Bloggers who spend precious hours engaging in vendettas against other bloggers or well-known public figures are typically a bore. As a general rule, then, Greymantle doesn’t use this space to pick fights or purposely aggravate other people in the ‘blogosphere’.
But the exception proves the rule, as the old expression goes.
Therefore, I am going to beg the indulgence of my readers in order to post a rebuttal to criticisms made in late-October 2022 by NY Times op-ed writer Ross Douthat concerning casting choices made by the producers of Amazon Prime’s prestige fantasy television drama, “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Season One). In our view, Douthat’s criticisms are way off base, hence our latest installment is titled “Fumbling the ‘Race and Rings’ Controversy: The Strange Case of Ross Douthat”.
Let me start off by making clear that I greatly admire Mr. Douthat as an opinion columnist and nonfiction author. I’ve read all of his books but one, and Douthat has long been my favorite NYT columnist — which is really saying something given that I admire several other NYC op-ed writers.
That being said, Douthat’s negative reaction to Rings’ diverse casting struck me as particularly wrong-headed given Douthat’s personal investment in both the fantasy genre and Roman Catholicism. Catholicism infuses ‘Rings’, albeit in subtle and indirect ways. ‘Rings’ therefore made an odd target for Douthat’s criticism, one that merits a thoughtful riposte.
Hold on a second, Greymantle, the reader might now object. What’s the point of answering criticisms made two months after the fact? The first season of ‘Rings of Power’ wrapped in October, man! This is old news. Treat us to a new subject, thank you very much.
To all of which Greymantle responds by reminding his readers that we are now in the ‘short week’ between Christmas and New Years’, a brief spell during which nothing of importance ever occurs. There simply isn’t much to write about except established grudges and controversies.
Greymantle chooses to focus on the “race and Lord of the Rings casting controversy” because ‘Rings’ is close to his heart and Ross Douthat’s writing is likewise close to his heart, and if I can’t throw a few verbal punches on my blog during the ‘short week’, then when can I throw them? In keeping with the seasonal spirit of self-indulgence, Greymantle is going to engage in a little self-indulgence of his own.
And, gentle readers, if the subject bores you, then I promise to make it up to you later this week with not one, but two new blog posts: Greymantle’s 2022 Year in Review (I pledge to keep it brief) and our 2023 Look Ahead post, which will be briefer still, but all the more a pleasure to read.
Now, into the breach.
THE TROUBLE WITH ‘CULTURAL PROPERTY’
Most of us – excepting those of us who are wealthy, however you choose to define that term – don’t own all that much. Not in the legal sense. We live our lives surrounded by other people’s possessions.
Objects of culture represent a kind of anomaly within our mental landscape. Paintings and sculptures have individual owners, but the “Mona Lisa” occupies a collective space in the hearts and minds of Western men and women that approximates a form of surrogate ownership.
If a Russian intelligence operative or Islamic terrorist defaced the “Mona Lisa”, it would illicit a reaction of collective outrage across Western and Southern Europe, and likely in the hearts of a fair number of North and South Americans, too. “How dare they!” would be the immediate and unmediated reaction. “How dare one of them damage what is ours!”
Now, I can’t tell you who currently owns “the Mona Lisa” in the legal sense. For all I know, it’s the French government. But it could just as well be some wealthy Italian or Japanese collector, or even (and this would be ironic given the example given above) a Russian oligarch.
The legal ownership of a critical object of culture really isn’t the point. In a lot of ways, the sense of ‘cultural ownership’ is of greater importance.
Think of the passions and controversies connected with the Elgin Marbles or the Benin Bronzes, to name two major works of culture that have arguably been in the ‘wrong’ hands for centuries, and you get some idea of the passions unleashed when cultural property gets mis-appropriated.
Or what have you. The eye and mind of the beholder is what is really at issue here. It has nothing to do with copyrights. And possession isn’t “nine tenths of the law”, either. The matter resides in the heart.
These are the passions running through the core of the “diverse casting and Rings of Power” controversy (or “race and Rings” or whatever you choose to call it), and they are pretty powerful passions.
THOUGHT EXERCISE: SPACE ALIENS CONSIDER PROPERTY
There is a thought exercise Greymantle enjoys playing out in his mind that goes like this: an unidentified flying object (UFO) lands on my front lawn and a group of little green aliens descends the exit ramp and knock on my front door. To my amazement, they ask me to explain to them the contours of some contemporary cultural phenomenon.
