Since Amazon is working on new Tolkien products, we’ll be hearing about the author and his works more. Most of the scuttlebutt is that the new series, set in the Second Age, is going to align with the cultural Zeitgeist. For example, the Hobbits, who don’t show up in the legendarium before the Third Age, are going to be multiracial. That’s to be expected. Part of me wonders if they didn’t draw on the Silmarillion because it is so clearly fleshed out it didn’t provide the level of freedom from the source text they wanted.
Deviation from stuff like correct anthropological description and ‘race-bending’ or whatever isn’t a killer in my book. For example, to my knowledge, none of the adaptations of Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea universe correctly depict the racial characteristics which are quite explicit in the series. Le Guin wanted to do a bit of inversion, and the central characters and protagonists were brown-skinned, while some of the marginal characters and antagonists were white-skinned (with the European-looking Kargads being barbarians). But the fact is there is was no way that a major production in the 2000’s was going to cast Ged with dark-brown skin, because they wanted the audience to identify with him, and the audience was mostly white.
That being said, the problem with deviations from Tolkien’s legendarium is that his world-building was essential to many aspects of the story, and too many deviations are going to really cause objections. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if it is popular, but I suspect at some point it won’t “hang together.”
But more generally, as Tolkien’s work comes back into the spotlight, you are going to get really strange comments and interpretations. I’m thinking here of a bizarre but widely read Medium post, No, Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” isn’t Christian. The author, to be candid, seems kind of dumb. Titles like “Did Tolkien believe in the Bible?” indicates that the author interprets Christianity in such a manner that the religion is basically just a form of sola scriptura Protestantism (I am aware that Catholics have nuanced views regarding the Bible, and am not saying they don’t believe in the Bible!).
One can quibble with Tolkien’s contention that the world he created was “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” The author can say what he thinks, but the way others take his creation is clearly much broader than his Roman Catholicism, and critics have argued that he was muting the pagan influence. But that’s a very different thing from saying Tolkien wasn’t Christian. If Tolkien wasn’t Christian then I’m not an atheist. By any reasonable definition J. R. R. Tolkien was a very devout Roman Catholic, but expect a lot of unreasonableness in the next few years.
Saw tweets regarding that essay a few hours ago. It reminded me of Wisecrack’s attempt at film critique regarding the LotR movies.
They got the Youtube version of ratio’d at the time.
I think they came from that media studies / semiotics / film school crowd that spends a lot of time watching Slavoj Zizek videos.
Let’s check in on what the Tolkien Society thinks:
https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2021/06/seminar-speakers-announced-tolkien-and-diversity/
Danna Petersen-Deeprose – “Something Mighty Queer”: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien
Cordeliah Logsdon – Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings
Clare Moore – The Problem of Pain: Portraying Physical Disability in the Fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien
V. Elizabeth King – “The Burnt Hand Teaches Most About Fire”: Applying Traumatic Stress and Ecological Frameworks to Narratives of Displacement and Resettlement Across Cultures in Tolkien’s Middle-earth
On second thought…. let’s not.
Thank you for your voice in this interesting matter. A lot about the Christianity of Tolkien’s legendarium tells his newest book, “The Nature of Middle-earth”.
And I, if I can, want to remind about J. R. R. Tolkien’s Baltic genealogy (Prussia 16th, 17th c. > Gdansk 18th c. > London and England from 1770) and Y-DNA genetics (R1a-Y42738*)
http://tolkniety.blogspot.com/2021/08/tolkien-confirmed-haplogroup-is-y42738.html
Before I was exposed to religious and atheistic thought 5-6 years ago – I have never given a thought to the religious undercurrent of Tolkien’s world. So such interpolations don’t carry much weight against to my simplistic initial readings of the universe.
Anyways happy that they’re leaving the Second war of the ring story away and exploring other timelines.
You know, I generally try to be upbeat and cheerful – you have to be when you have children, because it’s unthinkable and, even if forced to, deeply painful to think of them inhabiting a nightmarish future.
