The entire point of, OK, my phone really wants to call it Anastasia so I guess weâre doing that? The entire point of Anastasia (as administered by a board-certified Anastasiologist) during sugary. Sugary? Havenât I suffered enough? The entire point of Anastasia during augury. Jesus Christ. Hold up. You know what, augury is preferable to sugary. Augury is obviously performed by an auger (makes sense if you give it a think) whereas sugary is performed byâŠ? A sugardaddy? NO THANK YOU. Anyway. The entire point of Anastasia is so that you donât know what music your sturgeon. Fuck right off. Was playing. While you were under. Youâre not supposed to wake up from Anastasia and immediately realize you managed to get earwormed by Motörheadâs âAce of Spadesâ during your sugary.
I really donât want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkisâ âkeep Tolkien whiteâ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isnât seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkienâs âI hate apartheidâ valedictorian address being used as a âcounterâ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except itâs only ever the âI hate apartheidâ line thatâs shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isnât exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going âomg we relateâ and expressing what is a very, very mild âsegregation is not greatâ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around âwhat do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?â in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose oneâs own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist itâs anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck⊠and then getting really Pikachu-meme âbut theyâre misreading itâ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with âI donât see colourâ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely donât have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. Iâm not surprised by Serkisâ comment. I donât really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy âI felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther setâ âI somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possibleâ Serkisâ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesnât exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response âfuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, letâs see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptationâ. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. Theyâre interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we donât have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, itâs always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had âa few racist elementsâ but ânothing like the racism of todayâ. Of course itâs nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isnât writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very âget thee gone from my gateâ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkienâs own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkienâs âproblematic elementsâ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway âBlack men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron⊠itâs the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidentalâ, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible⊠casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge âscandalâ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politicsâąïž, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didnât want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesnât need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkienâs few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And itâs just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they donât realy say about most other âcanonicalâ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic âloveâ? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in NĂșmenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and weâll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkienâs world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We donât need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting âkeep the Shire whiteâ Serkis soundbites and âhooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!â news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
Sulfur combusts on contact with air to create stunning blue lava-like rivers of light in the Kawah Ijen crater on the island of Java | Ph: Olivier Grunewald
And one more bookbinding post! A shorter one. For my brother's wedding, he requested lotr. And I also have another cousin who is recently married and was supposed to he holding a wedding this year, but he and his wife were in a bad car accident that wasn't remotely their fault (rear-ended into incoming traffic), and recovery has been pretty long and gnarly, but I wanted to give them something nice as well. So! Double lotr, all the way across the sky.
I originally planned to mix it up more on the vibes between the two editions (partly so I myself could keep them straight and didn't gift the couples copies with the wrong names), but.... these marble print fabrics are just too powerful, I couldn't say no. I did enough differentiating with the titling and endpapers, it all worked out!
And, naturally, they both needed some edge illustration to take it to the next level!!
So, the green set. I found this gorgeous black and white paper a couple weeks ago at my local art store, and it was SO striking that I grabbed a couple sheets. I was worried at first that it was going to be too busy with the marbled fabric on the cover, but couldn't find anything else that sparked joy, and... i shouldn't have stressed so much, the combo is fantastic. I should trust the maximalist voices in my head! For this one I drew the scene from osgiliath, looking out at minas tirith
After THAT, i was looking to draw something that specifically wasn't More Buildings đ I had a pretty magenta paper I've been sitting on that harmonized surprisingly well with the minor colors in the blue fabric. I originally had my eye on a matching leather, but backed away to the same warm navy hide I used for the guestbook, which really gave the whole thing some nice dignity. And the opposite of drawing buildings is drawing CREATURES, so i went absolutely ham on balrog cross-hatching
Both these sets were a ton of fun and came out deliciously! And finished drying two whole days before the wedding! I got PLANY of time đ€Ł But truly, I'm not very good at repeating myself, so it means a lot to me that I can be this many lords of the rings deep and still be finding new ways to delight myself. I had a lot of fun with these sets!!
your email found me at the grocery store irl. that's crazy that you gave it little legs and everything. it walked right up to me. everyone was so scared one person screamed when i picked it up. i said it's okay you just do this kind of thing sometimes. while i was reading, its little legs were just sort of dangling in the air. someone asked me if it's alive and if holding it like that made it uncomfortable. i told them idk i just get the emails i don't send them.
