*sigh* time for another thread on the ignorance of people trying to insert negative real world allegorical messaging into The Lord of the Rings.
I’m going to start by saying that any suggestion that orcs are meant to be a stand in for black people sounds incredibly racist. There are human beings in Middle-earth. We mostly see the white ones because they are in the part that would geographically be Europe. but black humans
exist in Tolkien’s world because his world is meant to be this world in some mythological past. Orcs are completely fictional characters who are not “working class”, they are slaves of Sauron. Sauron doesn’t pay people. Orcs have been twisted and changed to the point where little
“humanity” is left in them at all. They have become almost mindless beasts, so taken over by evil that they no longer resemble the elves they were created from, in the first place. There is a tragedy to orcs but fighting orcs is not a ‘genocide’. It’s actually kind of disgusting
someone would take such a horrendous act of evil and apply it to fantasy creatures in a book about war. Tolkien makes a point to show that the other /humans/ they are fighting against are likely not evil people, at all. Sauron’s power had overtaken the places to the East & South
of Middle-earth but that doesn’t make the people there bad. More likely they were being oppressed and forced to fight or being deceived by Sauron. Even in letters Tolkien ponders whether orcs are irredeemable and the whole message with Gollum is the struggle within a person. He
is also not a “racist caricature”, he is simply a person who has given into the temptation of the ring. But Frodo still seeing the good hidden deep within him. The message there is one of mercy and empathy.
But The Lord of the Rings is also a story where characters of different races (mythological races) come together and are forced to set aside their differences, set aside the wrongs they have done each other in the past. Where those who are seen as people of little use are the
ones who are the heroes. We see even with the men that fight against the people of Rohan that they weren’t just evil “savages” but people who had been wronged and abused by Rohan in the past. Saruman used that justified hatred to get them to fight Rohan. Tolkien does not depict
the “good guys” and perfect and faultless, but rather kingdoms who have their own demons in their pasts. Tolkien might have been a “man of his time” in some ways but when you inspect his story you see that he values all human life and sees it all as valuable.
Goodness, the conclusions people draw about Tolkien’s works are just... I want to bang my head against a wall.