But, I am really getting to feeling that the time for dialogue is over. We don’t even share the same language with people such as these. At this point, I would not be surprised to find myself in an American version of a Falangist militia with my sons in, say, 10 years (though I will be getting a bit long in the tooth by then).
These people have no respect for anything and will desecrate everything in the ways of their madness. The LOTRs is a great work of literature and, at the same time, is deeply Christian- and European-centric. It’s not for nothing that the Battle of the Pelennor Fields has a strong (historical) Battle of the Cantalaunian Fields vibe. It’s meant to be viewed and enjoyed as European (and perhaps even Nordicist) mythology. Even though I am not ethnically European (I’m probably an Easterling in Tolkien’s world), I deeply admire and appreciate Tolkien’s work. I just can’t understand why his work cannot be left well alone as is.
I suppose the problem with revolutionaries is that they don’t want to leave you alone even when you pose them no threat and force you to choose sides. Well, here is hoping that they get their wish, but not in the way they expect.
The multicultural casting of the current generation of fantasy depictions is really head-scratching. Like, I watched Season 1 of the Wheel of Time, and Edmond’s Field – a bucolic small farming village – has visibly white people, black people, east Asian people, south Asian people, etc. This just makes no sense, unless you add a layer of story saying everyone is a refugee from somewhere else within the last 1-2 generations, which wasn’t done. I mean, I would have liked it if the entire village was one non-white ethnicity other than Rand (who is supposed to stand out due to his red hair), but the decision to just have it look like the less white parts of modern London was perplexing.
There are plenty of fantasy series out there if you don’t want to have an all-white cast regardless. Most of the human characters in The Prince of Nothing are not really white. I’m reading Malazan Book of the Fallen right now (amazing series if you have a few spare months to read 10,000+ pages) and there are also tons of non-white characters. Or Earthsea, as you noted. Honestly it’s very akin to what’s happening now with historic drama (where it’s even less defensible) – that instead of actually telling stories where diversity makes sense (or which are centered on characters constructed to be non-white from the ground up) you tell the same old “white” stories and just randomly plop down POC in the roles.
“I just can’t understand why his work cannot be left well alone as is.”
Twinkie, it’s because these are no-talent hacks whose who are only capable of cacking out derivative crap. If they think it’s so important to have a multiracial fantasy world, they should world-build one of their own.
I couldn’t ever shake off an impression that Tolkien was a kind of an SLC24A5 chauvinist. The whiteness themes just rubbed me the wrong way, but perhaps I was just too old when I first read it…
SLC24A5 chauvinist or SLC45A2 chauvinist?
I was and will remain a huge fan of Tolkien’s work and the fantasy genre in general. But I will not be watching this as American studios seem incapable of making a work that doesn’t result in characters acting and thinking like modern Americans. Ironically, it was Peter Jackson’s films that helped lead me to this conclusion since a lot of his changes seemed to me to make certain characters question concepts such as fealty, duty, and loyalty in a very modern way (the characterization of Faramir, Elrond, Sam, Denethor, Théoden, and even Aragorn was off in some respects). Perhaps to make them more relatable to the audience but–for me–it was alienating.
Maybe one day Japan, India, or China will make an adaption.
It’s not for nothing that the Battle of the Pelennor Fields has a strong (historical) Battle of the Cantalaunian Fields vibe. It’s meant to be viewed and enjoyed as European (and perhaps even Nordicist) mythology.
(Genuine question) In what way is the battle depiction uniquely European or Nordicist? What makes it different from battle depictions in the Homeric epics or in the Ramayana and Mahabharata (I see lots of parallels between the Indian and Homeric epics.)
I did not mean that the Battle of the Pelennor Fields was “uniquely European or Nordicist.” I meant that Tolkien’s overall mythology was.
However, I did write that Pelennor has a strong vibe of the historical Battle of the Catanlaunian Fields. If you are unsure what that means, please look up the latter online. I’ll get you started: it was the famous battle, in which “The Last Roman” Aetius and his Gothic ally Theodoric defeated the Hunnic confederation under Attila.
