{"id":112057,"date":"2016-02-28T21:17:12","date_gmt":"2016-02-28T21:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/02\/28\/jewishzevran-prokopetz-nobodys-going-to\/"},"modified":"2016-02-28T21:17:12","modified_gmt":"2016-02-28T21:17:12","slug":"jewishzevran-prokopetz-nobodys-going-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/02\/28\/jewishzevran-prokopetz-nobodys-going-to\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

jewishzevran<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

prokopetz<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Nobody\u2019s going to deny that, as it\u2019s conventionally depicted, Middle-Earth – the setting of The Hobbit<\/i> and The Lord of the Rings<\/i> – is awfully monochrome. In art, basically everybody is drawn as white, and all major depictions in film have used white actors.<\/p>\n

When this state of affairs is questioned, the defences typically revolve around \u201caccuracy\u201d, which can mean one of two things: fidelity to the source material, and the internal consistency of the setting. Being concerned primarily with languages and mythology, Tolkien left few clear descriptions of what the peoples of Middle-Earth actually look like, so in this case, arguments in favour of the status quo more often rest on setting consistency.<\/p>\n

Of course, we need hold ourselves neither to fidelity nor to consistency – the author\u2019s dead, and we can do what we want. However, what if I told you that there\u2019s a reasonable argument to be made from that very standpoint of setting consistency<\/b> that Aragorn – the one character you\u2019d most expect to be depicted as a white dude – really ought to be portrayed as Middle Eastern and\/or North African?<\/p>\n

First, consider the framing device of Tolkien\u2019s work. The central conceit of The Lord of the Rings<\/i> – one retroactively extended to The Hobbit<\/i>, and thereafter to later works – is that Tolkien himself is not the story\u2019s author, but a mere translator of writings left behind by Bilbo, Frodo and other major characters. Similarly, Middle-Earth itself is positioned not as a fictional realm, but as the actual prehistory of our own world. As such, the languages and mythologies that Tolkien created were intended not merely to resemble their modern counterparts, but to stand as plausible ancestors for them.<\/p>\n

Now, Aragorn is the king of a tribe or nation of people called the D\u00fanedain. Let\u2019s take a closer look at them in the context of that prehistoric connection.<\/p>\n

If the D\u00fanedain were meant to be the forebears of Western Europeans, we\u2019d expect their language,\u00a0Ad\u00fbnaic, to exhibit signs of Germanic (or possibly Italic) derivation – but that\u2019s not what we actually see. Instead, both the phonology and the general word-structure of\u00a0Ad\u00fbnaic seem to be of primarily Semitic derivation, i.e., the predominant language family throughout the Middle East and much of North Africa. Indeed, while relatively little Ad\u00fbnaic vocabulary is present in Tolkien\u2019s extant writings, some of the words we do know seem to be borrowed directly from classical Hebrew – a curious choice if the \u201cmen of the West\u201d were intended to represent the ancestors of the Germanic peoples.<\/p>\n

Additionally, the\u00a0D\u00fanedain are descended from the survivors of the lost island of N\u00famenor, which Tolkien had intended as an explicit analogue of Atlantis. Alone, this doesn\u2019t give us much to go on – unless one happens to know that, in the legendarium from which Tolkien drew his inspirations, the Kingdoms of Egypt were alleged to be remnant colonies of Atlantis. This connection is explicitly reflected in the strong Egyptian influence upon Tolkien\u2019s descriptions of N\u00famenorean funereal customs. We thus have both linguistic and cultural\/mythological ties linking the survivors of N\u00famenor to North Africa.<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019m not going to claim that Tolkien actually envisioned the D\u00fanedain as North African; he was almost certainly picturing white folks. However, when modern fans argue that Aragorn and his kin must be depicted as white as a matter of setting consistency<\/b>, rather than one of mere authorial preference, strong arguments can be made that this need not be the case; i.e., that depicting the D\u00fanedain in a manner that would be racialised as Middle Eastern and\/or North African by modern standards is, in fact, entirely consistent with the source material, ethnolinguistically speaking. Furthermore, whether they agreed with these arguments or not, any serious Tolkien scholar would at least be aware of them.<\/p>\n

In other words, if some dude claims that obviously everyone in Tolkien is white and acts like the very notion of depicting them otherwise is some outlandish novelty, you\u2019ve got yourself a fake geek boy.<\/p>\n

(As an aside, if we turn our consideration to the Easterlings, the human allies of Sauron who have traditionally been depicted in art as Middle Eastern on no stronger evidence than the fact that they\u2019re baddies from the East, a similar process of analysis suggests that they\u2019d more reasonably be racialised as Slavic in modern terms. Taken together with the preceding discussion, an argument can be made that not only is the conventional racialisation of Tolkien\u2019s human nations in contemporary art unsupported by the source material, we may well have it precisely backwards!)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

THIS^^^^^^^^^^^^^<\/p>\n

also just a reminder that when we first meet Aragorn in Fellowship he\u2019s described as\u00a0\u2018dark\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

jewishzevran: prokopetz: Nobody\u2019s going to deny that, as it\u2019s conventionally depicted, Middle-Earth – the setting of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – is awfully monochrome. In art, basically everybody is drawn as white, and all major depictions in film have used white actors. When this state of affairs is questioned, the defences … <\/p>\n

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