Skin Color in Middle Earth
Okay, the question was specifically about elves and dwarves, but I’m broadening the post to include all people of Middle Earth, since it’s all related.
All elves are described as having fair/white skin. (to be honest, I’m not sure if it’s straight-up, explicitly stated, like “all elves are white”, but every elf we meet is described as white, and so many scholars - including those who were writing during Tolkien’s lifetime - state this, so I can’t imagine that Tolkien wouldn’t have corrected them if this is false. If somebody has found anything on this topic, please let me know!) The most variation we see among elves is their hair or eye color. In this post I talk about the different groups of elves, but most of those groups developed later on in history. The three fundamental (as in, they were born different) groups of elves are the Vanyar, the Noldor, and the Teleri, and they are all fair skinned. I see no reason why other skin colors would develop later on, so I think it’s pretty fair to say that even in the Third and Fourth Age, all elves have fair skin.
Tolkien never actually addressed the skin color of the dwarves, but it’s assumed that they were also white. ((REWRITTEN AFTER FURTHER RESEARCH: Men see more variation that elves and dwarves. Some men are described as fair skinned (this is usually the men of Rohan, and the Dunedain/descendants of Numenor, such as the men of Gondor.) Others are described as “swarthy” or as having slightly darker skin - such as the Dunlendings, and some small communities in Gondor. And the men of the far south (Harad) are consistently described as having dark skin. As far as hobbits go, Tolkien described the Harfoots (one of the three original groups of hobbits) as “browner of skin” than the other two groups. But just what that means isn’t clear - it could mean that most hobbits had fair skin and Harfoots had slightly tanner skin. Or it could mean that all hobbits had darker skin, and Harfoots even more so. Traditionally, adaptations have shown almost all men and hobbits to be white, but there’s really quite a bit of room for interpretation here.))
This lack of racial diversity in Middle Earth has motivated some to accuse Tolkien of being racist. And while that is a very interesting debate that there isn’t space to get into in this post, in the case of ethnic and racial representation in Middle Earth, it’s important to keep in mind that Tolkien was creating an English mythology, so there’s some truth to the argument that, for the time period he wanted the stories to take place in, it simply wouldn’t make sense for there to be much racial diversity.
But, like I said, the racism debate is a topic for another post. Just wanted to mention it since Tolkien’s all-white cast tends to lead people into the discussion anyway.
SOURCES: General descriptions of characters in all the books, as well as a lack of counter-arguments, I guess.
