After years of creating Neo-Khuzdul lessons, grammar documents, dictionaries, exercises and other study materials, I am delighted to announce that Scholarium has officially opened its doors.
Scholarium is a completely free interactive learning platform where you can follow the Neo-Khuzdul course, complete exercises and examinations, practise with flashcards and crosswords, play language games, follow Story Letters, earn badges and track your progress through a guided lesson path.
Scholarium is the new home for learning Neo-Khuzdul, bringing lessons, exercises, flashcards, games, Story Letters, examinations and much mo
It brings the course and all its supporting materials together in one place, while introducing many new ways to practise and experience the language.
The included introductory video offers a first look inside Scholarium and some of the features waiting for you.
I have also written a longer article about how the idea for Scholarium began, how the platform developed and what this launch means for the older course systems, you can read it on the article wordpress blog.
A New Home for the Course
Scholarium now replaces the separate systems previously used to access different parts of the course.
Brainscape is no longer required. Scholarium has its own lesson-based flashcard system, including Practice, Memory and Challenge modes. Support for the Neo-Khuzdul content on Brainscape will end soon as well.
The downloadable Patreon lesson packages will also be removed within one week and replaced with a link to Scholarium. All their content, together with much more, is already available through the guided Scholarium lesson path.
The Google Forms exercises and examinations will also be taken offline within one week. Scholarium now includes its own exercise and examination system, created specifically for the course and offering far more possibilities than Google Forms.
The YouTube video lessons will remain available, but they are also included directly within Scholarium, where they can be watched without the advertisements you may otherwise encounter on YouTube.
Those who have already started the course through Patreon, Brainscape, YouTube or Google Forms can request to begin Scholarium at a particular lesson. However, I strongly recommend starting with Lesson 1, as Scholarium contains many new stories, games, exercises and activities that were not part of the earlier learning path.
The doors are open. Enter Scholarium and begin your studies today:
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I really donāt 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 Serkisā ākeep Tolkien whiteā 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 isnāt seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkienās āI hate apartheidā valedictorian address being used as a ācounterā to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except itās only ever the āI hate apartheidā line thatās 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 isnāt 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 āomg we relateā and expressing what is a very, very mild āsegregation is not greatā 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 āwhat do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?ā in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose oneās 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 itās anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuckā¦ and then getting really Pikachu-meme ābut theyāre misreading itā 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 āI donāt see colourā 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 donāt have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. Iām not surprised by Serkisā comment. I donāt 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 āI felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther setā āI somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possibleā Serkisā 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 doesnāt exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response āfuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, letās see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptationā. 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. Theyāre interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we donāt 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, itās always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had āa few racist elementsā but ānothing like the racism of todayā. Of course itās nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isnāt 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 āget thee gone from my gateā 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, Tolkienās 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 Tolkienās āproblematic elementsā 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 āBlack men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauronā¦ itās 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 "incidentalā, 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 legibleā¦ 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 āscandalā 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 Politicsā¢ļø, 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 didnāt 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 doesnāt 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 Tolkienās 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 itās 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 donāt realy say about most other ācanonicalā 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 āloveā? 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 NĆŗmenor 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 weāll 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 Tolkienās 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 donāt need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting ākeep the Shire whiteā Serkis soundbites and āhooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!ā 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 write these words with a broken heart. To those who read this and choose to ignore it, you can simply scroll past, but I am living through the most difficult moments of my life. My husband is slowly dying before my eyes. Due to a severe head and jaw injury, he has been unable to eat or drink for over a week, his weight has dropped to just 39 kilograms, and he is suffering from severe, life-threatening malnutrition.
The doctors confirmed he needs urgent surgery, but we can't afford the operation and treatment. I feel helpless watching him weaken day by day, while time is running out.š
I'm not asking for the impossible; I'm simply asking for a chance to save his life. Please, if you can't donate, don't hesitate to share our story. It might reach someone who can give him a new lease on life.šš
Sorry I started sobbing uncontrollably when you expressed the slightest concern for my lack of human connection, and casually mentioned you think I deserve better than a life of isolation and loneliness. Super weird. Not sure what was up with that lol. You still think Iām cool and mysterious and sexy, right?
Thank you, Black people in fandom spaces. Thank you, Black creators and Black lurkers. Thank you Black artists, Black writers. Thank you, Black bloggers, Black influencers. Shoutout to those Black characters, both canon and original. Thank you, Black people, both queer and cishet.
Your perspectives matter. Your representation matters. You are not bothersome for demanding equal treatment in fandom. It is not your responsibility to make fandom more welcoming and inclusive to you. It is not your sole responsibility to create all of the Black-centered content. You are not "ruining" anyone's fun for demanding better for yourself, and anyone who says otherwise can go fuck themselves. Any fandom worth being a part of should have no room for racism in it.
Black people in fandom, you are wanted. You are needed. You are loved and appreciated. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
And since they don't get told it near enough, thank you, Black women especially!!!
You are not "ruining" anyone's fun for demanding better for yourself, and anyone who says otherwise can go fuck themselves. Any fandom worth being a part of should have no room for racism in it.
