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Faurexus wrote:

You have to be trying to get a racist reading out of LoTR.

The Shire is not, by any means, an ethnostate, simply because it is dominated by one race. The important thing is they aren’t closed to visitors (almost all of the time, unless they have no manners). Sam, who is perhaps the most admirable character of the bunch, has no bloodline to speak of. Also, technically it’s more present in the Hobbit, but the Elves and Dwarves are not charitable to each other. Boromir is a noble and rather ambiguous, as is his father.

Orcs are evil because they are enslaved, not because Orcs are all evil. Tolkien was not a racist and this is a smear.

As for a lack of diaspora in towns, his world lacks the diaspora of modern times because it is not technologically advanced or globalized (things Tolkien shunned).

Edit: Also, Aragorn, I should mention, is already not a pure human, and very deliberately marries an Elf. The line of Gondor itself isn’t all that “pure”.

The most serene republicans has already answered this pretty well. I'm not suggesting that Tolkein intentionally set out to write racist propaganda, but the text is steeped in the values and assumptions you'd expect of an early 20th century Oxford scholar. It shouldn't be all that surprising, for instance, that of the various forms of Men the good guys are white and modeled on European cultures in contrast to the Easterlings, Haradrim and Southrons (who I think are somewhere described as weak-willed and easy for the enemy to dominate).

Where LotR goes beyond the default colonialist mindset it comes from is in its pessimism. What comes through isn't so much that some races are better than others as a total rejection of modernity, industrialisation and progress. The history of the Third Age is a story of steady decline into mediocrity and the elves that represent everything that's best are disappearing over the sea. Literally nothing is getting better with time and his characters wander among the ruins of things that cannot be replaced or improved on. Writing a decade or more before the beginning of mass immigration into Britain Tolkein doesn't see the social change he laments as primarily racial - if he'd written a little later he might have done. Look especially at Treebeard and the scourging of the Shire. I don't see a fascist, I see a bewildered old man turning his back on any possibilities the future might offer.

On the points you raised, the bloodline of the royal house of Gondor has indeed been greatly diluted, and as a result the country has steadily declined, its borders have shrunk and it's lost control of some of its major cities. Most epic literature uses the trope that the heroes of the past were greater than the heroes of today, but it's unusual to explicitly tie that to ethnic considerations. Tolkein writes about this at length but it's economically summarised in the screen play - the blood of Numenor is all but spent. Aragorn does indeed marry an elf, and the decline of the royal bloodline is partly reversed by adding ancient High Elven ancestry. It's not that mixing is bad, it's that older is always better.

Sam is certainly a commendable character. He embodies the pastoral idyll, he's the dependable working class that acknowledges its betters and is content with how things have always been. Denethor and his sons are certainly portrayed as having some virtues that Men of lesser race don't have, but they have fundamental flaws that serve to highlight the greater virtue Aragorn possesses because of his royal blood.

Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, Terrabod, Hommeres, and 4 othersFaurexus, Middle Barael, Nation of ecologists, and The most serene republicans

The most serene republicans

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