Cool lotr post! I didn't know Netflix was doing a remake! If it's not too much trouble, you mentioned canon brown hobbits? I'm interested in that, are you able or willing to point me to that or paraphrase the passage about it? Thanks!
i don’t know about the remake, they only bought the rights, that could mean anything
it should be somewhere in lotr appendices, part about hobbits; i can’t paraphrase because i read it years ago - when a person of color was denied role in the shire because there are no brown hobbits. me and some other folks went ‘wait a moment, we read the books and they were there.’ look at the part about migration of hobbits, they are pretty explicitly described as belonging to different races and having different skin tones.
i also remember that just before aragorn goes on the path of the dead, they are guided there by indigenous people who lived there before even gondor was founded, they are described as very different, but i can’t remember their skin tone
in addition, i reread the hobbit recently, and tolkien simply doesn’t shut up about the men of dale being indigenous to dale and different from those that moved there later - entire dale is racially mixed according to canon, and we don’t have physical description for anybody except bard (tall, long dark hair)
so of course everybody is white in the movies, except for 3 black extras appearing for one second each, it is the only logical interpretation for the eastern-most point of tolkien’s map, which is a merchant town with links to further east and south /sarcasm
dwarves also had different races, but i am not sure what the difference was, so i can’t say that it wasn’t more like a nationality than a race
and in general, when tolkien talks about people, he talks about different races of people, it is just that he talks about it in a very old fashioned (questionable) ways, and from a european standpoint where there are also different races of ‘white’ people in europe. as a slav and ethnic serb whose family was killed by the nazis, i am very fine with those distinctions, but they are confusing for those who only see us as white.
just remember if you are going to go digging for stuff like this, tolkien was racist. his descriptions of orcs and easterlings are racist, and he clearly prioritized western elves, humans as wiser, better etc. But that doesn’t mean other races aren’t there, or that we have to interpret his work in a racist way.
it is generally interpreted that way, not because that is accurate, but because creators in Hollywood and elsewhere have their own biases and agendas