They have been watching Earth, they say, and would like to understand what the big deal is with anti-vaccine sentiment among Republicans. Or what the origins of Wicca are. Or why teenage girls admire Taylor Swift.
Why the “race and Rings” controversy erupted in 2022 is the latest question posed by the little green men. Given their role as disinterested foils, I try my best to oblige them.
‘Well, green men, Lord of the Rings occupies a venerated cultural space in the hearts of many politically conservative white Christians. In the US, in particular, this demographic views ‘Rings’ as a kind of appendix to The Bible and a central work of art that both explains and is a commentary on the recent history of the Western world.”
“Really? A fictional saga about hobbits and elves set in a mythical pre-historic Earth thousands of years before Christ is a commentary on the Second World War, Soviet communism, and the Cold War?” ask the aliens.
“Well, not exactly,” I reply. “That’s a bit of a stretch. There are some loose analogies to those events built into the text. But the author was aiming to create a perennial mythology that would transcend all eras. Some conservatives seized on the loose analogies to contemporary events referenced above and adopted ‘Rings’ as a kind of one-size-all Ur-text to make sense of their experience. They now feel that they ‘own’ the saga.”
“But who actually owns ‘the Rings of Power’?” the aliens ask.
“A complicated question. Something called the Tolkien Estate owns the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s written and printed works. Jeff Bezos, owner of the company Amazon, owns the rights to the ‘Rings of Power’ TV series, rights that he purchased from the Tolkien Estate. Many fans of Tolkien’s books do not like the fact that Bezos now has the legal power to interpret several of Tolkien’s written works. They don’t trust him.”
“Why not?”
“Because he is a leader in the US technology industry, which is riddled with leftish social and political sentiments that are in direct conflict with the values of social conservatives,” I respond.
“They believe an enemy has taken control of a critical piece of their cultural property?” inquire the green men.
“Exactly!” I reply. “You nailed it. Conservatives fear that Jeff Bezos and the people he hired to produce ‘Rings’ are believers in ‘Wokeness‘ – a social and philosophical movement that began on US college campuses in the 1980s. The leaders of this movement are essentially trying to adapt Marxist-inspired Third World anti-colonial ideologies from the 1950s for use as a rhetorical tool in contemporary US political struggles.”
“You sound like a Marxist yourself when you use terms like that!”
“I know. But I’m not.”
“Are the conservatives right about Bezos and Wokeness?”
“That’s rather unclear. I doubt Jeff Bezos and the producers of ‘Rings’ are hardcore ‘wokesters’. But they do seem to believe, to some extent, in the concept of ‘Diversity and Inclusion’, which means they value having actors and artists from demographically diverse racial and ethnic groups in the cast and crew of ‘Rings’. They wish the casting to reflect the increasingly mixed ethnic nature of the Anglophone countries.”
“But why is that controversial?”
“Because the rapidly changing ethnic nature of Britain and the US is itself a point of significant contention and controversy. And because the social conservatives, who are largely white and heavily Christian, view ‘Rings’ and other works by Tolkien as part of a broader cultural heritage now under threat from a variety antagonistic social groups,” I respond.
“Don’t conservatives strongly believe in capitalism and make a particular point of defending ownership rights? Why wouldn’t they believe that Jeff Bezos can do whatever he wants with his money?”
“They do. But it’s galling to them to see someone beat them at their own game whose views don’t completely align with their own.”
WHO OWNS NUMENOR?
The aliens are now thoroughly perplexed. Though able to understand the conflict over ‘property’ on a rational level, the green men are confused by the contradictions between the legal and cultural property concepts.
Who owns Numenor? Who owns Tolkien’s fictitious island kingdom of Middle Earth’s Second Age? So they might ask.
Well, technically the Tolkien Estate does. Then Jeff Bezos bought the rights to re-create Numenor on film by incorporating various references to it found in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ novels into his television series.
But in their hearts, each fan of Tolkien has his or her very own Numenor. And that Numenor is the offspring of his or her heart and Tolkien’s language. A private inner paradise, if you will.
Trespass on someone’s private paradise and you are asking for trouble.