Curufin wanders amidst the party and does his best not to look like heâs losing his mind. Despite being held in Tirion, most of the guests - and the hosts - are Vanyar, which means the conversations are less craft-centered and more focused on the Valar or Maiar, everyone sharing gossip on the latest trouble Mithrandir has caused, or if Curumoâs spirit has been pardoned yet, or the very loud fight between OromĂ« and Yvanna which nearly caused an earthquake. Ridiculously boring topics for conversation, but Curufin bares it all with a polite smile.Â
He may be the only FĂ«anorian willing to brave court politics in this new age, but heâs not the only FinwĂ«an there. Galadriel, splendid in gold and white, is also in attendance. Curufin does his best to avoid her - the last thing his family needs is for him to cause trouble - but when he tries to walk by she reaches out and grabs him.Â
âWhat excellent timing, cousin.â Galadrielâs fingers are tight on his forearm, and she all but yanks him to her side. âJoin us for a moment.â
Curufin bites back the urge to snap at her. He does not know what game she is playing, smiling at him as though they are friends, but that he wants no part of it. âI would not want to intrude on your conversation,â he says, trying to pull away, but her grip only tightens.Â
âNot at all,â says Galadriel, in a cheerfully bright tone that does not match the ice in her eyes. âYou see, we were just talking about TylepĂ«.â
âOh?â That catches Curufin's attention. His son, newly reembodied, currently rests in LĂłrien. Sauron had damaged him far beyond what even Nienna could repair, and so it is up to EstĂ« to continue the long work of healing his soul.Â
âAiwener has some opinions about his return to life,â continues Galadriel, gesturing at the other elf. âI think youâd find them fascinating.â
âI was only voicing a concern,â says Aiwener. Curufin has never seen him before and sizes him up quickly. The other elf is young, Vanyarian from his style of dressing, and clearly a fool in how he does not seem to recognize who Curufin is.Â
âIt is only,â says Aiwener, âthat he was held captive by the Enemy for so long and in such a brutal capacity. Sauron did all he could to break into his mind. How do we know that such evil does not still linger within him, waiting to take root and destroy our blessed land? Even a single seed of Sauronâs malice could blossom into terrible fruit if left unchecked. Would it not be better for the Valar to unravel his soul entirely?â
âYou would erase him?â Curufinâs voice matches Galadrielâs now: false cheer that barely masks the fire beginning to burn beneath his tongue.Â
âI would sacrifice him for the greater good, yes,â says Aiwener. He frowns, unhappy with Curufinâs clear dislike of the idea. âYou donât agree?â
âNot at all,â says Curufin. âYou, cousin?â
âI disagree with the idea as well,â she says.Â
Curufin is not surprised. Celebrimbor has always been the one FĂ«anorian that Galadriel has always loved, even before everything between their families broke so disastrously. And why wouldnât he be? Who could not love Celebrimbor, brilliant and brave and better than all the rest of them put together?
But Aiwener does not understand. âI can see why Lady Artanis would be against such a thing, for her wide heart and merciful nature are well known. But why - â he turns to Curufin â- do you care if he lives or fades to nothing?â
âI am his father,â says Curufin, and he lets some of the fire loose upon that last word. Letâs his eyes blaze as he glares back at this elf who would dare threaten his child.Â
Aiwenerâs mouth opens and closes like a fish gasping for air before managing to stumble out âI see my friend excuse me.â He all but runs away from them, and it is only then that Galadriel releases Curufinâs arm.Â
âIgnorant fool,â she mutters. A server passes by them and she snags two glasses of white wine.Â
âIndeed,â says Curufin, accepting one of the glasses from her. âIâm surprised he did not know who I was.â
Galadriel scoffs. âAiwener is young and extremely ignorant of history. Still, that does not stop him from being full of fears.â
âAnd judgement.â Curufin narrows his eyes. Aiwener has become lost in the crowd, but it wouldnât be hard to find out more information about him. âShould I be worried?â
âPerhaps,â says Galadriel. She stares down into her wine as though it is her scrying mirror. âHe is not the only one to have shared such an idea, only the most vocal. I have heard whispers of a petition collecting support for the idea.â
The thought of losing his son again, in an even worse and final way, makes Curufinâs blood boil. âYour father would not accept such a thing.â
âHe wouldnât,â says Galadriel, âbut the petition is not for him.â
âManwĂ«.â Damn them all! Would Celebrimbor never be allowed peace? Years of courage and sacrifice and being good, all counted for nothing due to a few paranoid, ignorant fools. âWe cannot allow that to happen.â
âNo,â agrees Galadriel, âwe cannot.â
She raises her glass and Curufin touches his against it. Seals their unlikely alliance with that sharp, bright sound.Â
âWell then, cousin,â he says, âwhat do you suggest we do first?âÂ
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