Started as a bagginshield blog but now is Hobbit/Tolkien/LotR and mostly Nwalin now. Still like Thorin x Bilbo but is a multi-shipper blog. Changing the name would break the link to my art on ao3 though. Thorin and Bilbo pics towards the beginning of the blog. Icon is by slugz01
Dwalin and other guards catching a thief ring, Dwalin goes in the hideout and comes up behind Nori, "Hands on the wall!"
Nori looks behind him and sees Dwalin, "You gonna search me? Fair warning I've got a knife in my pocket but I'm also happy to see you." Winks back at Dwalin.
IN THE BOOK!!!! In the book after they had successfully driven Smaug out of the mountain, Thorin comes up to Bilbo and gives him the mithril shirt, just like in the movie, HOWEVER in the book he continues to adorn Bilbo with jewelry and then plants a crown of pearls and white gems and crystals atop his head
…the KING under the mountain…puts a CROWN on bilbos head…
TL;DR, Tolkien was an extraordinarily humane writer who rejected many dominant racial ideologies of his era. However, his legendarium did inherit and reproduce the racial imagination of early 20th century Europe. These two positions are not contradictory, and it actually does matter what Tolkien publicly believed, even if his works don’t perfectly embody those beliefs.
...
Saying "Tolkien was unusually decent on race for an English academic born in 1892" is not the same thing as saying "Tolkien was morally flawless." Few serious Tolkien scholars would argue that Tolkien's work is free of racialized assumptions. It is worth talking about how to interpret those assumptions, how central they are to the legendarium, and how modern adaptions should engage with them.
Second, historical context does matter. It doesn't excuse everything, but it's how useful comparisons are made. To decide whether Tolkien was progressive, we need to compare him to other Oxford philologists and European writers of the early-to-mid 20th century.
On that comparison, there is good evidence he was ahead of his time: consider his outright rejection of the Nazi racial ideology in the 1938 letter, his condemnation of apartheid, his mistrust of imperial arrogance, and the recurring theme throughout his work that mercy and humility are preferable to power.
None of those erase the racialized geography of Middle-Earth or the descriptions of Southrons/Haradrim/Orcs but they do tell us something about what Tolkien personally believed, even if his fiction sometimes reproduced assumptions that don't sit easily with those beliefs. His documented opposition to Nazism and apartheid is not trivial. They are evidence that Tolkien's moral outlook on race was more expansive than many of his contemporaries, even if he did remain bounded by assumptions he himself never recognized.
We routinely evaluate historical works relative to their own moment while still recognizing their limitations.
Pride and Prejudice is by modern standards still a deeply gendered novel, but its insistence that women possess intellectual and moral agency pushed feminist thought forward. Maurice is centered on white upper-middle-class English men, but in 1913 simply writing a novel where two men fall in love, have sex and find happiness was radical. Huckleberry Finn was one of the strongest anti-slavery novels in American literature, while still reflecting assumptions and language of 19th century America.
The Lord of the Rings makes the renunciation of power rather than its acquisition the moral center of an epic fantasy. The commoners who reject glory are depicted as the real heroes. To an extent, it also undermines a simplistic view of racial superiority.
Consider Sam wondering about a dead Southron soldier:
He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace...
Sam doesn't just pity the Southron. He wonders about what he wanted, and who was waiting for him at home. It's an unusually empathetic scene for a wartime epic written in the 1940s.
The fact that in 2026 we can identify limitations in Tolkien's work is itself evidence that moral progress has occurred. Saying "he was progressive for 1950 but not 2026" isn't some special excuse; it's literally how history works.
Edit:
There's been some really thoughtful discussion in the comments on this post, and I wanted to add one last note on my own perspective as an Asian-American Tolkien reader. I can't speak for everyone, of course.
I have loved The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion since childhood. At the same time, there were times I felt let down by the stories before I had the language to explain why.
The character I most identified with in The Silmarillion was Maeglin: the person who was visibly different, mistrusted based on his origins and an “inborn” darkness, and inherited a litany of injustices done to his people that he couldn't even talk about because he lived among those responsible for them. I do not think Tolkien handled his story well.
It's a huge part of why I write fanfiction— to examine and rewrite the parts I feel Tolkien got wrong.
I have also learned that there were writers contemporary to Tolkien who handled race more elegantly than he did. I've also read enough across various decades to know that these problems also aren't unique to him. Many books I've genuinely loved, including ones written in the 70s 80s and 90s, were still rife with unkind assumptions about race, gender and sexuality. Structural bigotry is so pervasive that untangling it takes a lifetime of intentional study, and I am still trying to do that myself.
I do not expect any single work to contain the whole moral truth. That doesn't mean refusing to criticize places where work falls short; it means you can love something and still see its failures.
Lately I've been reading almost exclusively books by women, queer authors, and authors of color because I am actually so tired.
But am I still going to brainrot about a fantasy trilogy and legendarium published 76 years ago? Forever yes. It brings me so much more joy than pain, even knowing everything I do now. Precisely because I love it so much, I want to understand it as honestly as I can.
“Well, I like the Crystal Gems, and Sailor Moon,” I began, innocently enough. “Oh, and dwarves.”
“Dwarven sailor scouts!” came the all-too-quick reply.
“I’m sorry?” I stammered, ignorant as to what I had done.
“Dwarven sailor scouts!” they chorused, again and again. “Dwarven sailor scouts!” and the streets ran slick and red, while hellfire swirled around us. This was all my fault.
origamiaround
gracieabrams