Evidence of this abounds. The Atlantic Monthly ran a good piece by Adam Serwer back in September titled “Fear of a Black Hobbit” that summarizes the recent backlash against diverse casting in high-concept fantasy and science fiction dramas. It offers a good summary of big-budget television shows and films (e.g. ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘Star Wars’) that have utilized more diverse casting and the conservative backlash against those choices.
The odd and, Greymantle would argue, ridiculous element in many arguments against (or at least in many individual criticisms of) diverse casting is the ‘contra’ camp’s contention that ‘because such-and-such story is based upon European culture, the characters should logically be white or European and be cast accordingly’.
That seems a bit of a stretch for an epic like ‘Star Wars’ that is set in a distant galaxy, home to 20 million sentient species and thousands of human cultures. It strains credulity to apply the same standard to ‘Game of Thrones‘ in the sense that while central elements of the cultures in ‘The Song of Fire and Ice’ are modeled on medieval Europe, other elements derive from the Near and Far East, mixing up the picture considerably.
And unlike the late J.R.R. Tolkien who authored ‘Lord of the Rings’, the author of the novels ‘A Game of Thrones’ is based on, George R.R. Martin, is alive and kicking and one of the show’s writers. If Martin himself has no issue with diverse casting and has supported the show runners’ efforts in this respect, then why should (some) fans object?
TRUMPISM AT PLAY, ONCE AGAIN
The crux of the matter appears to lie in America’s specific set of right-wing obsessions and in Trumpist political culture. The Trumpist sensibility is ‘pugnacious and oppositional’ according to David French of the online news magazine, The Dispatch, an opinion echoed by many other observers, both foreign and domestic, of Trumpism.
The core Trump supporter is likely to be older or middle aged, more likely to be white, and more likely to be obsessed with a sense of cultural loss and threatened with declining social status. Trumpism looks for targets and scapegoats to justify its sense of threat and frequently finds those targets in the realm of American popular culture, which has become more socially and racially integrated since the 1960s.
Adam Serwer’s article quoted at length a one Brandon Morse, an editor for the right-wing news site, RedState, who expressed much of what concerns Trumpian populists while using Amazon’s ‘Rings of Power’ TV series as a focus point: “The show’s producers have cast non-White actors as characters in a story based on European culture who look wildly different from how Tolkien originally described them. It’s an attempt to embed social justice politics in Tolkien’s world. If you introduce modern political sentiments…then you’re no longer focused on building a good story.”
These words distill many common objections to diverse casting.
THE STRANGE CASE OF ROSS DOUTHAT
Now, here is where Greymantle shifts his focus slightly to speculate on the strange case of Ross Douthat, NY Times opinion columnist, National Review movie critic, celebrated author, unapologetic pro-lifer and self-identified ‘Never Trump’ conservative.
Douthat has been an opponent of Trump and Trumpism since Day One (that was the day the Orange One rode down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his run for President), so it’s a bit odd to find him echoing the Trumpist line contra diverse casting in his October 28, 2022 column. Click on the link and read his argument for yourself. Don’t take it from me.
I will admit it. Greymantle read that column and was perplexed. Douthat has scant love for ‘Game of Thrones’ and its author, but grudgingly admits that the racially diverse casting of ‘House of the Dragon’ works and has a commonsensical basis in ‘real world’ experience. He then tears into ‘Rings’ casting choices as being akin to a Benetton ad.
Here are some snippets that summarize Douthat’s argument:
“When you consider that several thousand years pass between the events of the famous trilogy and the antecedents depicted in ‘Rings of Power’ it seems easy enough to imagine diversifications that don’t betray anything essential to Tolkien’s world. If the Hobbits of the Shire are supposed to look like plump Englishmen, for instance, that doesn’t mean their distant Harfoot cousin-ancestors can’t looks more African or Asian.”
“But notice…that I’ve evoked…a racial re-imagining of Tolkien’s peoples that still treats them as peoples (Douthat’s italics). With shared histories and phenotypical traits passed down similarly to the way they are in our world (Greymantle’s italics), whose past Middle-Earth is supposed to embody.”
“This isn’t what ‘Rings of Power’ ended up doing. Instead, on the Amazon show each tribe and people is internally multiracial, resembling an elite college campus engineered for maximal diversity…On the show, every kingdom and clan, however insular, whether human or non-human, boasts the diversity of a United Colors of Benetton advertisement.”
