Tolkien and race
Attitudes to race in the fictional works of J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy writings have been said to embody outmoded attitudes to race. He was exposed as a child to Victorian attitudes to race, and to a literary tradition of monsters. In his personal life, he was anti-racist both in peacetime and during the two World Wars.
With the late 19th-century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline, Robin Anne Reid and others have suggested that the presentation of the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings embodies scientific racism. David Ibata has stated that Peter Jackson's depiction of the Orcs in his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy was modelled on racist wartime propaganda caricatures of the Japanese. Tolkien said that his Dwarves were reminiscent of the Jews, raising questions of possible antisemitism. John Magoun has said that the work embodies what he calls a moral geography, namely that the West of Middle-earth is good and the East is evil.
In his personal life, Tolkien strongly opposed Nazi racial theories, as seen in a 1938 letter he wrote to his publisher. In the Second World War he vigorously opposed anti-German propaganda. Sandra Ballif Straubhaar has described Middle-earth as definitely polycultural and polylingual.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q102310087. The first chronological checks are 1938.
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