So when Amazon’s Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series, tells Vanity Fair, “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” in reference to casting a black elf and a black dwarven princess (without a beard!) and a black hobbit, because “Tolkien is for everyone,” it should set off alarm bells.
Why doesn’t a racially diverse cast of characters make sense in Tolkien’s mythology? Because this isn’t “Games of Thrones” or the “The Wheel of Time” or some other throwaway fantasy series that can easily be adjusted to reflect our myopic modern obsessions about race and representation. This is “Lord of the Rings,” a prehistoric fantasy epic whose purpose, as Tolkien himself explained in some detail, was to provide a legendarium for Britain, which Tolkien felt “had no stories of its own,” at least not like the legends of other lands: “There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.”
To do this, Tolkien worked for decades to create a fully realized lore of Middle Earth — languages, genealogies, histories, poetry, maps, detailed geographies. But it was the lore of a particular place: “the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East.”
Hence it should go without saying (although it clearly doesn’t) that most of the characters in Tolkien’s legendarium are white. They are, of course, all of various races, but here the races are divided between elves, men, dwarves, hobbits, and so on. It makes as much sense to cast black elves and dwarves for a TV adaptation of Tolkien’s work as it would to cast Native Americans for an adaptation of Homer’s “Odyssey” or Asians for Virgil’s “Aeneid.” You could do that, but you’d end up with a tale so far removed from its origins that it has become something else entirely.
And that appears to be what Amazon is doing here — not just because it decided to graft 21st-century notions of racial diversity onto Tolkien’s prehistoric mythology, but because it has also decided to collapse thousands of years of that mythology for the sake of convenience. As showrunner J.D. Payne told Vanity Fair, “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”
thefederalist.com
Because of course they did
Why doesn’t a racially diverse cast of characters make sense in Tolkien’s mythology? Because this isn’t “Games of Thrones” or the “The Wheel of Time” or some other throwaway fantasy series that can easily be adjusted to reflect our myopic modern obsessions about race and representation. This is “Lord of the Rings,” a prehistoric fantasy epic whose purpose, as Tolkien himself explained in some detail, was to provide a legendarium for Britain, which Tolkien felt “had no stories of its own,” at least not like the legends of other lands: “There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.”
To do this, Tolkien worked for decades to create a fully realized lore of Middle Earth — languages, genealogies, histories, poetry, maps, detailed geographies. But it was the lore of a particular place: “the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East.”
Hence it should go without saying (although it clearly doesn’t) that most of the characters in Tolkien’s legendarium are white. They are, of course, all of various races, but here the races are divided between elves, men, dwarves, hobbits, and so on. It makes as much sense to cast black elves and dwarves for a TV adaptation of Tolkien’s work as it would to cast Native Americans for an adaptation of Homer’s “Odyssey” or Asians for Virgil’s “Aeneid.” You could do that, but you’d end up with a tale so far removed from its origins that it has become something else entirely.
And that appears to be what Amazon is doing here — not just because it decided to graft 21st-century notions of racial diversity onto Tolkien’s prehistoric mythology, but because it has also decided to collapse thousands of years of that mythology for the sake of convenience. As showrunner J.D. Payne told Vanity Fair, “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”
Amazon’s 'Lord Of The Rings' Has Already Betrayed Tolkien’s Vision
Grafting twenty-first century notions of racial diversity onto J.R.R. Tolkien’s prehistoric mythology is as nonsensical as it is unnecessary.
thefederalist.com
Because of course they did