“Now, one could certainly invent a fantasy world where skin color and physical characteristics are assigned randomly at birth and every family is home to a perfect cross-section of the human race. But that would need to be part of the world building…and ‘Rings of Power’ isn’t doing that. It’s just asking us to accept this Benetton-world without any explanation.”
“It’s a constant reminder that a story set in vanished Numenor…actually belongs emphatically to America in 2022.”
To be fair to Douthat, he does bring up a valid point about the internally multi-racial character of the various tribes and nations featured in ‘Rings of Power’. At first blush, that does seem to be intuitively at odds with Tolkien’s portrayal of the distinct peoples who frequently live apart from each other in his fictional world.
However, where I find fault with Douthat is in his failure – and it is an instance of failure rather than a direct refusal – to mine Tolkien’s original texts for a plausible alternative explanation. And such alternative explanations do exist, as I will demonstrate below.
The fact that Douthat avoided a deeper examination of the text is what irks Greymantle given Douthat’s longstanding Tolkien fandom and deeper (one would presume) philosophical connection to the text given his status as a committed Roman Catholic and follower of the ‘Great Books’ tradition.
Rather than digging deeper and knowing better, Douthat fell into the same trap that captured his Trumpist antagonists and he wound up echoing, albeit in a more reasoned manner, the concerns of populists like RedState’s Mr. Morse. A poor showing from the man who wrote a column in 2019 deriding Mr. Trump as America’s ‘Nihilist in Chief’!
But, what is it that conservative critics of ‘diverse’ casting misunderstand about many and varied fantasy worlds, and Tolkien’s in particular?
THE POWER OF WORDS IN ‘CREATED WORLDS’
Greymantle believes he has the answer. The explanation lies in a tragic misreading of the nature of both Tolkien’s world of Arda (of which Middle Earth is the largest continent) and other worlds created by science fiction and fantasy authors such as C.S. Lewis by Mr. Douthat and other, less savory conservative critics.
Here’s the key: Middle Earth, like C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Land, is a created world. It was created by a Divine Creator and, as such, does not conform to the particular laws of nature and evolution that we modern people have grown accustomed to carrying around our heads as an unconscious frame of reference. Nor should they be expected to conform to those natural laws.
Furthermore, when it comes to Arda/Middle Earth, Tolkien seldom provides detailed physical descriptions of his characters. This is particularly true of “The Silmarillion” and all works derived from it. These are the texts that most strongly influence the ‘Rings of Power’ television series.
Take Tolkien’s description of the ‘awakening’ of the human race at the dawn of Arda’s First Age of the Sun as given in “The Silmarillion”:
“At the first rising of the Sun the Younger Children of Illuvatar awoke in the land of Hildorien in the eastward regions of Middle Earth; but the first Sun arose in the West, and the opening eyes of Men were turned towards it, and their feet as they wandered over the Earth for the most part strayed that way. The Atani they were called by the Eldar, the Second People; but they called them also Hildor, the Followers, and many other names…”
Note the lack of any physical description of the first Men in this passage. The narrative is descriptive in a mystical sense, but not in a material one. The race of Men ‘awoke’ in an eastward land and, upon opening their eyes, beheld the first sunrise. They then journeyed in the direction of the light. What follow are the names given to Men by the Eldar (elves), of which many are contained in the same chapter.
It is this acting of naming, of bestowing words upon something, that Tolkien finds meaningful. He does not even bother to describe the appearance of the first Men. To Tolkien, their physical characteristics were so incidental as to not merit mentioning.
Witness another key passage from “The Silmarillion” wherein the first humans enter the elven realm of Beleriand and are encountered by Galadriel’s brother, Finrod:
“When three hundred years or more were gone since the Noldor came to Beleriand, Finrod Felagund lord of Nargothrond journeyed east of Sirion and went hunting with Maeglor and Maedhros, sons of Feanor. In a valley among the foothills of the mountains, he saw lights in the evening, and far off he heard the sound of song.”
“As he drew near he perceived that…the singers used a tongue that he had not heard before, neither that of Dwarves or of Orcs. Then Felagund, standing in the night-shadow of the trees, looked down into the camp, and there he beheld a strange people.”