Some possible parallels:
Romans (and Byzantines?): Gondor/Arnor
Aetius: Aragorn
Visigoths/Burgundians/Franks/Saxons: Rohirrim
Theodoric: Theoden
Armoricans: Elves
Alans: Good Easterlings
Hunnic confederation: Orcs/Easterlings/etc.
Attila: Sauron/the Witch-King of Angmar
The ring of the Niebelungs: The Ring of Power
I first read the LOTR as a teenager in the U.S. Long before that though, back in East Asia, I read (in my birth language) a youth version of the Nibelungenlied and also watched a 60’s or 70’s-made two-part film series. So when I read the part in LOTR about the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, I was struck by the similarity to the imagery of the final battle in the second German film, “Kriemhild’s Revenge.” In the film, Kriemhild – once married to Siegfried – exacts vengeance for her erstwhile husband’s murder by Burgundians by marrying Etzel (Attila) of the Huns and having the Huns massacre the Burgundians at the wedding (which conveniently destroys the Hunnic kingdom as well).
Later, after studying European history of this time, I realized all this was partly based on the events surrounding the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields.
Thanks Twinkie. I looked up the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields and can understand the references you made, and the parallels with Pelennor in LOTR.
Maybe I am over-projecting, but it seems like Tolkien’s battles have a common theme of cultured people (or people with ethics) fighting barbarians, which is how I guess both the Romans and Northern Europeans visualized battles too. This is distinct from both the Iliad and the Indian epics, in which wars are fought between people who know each other and share a common culture, loosely speaking, (in the case of the Mahabharata, a fratricidal war), where one of the sides has wronged the other.
Tolkien wasn’t really a Nordicist at all. His physical descriptions of the Numenorians (and Dunedain) as well as the Noldor (high elves in Middle Earth) is uniformly dark haired and a skin colour that is either dark or pale with grey eyes. While we might interpret this as broadly West Eurasian, we wouldn’t call these people Nordic by any means.
Tolkien describes the Rohirrim in more “Nordic” terms, with blond hair and a skin colour that is light enough for them to show as “ruddy”. However, these Rohirrim are “middle-men” and not of the high civilization and ancestry of the Dunedain.
Ironically, but trying to “race lift” the second age, they miss the great lesson of the second age. Tolkien winds up writing of the Numenoreans, who despite their Elven gifts, long for more. They start colonising middle earth, hacking down forests for timber, building colonies, and driving off the natives or exacting heavy tribute from them.
Eventually thisdrives many of the natives of middle earth to support Sauron, while the Numenoreans themselves them fall under his influence, and turn to slavery and further conquest:
“Nonetheless for long it seemed to the Númenóreans that they prospered, and if they were not increased in happiness, yet they grew more strong, and their rich men ever richer. For with the aid and counsel of Sauron they multiplied their possessions, and they devised engines, and they built ever greater ships. And they sailed now with power and armoury to Middle-earth, and they came no longer as bringers of gifts, nor even as rulers, but as fierce men of war. And they hunted the men of Middle-earth and took their goods and enslaved them, and many they slew cruelly upon their altars. For they built in their fortresses temples and great tombs in those days; and men feared them, and the memory of the kindly kings of the ancient days faded from the world and was darkened by many a tale of dread.”
The irony is that this lesson on the literal Fall of the West would be extremely well received in our present climate.
He wasn’t a Nordicist in the sense the Nazis were – indeed he seemed to have despised the latter – but he wrote of “That noble Northern spirit” as having made the “supreme contribution to Europe” in a letter to his son.
He wasn’t a shallow racist who attached much significance to skin colors and such (indeed as his famous spat with the German publisher over the question of Jewishness amply illustrates his gentlemanliness and fairness), but he clearly thought there was something unique and special to the peoples and cultures of Northern Europe… which is entirely unsurprising given that he was German in ancestry and was English through and through by upbringing and culture, at a time when Northern Europeans were arguably at the zenith of their power.
Moreover, I did not write that HE was a Nordicist, but rather that the mythology he created was specifically European and “perhaps even Nordicist.” Tolkien himself did not like the term Nordicist, so maybe I should have written “Northernist” (or Northern Europeanist). Nonetheless, his creation clearly had a very specific geographical and historical origin – Northern Europe – with which he associated heroic characteristics.
