People have been talking about this news story from The Telegraph about a 2024 course at the University of Nottingham on the topic of "Decolonising Tolkien" (a summary by a Fox News reporter here, if you can't access the article itself). It is the sort of thing that one would expect. But I was caught short by this (using the Fox News summary):
According to The Telegraph, the course includes texts that accuse Tolkien’s work of "ethnic chauvinism" against orcs and other dark-skinned characters.
"It adds that Tolkien’s treatment of the fictional races shares in a tradition of ‘anti-African antipathy,’ in which people from Africa are painted as ‘the natural enemy of the white man,’"
The Telegraph reported. Nubia has reportedly argued "that eastern races in the fictional realm of Middle Earth are depicted as evil while fairer-skinned peoples of the West are shown as virtuous."
So here's the thing. Tolkien's orcs, with a few exceptions of uncertain status, are not dark-skinned. In the LOTR movies and in the Rings of Power television show, orcs are often depicted as having some form of a dark muddy greenish-bluish-black color of skin. But Tolkien's orcs are generally sallow-skinned. They are usually a sort of sickly yellowish-brown color. (The representation of the goblins in the Hobbit movies are probably closer to what Tolkien actually had in mind for most orcs. Occasional references to 'black Uruks' are referring not to skin-color but to their being the branch of Orcs most closely associated with the Dark Lord in Mordor, the Black Land, black meaning enshadowed.) There is a reason for that related to the comment by the professor in the last paragraph above -- Tolkien's descriptions of orcs are heavily influenced by fantastical literary descriptions of Huns and Mongols, who, of course, invaded with fire and flame from the East. When asked to describe the orcs by a reader once, he explicitly says that they look somewhat like short, unusually ugly Mongols.
So, no, nothing whatsoever to do with Africa. The "eastern races" comment is less wrong, although, again, the dynamics here are based on the Huns and the Mongols, and the East invading the West, so that the harshness of the description is because the ultimate root of it is literary legends about (you guessed it) the terrifying invading armies of the Huns and the Mongols. The only connection to "colonialism" is that the European writers who wrote these legends absolutely did not want to be colonized by Attila's armies or, later, the Golden Horde. (Of course, in Middle Earth, the eastern human races are also not depicted as 'evil', but oppressed and enslaved, and forced under duress to fight as a result of their enslavement. They are demanded tribute from conquered countries, and Sauron and the Witch-King use them as auxiliaries and, to use the later term, cannon fodder.The eastern societies may well be often evil, because in the story they are under the direct influence and part of the loose, widespread empire of Sauron, but we only know of them very indirectly. It's also the case that the Western people are not particularly virtuous, and, in fact, when Tolkien tried to write a sequel story about what happened to Gondor after the death of Aragorn, he eventually gave it up because the only story he could write was a depressing one about how corrupt and evil and orc-like they became.)
So not only is part of the line of thought based on a poorly thought-out account of the subject matter, it is not about any kind of real "decolonising" at all -- the whole point of 'decolonizing' is people recovering their heritage after having been subjugated by colonial empires; anything else is a cheapening of the concept, and a mere rhetorical abuse. And, of course, it's philistine in its core. The story is as it is; it is a work of art that needs to be assessed on its own terms. The relation of Orcs to any human race is entirely missing in the story -- famously, Tolkien never could decide how they fit in with Elves and Men, and at one point or other rejected all the possible options -- and if you imagine them to be non-white human races, this is, as they say, a 'you problem', rather than a Tolkien problem, because that's just not there in the story. If you think the tale is corrupting or detrimental to society, you are not talking literature anymore, you are talking ethics, and you need to give actual philosophical arguments appropriate to ethics, not vague insinuation or analogy.