“These were part of the kindred and following of Beor the Old, as he was afterwards called…after many lives of wandering out of the East he had led them at last over the Blue Mountains, the first of the race of Men to enter Beleriand; and they sang because they were glad, and believed they had escaped from all perils and had come at last to a land without fear.”
“Long Felagund watched them, and love for them stirred in his heart; but he remained hidden in the trees until they had all fallen asleep. Then he went among the sleeping people and sat beside their dying fire where none kept watch. And he took up a rude harp which Beor had laid aside, and he played such music upon it as the ears of Men had not heard…”
“Now men awoke and listened to Felagund as he harped and sang, and each thought that he was in some fair dream…because of the beauty of the music and the wonder of the song. Wisdom was in the words of the Elven-king, and (their) hearts grew wiser that hearkened to him…”
Note again that Tolkien provides no physical description of the human tribe in this passage, nor of Finrod. Tolkien doesn’t say whether Beor’s people look Asiatic in appearance, or African, or European, or whether their hair was red or black or blond or some unknown color. Tolkien focuses primarily on their language and their emotional state.
Likewise, the Men, upon waking to Finrod’s song, aren’t struck dumb by the beautiful features (presumably) of the Elven-king, but by the wonder and wisdom of his music. Mainly by its wisdom, which they are unable to directly comprehend given their lack of knowledge of the Elvish language, but which they are able to deduce the essence of nonetheless.
Why didn’t Tolkien provide a physical description of Beor’s people? I would suggest the answer is that such a description was irrelevant. If physical details were relevant, a writer as great as Tolkien would provide them.
It’s the words that matter. And the Word.
Tolkien never forgets that his world is a created world. Middle Earth is his creation. And Tolkien himself – in his own view – is a sub-creator of a much greater Creator. A much greater Author.
Some of America’s conservative critics appear to have forgotten this notion. Certainly Mr. Morse of RedState did, when he was quoted as saying about ‘Rings of Power’ that: “The show’s producers have cast non-White actors as characters in a story based on European culture who look wildly different from how Tolkien originally described them.”
In fact, Tolkien never did describe them. So Mr. Morse has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.
THE WILL OF ILLUVATAR
And now a final riposte to Mr. Douthat.
In a created world, there is a perfectly simple explanation for the multi-racial nature of the peoples and species depicted in Amazon’s ‘Rings of Power’. The explanation is that the ancestors of these peoples were created at once – in a single stroke – at a single geographic location, so all possible races of Dwarves, Men, Hobbits, etc. were physically present at the creation.
Given that humans were created at the dawn of the First Age, the Race of Men in late Second Age Middle Earth is less than 3,000 years old. They have not had the time to divide themselves into distinct ‘racial’ groups. If the original Men migrated en masse from Hildorien in the East to the western lands of Middle Earth, then we would naturally expect all races of Men to be mixed in together among Middle Earth’s kingdom’s.
No ‘natural selection’ is going on here. Humans who appear ‘African’ in Middle Earth don’t appear that way because one hundred generations under a tropical sun led their ancestors to produce more melanin in their skin. Humans who appear ‘Asian’ in Middle Earth don’t look that way because the epicanthic fold evolved after their ancestors spent 8,000 years resisting the fierce glare and dust conditions of the Gobi Desert.
Human beings, both individuals and groups, appear the way they do in Middle Earth because that is the way Illuvatar – the creator being of Arda – created them. It’s all the result of Illuvatar’s decisions. And the show-runners have broad freedom to interpret those decisions in a created world that lacks clear physical descriptions of its human peoples.
Ditto with Elves, Hobbit and Dwarves.
The ancestors of all these species were created at a single stroke at a single location. And Middle Earth is too ‘young’ a world to allow for much natural physical development. If dwarvish kingdoms contain dwarves of varied colors, then maybe that’s what Aule intended. Or maybe the seven dwarf kingdoms have actively exchanged brides via arranged marriages.
So, there is your answer, RossDouthat! What you described as a Benetton Ad is actually a logically plausible interpretation of the intentions of both J.R.R. Tolkien and his creator god, Illuvatar. As I see it, J.R.R. Tolkien would be pleased with Amazon Prime’s TV series based on his books.
And now, I think we can all stop obsessing over ‘diverse casting’ and get back to enjoying our movies and television.
Merry (belated) Christmas!
Greymantle