Tolkien reputedly loved Latin as a language and probably saw the Roman civilization has having been much more ancient and sophisticated than that of his “Northern” peoples. But the latter had a special place in his heart – just as English was special to him – because these were HIS people, HIS culture, and HIS language… and also, I suspect, because he saw the older civilization as having been spent long ago while HIS were still young and vigorous.
To repeat and clarify, I don’t see any of this as a problem and indeed see it as highly enriching. Today, the whole world seems to be awash in American liberal cultural universalism, so particularist mythos is seen as jingoistic and ugly, a sentiment to which I am very opposed. Tolkien’s writings are works of high literature that are beautiful and can appeal to peoples of all backgrounds (they certainly did me), but they are of a certain geographical and cultural context, in which the people associated with that context are exalted and endowed with highly noble characteristics.
One additional note. Apparently, Tolkien – sharing the common English prejudice of his day – rather admired the Anglo-Saxons, his cultural-spiritual ancestors, but seemed to have held the Welsh and other Brythonic (he might have called them Celtic) peoples in somewhat lower esteem (something about their language and culture leaving him feeling “cold”). I always thought that was a bit amusing, because I suspected his Elves were modeled after the Welsh, an enervated, but semi-magical and -lyrical forest race being pushed westward by the more vigorous Germanics/Northern race (with which he identified).
@twinkie, Tolkien is “Welsh is of this soil, this island, the senior language of the men of Britain; and Welsh is beautiful.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
He loved the language (and perhaps the people?) but made a big deal of disliking Celtic mythos. Partly this seems like reaction to to the Anglo-Irish Dunsany, the established English voice of fantasy, and to Victorian romantic affection for the Scots Highlands and the Arthurian cycle. Tolkien maybe spoke up for the Saxons and Danes. I’m not sure if the prevailing England of his time would’ve held Celtdom more in contempt, or Germany, with its romantic nationalism, favourability to despotism, and faith in philosophy over Common Sense.
Twinkle,
Wasn’t arguing with you as much as the shallow outrageratti that regularly regurgitates terms they don’t even understand.
I think the prevailing view of the Germans among the English of his day was that they were a worthy foe, a great people, who had been brought low by war and depression. Meanwhile, the Welsh were a dark curly-haired, squat people with a funny accent who, long ago, had been conquered by them (even if the Welsh turned the tables and furnished the English with a king or two later).
This: https://www.todayifoundout.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/twinkie.jpg
Not this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/N9tdfBIFFxU/maxresdefault.jpg
@twinkie, I think they probably were not that sympathetic to the Germans, over their own countrymen. Reparations after WWI were not really seen as unjust etc. The war was the fault of “the Hun” etc (i.e. Germans are brutish barbarian race, not “great” who never had a single nation rather than a warring collection of states, and have rightly been crushed by WWI to where they belong). A social historian could say more.
I always found this sort of view of Germany from England in the 1940s compelling, as what authorities tended to think and/or wanted the common man to think:
“The National Archives (TNA) has recently republished a 64 page pocketbook, first issued to British soldiers in late 1944 and early 1945, when they first crossed the frontier into Germany.”
“When you meet the Germans you will probably think they are very much like us. They look like us, except that there are fewer of the wiry type and more big, fleshy, fair-haired men and women, especially in the north. But they are not really so much like us as they look. The Germans have, of course, many good qualities. They are very hard working and thorough; they are obedient and have a great love of tidiness and order. They are keen on education of a formal sort, and are proud of their ‘culture’ and their appreciation of music, art and literature. But for centuries they have been trained to submit to authority – not because they thought their rulers wise and fight, but because obedience was imposed on them by force.”
Big not in admirable way but in the sense of being “fleshy”, servile, “culture” in quote marks etc.
https://howitreallywas.typepad.com/how_it_really_was/2006/11/index.html
(more orc than elf).
I thought we were talking about the interwar years, not at the end of WWII, during which the British suffered the German Blitz nightly.
