A few weeks ago one of my historical pet peeves was activated when I heard about a new Robin Hood movie that takes the groundbreaking, unprecedented, bold and visionary step of suggesting that the Middle Ages were a time of brutality, cynicism, and lawlessness.
Sarcasm alert. Everything I've heard about this movie sounds like it was created specifically to annoy me, so I'm going to try to ignore it and just talk about my pet peeve, which is this pop culture myth that the medieval period was particularly filthy, brutal, misogynistic and lawless.
Which is simply not the truth, and here's a true story from 1348 that shows the real Middle Ages.
We know this story because it's a very important moment in the development of common law - that is, the facts and the conclusion of the story were written down and became the basis for how similar cases would be decided long into the future. This 1348 judicial decision (citation: I de S et Uxor v W de S (1348) yb 22 edw iii f 99) is still read by law students today when studying the tort (or wrong) of assault. That's nearly seven hundred years of judges and lawyers looking back at a medieval judicial decision and saying, "Yes! That was a good and just decision!"
To set the stage, it's the 1300s - a century famous for the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Peasants' Revolt, and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church that saw the papacy moved to the French town of Avignon as puppets of the French monarchcy. But that's not the only thing that happens in the 1300s. This century also sees the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy; the Clockwork Revolution in which intricately designed clocks tracked everything from the hours of the day (which were measured in variable lengths) to the phases of the moon and the Sun's path through the zodiac; the creation of gorgeous books of hours and tapestries; the career of Christine de Pizan, the first woman known to have made a living from her pen; the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer and the radical social and religious reforms proposed by John Wyclif and his followers.
About the middle of this century a man known to history as W de S came in the night to the house of I de S and M, his wife, looking to buy some wine. The door to the taven was closed, so W pounded on the door with a hatchet, which he had in his hand. At this, M, the tavern-keeper's wife, put her head out the window and told him to stop. W responded by throwing the hatchet at M, narrowly missing her.
The tavern-keeper and his wife, contrary to what pop culture will tell you, responded exactly the way a couple of pub owners might respond today: they took the offender to court and argued that W had made an assault on M. W argued, in response, that he had committed no crime because the hatchet had not in fact struck M.
You might now be thinking that of course W would have won the case, since no actual physical harm was done to the woman he'd attacked. But you would be wrong! The judge in the case declared that the assault itself was harmful, and that W was liable to pay compensation for the fright he had caused M.
"Ever since then," states my old Torts textbook, "the tort of assault has extended protection to a person's right to be free of emotional disturbance brought about by intentional threats of physical violence."
Law did exist in the middle ages. Women, as well as men, could expect to be protected by the law from assault. And not only physical, but even emotional damages could be awarded for assault...all the way back in 1348.
It wasn't a perfect time, but it was far from the callous brutality depicted on our movie screens.
It does bug me that the "dung ages" trope is so deeply ingrained that it's basically impossible to actual depict the European Middle Ages any other way.
the thing about media literacy is that understanding why the author chose to specify that the curtains are blue is the same skill set as understanding that the way the author characterizes all black characters as angry or all chinese characters as meek and silent is racist. it is the same skill set as being able to identify when a news source is biased or when someone is feeding you propaganda. the ability to ask "why did this person choose to present this premise in this specific way?" is a critical skill in a world full of misinformation. why are the curtains blue? maybe it's a characterization detail. maybe it's extraneous worldbuilding. why is this character written as being right all the time? maybe you're intended to disagree with them. maybe it doesn't matter. maybe you should still ask why.
The only adaptation I'm aware of to engage w the hanging of the unfaithful maids is Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and I actually really didn't like the way she handled it
@platonce would love to hear more about your thoughts on the penelopeiad/how you would want to see it done
ok brief context first for any readers not aware: in the Odyssey, the unfaithful maids are a group of enslaved women in the house of Odysseus who are hanged for 'betraying' Odysseus by having sex with Penelope's suitors. In the Penelopiad they are instead Penelope's most faithful and trusted maids who she enlisted to spy on the suitors.
my issue w the Penelopiad on this subject is just that I think making it so the maids weren't actually 'unfaithful' carries the implication that if they had done all the things the Odyssey says they did then in some sense they would have had it coming.
as to how i would want it done, i suppose the main thing i would like to see acknowledged is that given that they were enslaved women the sex they had with the suitors would have been inherently coercive. (nb i think the Penelopiad does acknowledge this but as stated above I have other problems w its handling of the subject matter)
#the problem is so many try to make Odysseus a good person by modern standards#and he's not#and he's not even that great in the original context#his crew dies because of him#so many modern adaptations strip away everything that makes him not a hero#instead of adapting the source material accurately and letting the audience decide if he's still a hero or not
yeah I haven't seen the Nolan film but i read the summary bcos i was interested to see if they kept in the Unfaithful Maids and not only are they out but the film also seems to have really played down the massacre of the suitors?
which is another thing where like, even in the original context, we are not supposed to 100% agree with that!! its followed by a sequence where the suitors' families are all like 'dude what the fuck'
part of the emotional impact, to me, of the Odyssey is that we spent the whole epic being encouraged to sympathise w Odysseus as this almost everyman-type main character who just wants to go home and then at the end of the poem he murders a bunch of people. yikes!!
also i just stumbled on this essay talking about the unfaithful maids which I would recommend
it is--if not really surprising--so frustrating how extremely elementary, like literally "race in media 101" type criticisms of the racism in video games is received by white liberals with pronouns the exact same way that anita sarkeesian was received by neogaf chuds
Wanted to try out a new art style and can't say I don't love it. Couldn't decide if I liked the B&W or colored version better, so you get both. 50's pop art does something to me, I swear
From a production POV, I know Garsa's lekku and headpiece are designed to work as a single, hat-like unit, probably meant to avoid prosthetic application. The weight therefore needs to be balanced higher to avoid slipping off the back of Jennifer Beals's head. However, I can't help interpreting the very structural appearance of her headpiece as anything but an in-universe push-up bra for lekku. Garsa's would definitely dangle very differently without it. The morphology of lekku throughout SW canon demonstrates the diversity of growth and origin on the skull, and it wouldn't necessarily surprise me if there was, perhaps, a preference for 'lifted' lekku in certain cultures -- or certain lines of work.
I really don’t 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 Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ 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 isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s 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 isn’t 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 ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ 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 ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s 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 it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ 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 ‘I don’t see colour’ 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 don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t 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 ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ 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 doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. 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. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t 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, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t 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 ‘get thee gone from my gate’ 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, Tolkien’s 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 Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ 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 “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s 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 "incidental”, 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 ‘scandal’ 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 Politics™️, 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 didn’t 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 doesn’t 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 Tolkien’s 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 it’s 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 don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ 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 ‘love’? 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 Númenor 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 we’ll 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 Tolkien’s 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 don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” 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.
I feel privileged to be online during a time when pieces like this get written. I love the works of JRR Tolkien. I doubt the man would have made much of me or my values. (A feminist! A lapsed Catholic!) Except, perhaps, where he might. But trying to co-opt Tolkien as a progressive is crackers. Like, say, trying to co-opt Pope Leo for similar. I have much more to say on this but I’m just about to go to a Heartstopper publication day event with some excited young people. But love what you love, because god knows it's hard enough to find things that give us succour when we're living in a world mobilised against us, and meanwhile Peter Thiel not two miles away from where I sit now said that Sauron and Saruman are "deeply misunderstood".
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