You know Tolkien Describes all his Elves as being white skinned?
Anghraine’s fantastic piece here does a great job of deconstructing this question, some related questions and why they all rest on disturbingly racist attitudes about what it’s acceptable to change and interpret in Tolkien’s legendarium. I don’t have much to add to that, but:
I didn’t remember seeing this, but it’s quite possible that I missed a critical passage somewhere. So I spent today rereading, looking for any reference at all to the skin color of Elves. And I found something!
As Maeglin grew to full stature he resembled in face and form rather his kindred of the Noldor […] He was tall and black-haired; his eyes were dark, yet bright and keen as the eyes of the Noldor, and his skin was white.
That’s it. That’s the only one. So I think it’s fair to say that Tolkien described Maeglin as having white skin. One could even argue that Tolkien described the Noldor as white, since he does mention in this passage that Maeglin looks Noldor. But that’s a far cry from describing all Elves as white. In fact, I think it’s evidence of the opposite - the text does not bother mentioning that Maeglin has two eyes, or ten fingers, because those things are true of all Elves. But it does mention that his skin is white, maybe because that's not self-evident, maybe because it’s not true of all Elves.
Tolkien actually says very little about the skin color of any of his characters. Did he imagine them all as white? Quite possibly.
But even the most extreme adherents to author’s intent who I know don’t insist that we have to restrain ourselves to imagining the characters the way that the author arguably probably imagined them. I am more than happy to ignore or reimagine some of the incredibly troubling elements of the legendarium (and yes, they are there), but in this case, we don’t even need to do that.
Tolkien never describes his Elves as white skinned. There’s no reason to believe that all Elves had pale skin, and even if all Elves had pale skin not all people with pale skin are white.
It is okay to imagine Elves however you imagine them. But there’s nothing “objectively true” or “canonically correct” about imagining them universally white, and Tolkien never described them that way. And given that Elves are “beyond all other beauty that Iluvatar has caused to be”, and especially given that there are canonical POCs who are villains, I find the idea that they’re all white pretty icky. Even if Tolkien had explicitly described them that way, I would challenge it. But he didn’t, and the myth that he did is worth correcting as often and as loudly as necessary.
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