On the topic of the flight of the Elves, I guess Tolkien is coming from a perspective where he has to use this device that assumes Christian theology is in a sense (even if highly figuratively so) true, and the fantasy world in the past (which is an ancient world before the Flood, as in Howard, Ashton-Smith etc) has to make way for the current form of creation as ordained by God.
In most fantasy of the time, faerie is simply cast out before the light of Christ (see Poul Andersen, for example), or the gates to faerieland are barred. But because Tolkien has placed his Elves as pre-Christian but somewhat divine, and absolutely part of the divine plan, he has to do something else. And that is to remake the fading of the Elves as an oh-so Germanic noble sea colonization journey to the west (which rhymes with Angles, Saxons, Vikings to England, and with English colonization of North America), compelled upon them by divine writ and prophecy.
I guess that’s an example of how the work stands alone, in the sense of being internally consistent, but we can really understand it best in terms of the choices Tolkien made as an author to understand Tolkien as a Catholic Christian writer.
@twinkie, I thought the topic was generically just Tolkien’s time, so at any point he was alive, virtually, but probably implicitly close to the time of authoring LotR. So missed it if we defined it more, upthread. Though if it was specifically the interwar period I wouldn’t have thought views would be that shifted from during the wars (except in the direction of contempt away from fear?)
During the interwar years, the British public was generally well-disposed toward the Germans, certainly as a people and even perhaps as a nation. There was considerable sentiment that the Versailles Treaty was unduly harsh and the British government, for a while, was openly in breach with the French over the war payments from Germany.
Even after the Nazis came to power, the British were averse to another conflict with the Germans. Not only was the Anglo-German naval agreement supported by the British public, it was also made without any consultation with erstwhile allies, including France. Don’t forget that the Munich appeasement – which, in retrospect and to us, was quite foolish – was largely supported by the British public at the time.
British sentiment toward the Germans hardened considerably once the war began and worsened still once the war took a total character, including bombing of civilian population centers, and became an existential struggle.
Even through the war, however, the British public was well-disposed toward the Germans as peoples and individuals – the German POWs were treated decently and respectfully and quite a few eventually married local women without scandal. Once the war was over, the German POWs were even invited into the homes of British civilians, an experience that left the Germans in something of a shock (had the Germans won, I suspect the treatment toward the British POWs would not have been nearly that generous).
It should also be noted that the violence toward the defeated German civilians by the victorious allied soldiery was the least pronounced in British-controlled sectors. The Russian looting and mass-rapes are notorious. The French behaved badly if not quite at the heinous level of the Russians. Even American-run areas saw widespread killings of prisoners and rapes of German women (black American troops, in particular, were quite notorious for this, as were the French North Africans). The British, in contrast, behaved rather gentlemanly toward the German civilians.
It’s all relative really, and the English were a fairly polite nation in the grand scheme of things, and in foreign policy it was I imagine a matter of choosing a least bad outcome, and the more that Britain was least entangled with the continent possible, the better.
Even today if we were to collapse from America hegemony towards “spheres of influence”, a state of being that various different strands of US isolationism (on Left, and particularly recently on the Right) seem to want, I’d probably regard a German sphere of influence over Eastern Europe as more a desirable and natural state of being than Russian. (Of course this would be contested by Russia, but such is the nature of a system of “spheres of influence”; there is no “peaceful” situation of multiple “spheres of influence”). But that would not mean I would regard Germany favourably overall, or its people relative to Scotland or Wales, and certainly not as more kindred to England than people from those nations.
It’s not how you see the world today, but how the English of the particular historical period saw it.
To them, the Germans might be enemies and rivals, but were considered a great nation while the Welsh were not exactly a great nation or a people who produced a high culture. I think you underestimate how much particularism (region and class) there was in Britain before WW II.
You also seem to confuse affinity/relatedness with respect. For example, the Australians were literally descended from the British, but were looked upon with great contempt by the English of the day (so were Americans – so much so that when a captured British officer in North Africa was queried of his opinion of Americans by the Germans, he snorted, “Our Italians”).
