Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015), ed. by Ralph C. Wood

Book review by Robin Anne Reid of Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015) ed. by Ralph C. Woo

Women & Tolkien: Amazons, Valkyries, Feminists, and Slashers

This paper reports on an early pilot project that asks women who self identify as readers or fans of Tolkien\u27s work and/or teachers who have taught Tolkien\u27s work, and/or scholars who have published on Tolkien\u27s work to answer a few open-ended questions about their reasons for enjoying his work. By women, I mean anybody who identifies as a woman. By Tolkien\u27s work, I mean any of his published novels, stories, poems, or academic essays. The study arises from the question that is often asked of fans of Tolkien\u27s work: why do women so enjoy it, given the relatively minor narrative roles women play

Race in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and in Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor

Recent scholarship on how Tolkien\u27s Orcs influenced popular fantasy agrees upon the spread of racist clichés and stereotypes. Dieter Petzold, in \u27Oo, Those Awful Orcs!\u27: Tolkien\u27s Villains as Protagonists in Recent Fantasy Novels, analyzes how four novels attempt but fail to present orcs as focal and sympathetic characters. In Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, Helen Young argues that the influence Tolkien\u27s Orcs had on fantasy literature, film, and games is that of structural racism in which race [is] the conventional framework around which difference is built (35). She acknowledges that critical reading of Tolkien\u27s works can provide background and nuanced understanding but warns that the larger genre of fantasy--especially, I would note, in the present under Trump in which racists draw on their imagined White Middle Ages to justify hate crimes--makes such nuanced readings unimportant (35). In this presentation I consider Tolkien\u27s goblins (in The Hobbit) and Orcs (in The Lord of the Rings) and Elves along with Katherine Addison\u27s Goblins, Elves, and most importantly, Goblin-Elf characters, from The Goblin Emperor in the context of Young\u27s analysis of how racialized tropes which manifested in the Classical period as concern about monstrous races were applied to Jews, Mongols, and Muslims in the Middle Ages, and then adapted further in Tolkien\u27s legendarium and have spread throughout popular culture (88). The four tropes contrast the Whiteness of Men and Elves to the Otherness of the Orcs who are always marked as evil through skin color...aggressiveness and irrationality; primitive, disorganized cultures; and homelands which are outside the borders of civilization (89). I argue that Addison continues the tradition of women writers critiquing power and hierarchy through the mode of fantasy that Faye Ringel identified in Women Fantasists: In the Shadow of the Ring, shifting from focusing on gender to race

J.R.R. Tolkien, Culture Warrior: The Alt-Right\u27s Crusade against the Tolkien Society\u27s 2021 Summer Seminar on Tolkien and Diversity

In Verlyn Flieger\u27s GOH speech at MythCon, The Arch and the Keystone (2019), she argues that the contradictions in Tolkien\u27s own writing (fiction, non-fiction, and letters) is a primary cause of the increasing fragmentation and polarization [among readers and scholars], concluding that [e]verybody has their own private Tolkien, more Tolkiens than you can shake a stick at (9). In this presentation, I trace some attributes of the alt-right\u27s private Tolkien which they have made public in forty plus online articles, some receiving a hundred or more public comments, during 2021-22. The articles (in periodicals and personal blogs) attacked, variously: The Tolkien Society The 2021 Seminar, Tolkien and Diversity The seminar presenters The Superbowl Amazon Prime trailer The marketing photos of characters of color I use a linguistic method that involves collecting and creating a corpus (an electronic database of articles and comments) and identifying key words and collocations (words and phrases associated with key words. My goal is to analyze how these writers construct their crusading version of Tolkien, using it to attempt to repress the existence and interpretations of others, while situating my analysis in the context of contemporary religious-political conflicts

Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut\u27s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien

Making or Creating Orcs is a close reading of an Alternate University fan fiction, The Free Orcs AU, by Thorinsmut, which is based on the premise that Erebor was not attacked by Smaug and that some Orcs have fought and freed themselves from Sauron and have established a homeland in Gundabad. Working in the context of the scholarship on racist stereotypes relating to Tolkien\u27s Orcs, I argue that Thorinsmut is able to write back to colonial narratives (Baker) through the AU premise and the associated deletions and transformations of Tolkien\u27s characterizations, plot, setting, and themes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The narrative focus on trade and political alliances between Dwarves and Orcs (and the removal of Elves and Men) transforms Tolkien\u27s plot from a quest to destroy Sauron\u27s Ring to a story about Dwarf and Orc relationships, personal and cultural, and the experiences of Orcs who were enslaved by Sauron and fought for their freedom

Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015), ed. by Ralph C. Wood

Book review by Robin Anne Reid of Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015) ed. by Ralph C. Woo

Nine Tolkien Scholars Respond to Charles W. Mills’s “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto”

In spite of being written over three decades ago, Mills’s posthumously published “Manifesto” not only anticipates but transcends the majority, if not the totality, of the scholarship on Tolkien, race, and racisms which has been published since 2003. Scholars in philosophy and related fields familiar with Mills’s work will recognize that the essay was a “critical exploration of [how] a fictional racial hierarchy strikingly illuminates the ongoing influence of certain old racist ideas on our present day [sic] social realities.” Reid has invited a wide-ranging Tolkienists who have read the essay to respond, briefly, on the significance of the essay to their wor