sufficient knowledge of the haaradrim (or how its spelt sorry) to have more than a almost mythical image of them. I dont think the men of the east are ment as a literal people of pitch black skin etc as we see pther characters with ambiguous skin colour in the west (Aragorn being a prime example), but rather as a skewed retelling similar to the romans describing the brittons as "slow people who live in lakes of mud". Sorry rant over

I would like to point out, not to dismiss your point but to add to it another perspective, that Tolkien also borrowed a lot from Finnish mythology and language (everyone knows the Evlish language borrowed a lot from Finnish, and Gandalf for instance has clear parables to Väinämöinen), but when Tolkien wrote his books, Finns were seen as "oriental", and a common slur for Finnish people was "China Swedes" up until the early 1940s. So although one of the antagonist groups got their influence from asiatic people, there are "asiatic" (as seen at the time) influences on "the good" side as well. I think this gives more credence to the idea that Tolkien wasn't personally racist, though that doesn't mean that his work couldn't be, and his work has been used to push racist ideas (though this in itself doesn't mean that a work is racist, racist are idiots and don't necessarily understand the works they are co-opting).

Way I saw it was that the Haradrim are seen from the perspective of the men of the northern areas. They are deemed evil and dark because they side with Sauron, but this doesn't mean they actually ARE evil. They are, much as you said in the video, seen through the sort of eyes an Anglo-Saxon would have looked through when thinking of Africa, or China. Strange, unknowable, foreign and usually subversive. This, however, does not make this view true, and indeed, to my mind at least, the scene with Sam, where he looks on the body of the dead Harad man, proved as much. In that scene, we are struck by the realization that these are men, human beings just like us, and that they have been brought here, likely coerced in some fashion, or tricked, into servitude. We do not know whether the Haradrim hate their master, whether they rebel against him, and while I think a Haradrim character would have been awesome, we do not get this in the story since, as you stated, it ultimately has nothing to do with the story as a whole. It could just be me, and my reading of the book, but to me, Tolkien proved himself not to be a racist by that beautiful scene. That he even took the time to write it, to make the reader feel for what could have easily been left a faceless evil thrall, to me speaks volumes. I will premise this, though, with the statement that Tolkien's world was different from our own, and he was a product of that world, and thus, even if he had not intended any hateful message, it is possible that he was influenced by the prevailing views of the time. I am not trying to say that Tolkien, as much as I love his works, was a perfect man, indeed no human ever can be, but I honestly do not agree with views of him being racist.

Something of note is that Tolkien himself believed that the Blue Wizards might have helped out in the Eastern Lands and prevented the “dark” people from all falling to Sauron’s influence. In fact without their help there might have been a ton more Easterlings and Southerners the main characters would’ve had to contend with and their win likely wouldn’t have been possible. Anyways this does imply he saw them as real people and redeemable. His entire viewpoint actually was that everyone was redeemable and it’s one of the reasons why he grappled so much with the origins of the Orcs, I don’t think he believed anything in the Legendarium was truly 100% evil or irredeemable. It’s for these reasons I don’t think Tolkien intended for it to be racist to be honest and I think even as you put, it’s quite a bit more complicated than black = bad = racism.

I always interpreted the people of Harad as more an analogue to Arab people than black people but I don't think that fundamentally changes much.

IIRC there was a mention of the fact that Easterlings and Haradrim did not exactly chose the dark side. They were taken by force by leaders who were corrupted and given power by Sauron. I mean, two of the Mages (the unnamed blue ones) just fucking disappeared after they went to the East, so darkness must be kinda rampant in those places and since we know that ALL humans are good by nature we could assume that shit went south in the South and East. I may or may not be pulling this out of my ass tho because for the love of God I can't remember where I heard that and was it even canon at all

There seem to be a lot of people who end up at one of two extremes: On the one hand, there are those who focus solely on their immediate experience as readers, so much so that they don't really seem to think of fictional characters and events as fictional constructs at all. "The Haradrim could have had civil wars," is a perfectly natural thought to have as you read, but those types of hypotheticals can't form the basis of an interpretation that's meaningful to anyone else but yourself, and so they are quite useless in discussions with others. To those who only read stories like this, and never move on to a more distanced approach, it might not be very easy to see stories as part of the culture they're in. They're self-contained things, and that's it. But a literary work will always be part of a larger context, in several ways; it literally can't not be. On the other hand, there are those who contextualize stories not only to view a particular work in the context of its past or present culture, but also to label it as e.g. "dangerous," "decadent," categorically "problematic," etc. -- perhaps to promote the idea that literary works should be in service of society somehow. This takes many forms, but all have in common a general failure to think of art as art, in favor of some more instrumental approach. I think it's important to be aware of how you tend to read stories and then find a more constructive balance between different ways to approach them. It's crucial to acknowledge that even seemingly contradictory ideas and analyses can all be true or valid at once.

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I was honestly surprised how much more nuanced Tolkiens legendarium is than just "Evil brown people fighting the good people of the west", all people followed Morgoth from the beginning, and the only reason people of the West turned away from him was their proximity to the elves. We can see how righteous numenoreans become corrupted, and Tolkien makes it clear at multiple points in the books that there is nothing inherently evil about easterlings or haradrim. Indeed, there is the famous Tal Elmar tale told from the pov of Edain of Gondor who were a followers of Morgoth and who were subsequently driven out and subjugated by Numenoreans, it sure isn't as black and white as you'd expect from an allegory of Christianity

Tolkien vehemently opposed the Nazi doctrine of Teutonic racial purity, despite drawing from a common well of Teutonic mythology. That didn't stop him reflecting the common-or-garden racism of mid-20th century England that he was infused in.

Your thesis is wrong. Sam’s statement is not modern. It is Christian. And it also is a very common sentiment among combat veterans like Tolkien.

morþor meant 'crime, violence, torment' in Old English, btw.

Just commenting on Sam’s line, what I always took away from the stories were that the big battles etc were based around big myths with a simple lens that represents the old mythology from one point of view. But Sam and Frodo are the non myths that aren’t simple, and eventually forgotten by the myths so they are more real. But 🤷🏻‍♂️

In the Prologue, on the third page of the book, it says, "The Harfoots were browner of skin..... They were the most normal and representative variety of Hobbit, and far the most numerous." The majority of hobbits had brown skin.