Supposedly, one of the reasons why Mel Gibson loathes the English (he portrays them as buffoonish tyrants in his films) is how he felt disrespected by them. When he first met Laurence Olivier (on the set of “The Bounty,” I think), he was allegedly greatly wounded by him when, Olivier, upon being told Gibson was from Australia, uttered “How colonial!” and walked away.
Feel free to lecture me on this, but I think I probably have a better feel on this one as a British person.
Anyway, look, the only point I was making here, in essence, was to view your characterisation of the English generally viewing the Germans as a sort of kindred, “great nation”, to be respected and regretfully to go to war against, while viewing their fellow British countrymen with contempt as a sort of defeated subject people, is too simplistic and anachronistic and without a real feel for the country. Stereotypes existed in many ways, and there were many ways in which a contemporary Englishman would’ve felt contempt and admiration/respect for both Wales (and certainly Scotland) and for Germany.
(For some examples of a desription of these stereotypes – https://journals.openedition.org/angles/488 – “When war broke out in August 1914, the image of a brutal, barbaric and militaristic German (or Prussian) enemy would already have been familiar to much of the British public. Evidence of such negative stereotypes can be found in British discussions of Germany since the 1860s, when military victories over Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866 and France in 1870 paved the way towards the foundation of the German Empire under Prussian leadership. To cite just one example, Lord Arthur Russell characterized Prussia in 1872 as the antithesis of “liberal and democratic ideas”, listing among Prussian traits “military despotism, the rule of the sword, contempt for sentimental talk, [and] indifference to human suffering” (Wittek 2005: 79). …
By the time of the Entente Cordiale in 1904, Germany had replaced France as Britain’s most likely potential conqueror in popular “invasion literature”, including Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903), William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 (1906) and Saki’s When William Came (1913) (Rau 2009: 65-88). On the eve of the First World War, popular Germanophobia in Britain even extended to hostility towards the sale of German sausages in Britain (Waddington 2013). …
Despite much uncertainty as to how Germany’s rising power would affect Britain’s position in the world, however, it would be far too simplistic to claim, as one recent study of pre-war Anglo-German relations has done, that by the late 1890s “an entire generation of Britons and Germans […] had come to age having imbibed a consistent, and consistently negative, view of each other” (Hawes 2014: 404). For much of the 19th century, the German Empire had been widely admired in Britain for achievements in fields as varied as music and literature, philosophy and education, science and technology, and social welfare reform (Davis 2007; Geppert & Gerwarth 2008; Major 2008). …
Thus, even if negative images of Germany were present in British culture before 1914, the wide range of British attitudes towards Germany and the Germans cannot be summed up simply in terms of an “enemy image”.”
It was a mix of ideas and this continued to be the case after the WWI.
@ Matt
You gonna get it now.
Seriously though, Twinkie, I had read that about the French North African troops (can’t recall right now where), but not about American troops. Do you have any source(s) at the ready on American servicemen committing rapes? I would like to think that we would have kept good records on such, but I have been disillusioned before by our incompetence.
I guess this means some American millennial has a better “feel” on the attitudes of the Depression-era American sentiments than, say, a British economic historian of the time period.
And it’s not just academic knowledge for me either. One of my thesis advisors for my Ph.D. in history was Welsh (RIP) and was born during the interwar years. I spent some time with his family and the older folks among them spoke pretty resentfully of the way the English viewed them in the old days. The hilarious part was that, although they resented the English sense of superiority, they, in turn, held the Scots in contempt (“The Scots have no culture,” “Scotland is the most boring place in the world,” etc.). It kinda reminded me of the way people in the western part of Pennsylvania (which is pretty “hillbilly”) looked down on the people in West Virginia as uncouth trash a few decades ago.
By the way, if you have Netflix, check out a show called “The Crown” about the British royal family. Much of it is sensational nonsense, but two episodes about the royal family’s dealings with Wales are quite well done:
S3E3 Aberfan (the mining disaster)
S3E6 Twysog Cymru (The Prince of Wales)
Yup, those guys ran rampant, raping the ladies of the areas they controlled, initially Italy and then later in Germany. It was called the Marrochinate in Italy (“The Moroccan Deeds”). Also known for rape were the French Senegalese troops.
I don’t recall the citations for the black Americans right now, as I read the relevant texts more than a couple decades ago. But if you use some sort of an internet search engine, you’ll see references to poor discriminated black troops being charged and punished “disproportionately” for raping French and, especially, German women. I am sure you can read between the lines.
“Matt” referred to Brits being rather nice during World War II, but the British treatment of Japanese POWs was markedly different than that toward the Germans. A significant number of Japanese POWs died in British (and overall Allied) custody due to poor conditions (not that the Japanese expected better since their own behavior toward the Allied prisoners was ghastly).
“Matt” referred to Brits being rather nice during World War II, but the British treatment of Japanese POWs was markedly different than that toward the Germans.
Yeah, and let’s not get started on the way they treated their colonials, even well into the 20th century, much less their bombing of cities.
Right, and as you well know the gap between the way the Germans treated the British POWS as opposed to the way they treated the Russians was enormous. (But that can be looked at as a sort of tit-for-tat.) Also, on a discouraging note, apparently the Americans took to the comfort women in the Pacific rather quickly, although perhaps more on a paying basis instead of brutal coercion.
A generalization that I have noticed when reading about WWII is that it is presumed that “something” out of the ordinary happened to the Germans that allowed Nazism to flourish. Sure, there is finger pointing at the militaristic Prussians, but Germany as a whole was considered to be in the forefront of “civilization” and Nazism was some sort of unbelievable anomaly. On the other hand, the assumption is that the fanatical and militaristic Emperor worshipping Japanese were just doing their normal thing.
“but the British treatment of Japanese POWs was markedly different than that toward the Germans.”
My father (who is English) knew a guy back in the 1960s who had been an aviator during the 1944/45 Burma campaign (Fleet air arm iirc). He hated the Japanese and would speak quite openly about how after the sinking of Japanese ships they’d send out Hawker Hurricanes to pick off shipwrecked Japanese.
Anyway, this discussion about Tolkien and British views of Germany has been rather weird. I would only like to add that before WW1 British attitudes towards Germany were a lot more ambivalent than later on (e.g. despite the negative views about “Prussian militarism” there was close Anglo-German cooperation during the diplomatic conferences dealing with Balkans affairs just before WW1; also many cultural contacts, and indeed sometimes a feeling of racial kinship…Rhodes scholarships were originally open to British, American and German applicants), and Tolkien grew up during that era. He also had German ancestry himself and as a philologist dealing primarily with Germanic languages he of course had to engage with German scholarship. So while he was undoubtedly horrified by the extremes German nationalism eventually ended up at (“perversion of the noble Northern spirit” iirc), I don’t think there can be much doubt that some kind of broader Germanic affinity played a role in Tolkien’s view of the world (though certainly not the only or even dominant one, there was also his Catholicism after all).
In the case of “high fantasy” works, I don’t see what is the problem of having a multiracial cast; after all, you could simply assume that, in these universe*, being black, white, “EastAsian-form”, etc are not different races but simply different phenotype in the same population (like being blonde or brunette, or having brown or blue eyes).
*Tolkien works are supposed to be set in a distant past of our universe, but in practice this is the same as an alternative universe
You could, but why would you? You would have to go out of your way to explain the phenomenon for anyone to take it seriously, and it would be obvious that you were only doing so for misguided political goals… especially when adapting Tolkien, who was explicitly creating a new mythology for Anglo-Saxons, based on the old mythology of northern Europe.
Worldbuilding is better when the divergence from reality is consistent and purposeful. “It’s fantasy, you can do whatever you want!” is a cheap cop-out by people who don’t understand the genre. There are works where worldbuilding isn’t important, where it isn’t a problem to have multiracial medieval villages and military forces half full of women. But Tolkien didn’t write that kind of work.
I don’t believe there is a problem. Gods, myths, literature, legends, etc. have been re-purposed and adapted forever. Why should our time be any different?