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Palgrave Macmillan

Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth

  • Book
  • © 2022

Overview

Authors:
  1. Robert Stuart

    1. School of Humanities, The University of Western Australia, Nedlands, Australia

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  • Incorporates scholarship from Critical Race studies, cultural studies, and intellectual history

  • Analyzes reception, appropriation, and influence of Tolkien’s work

  • Thoroughly addresses key debates relating to Tolkien and race

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-viii
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  2. Introduction: Reflections on Writing About Tolkien and Race

    • Robert Stuart
    Pages 1-18

  3. Tolkien, Race, and the Critics: Debating Racism in Middle-earth

    • Robert Stuart
    Pages 19-85

  4. Manichean Racism? Black and White and Blacks and Whites

    • Robert Stuart
    Pages 87-124

  5. Race War in Middle-earth: The Orcs, Genocide, and Ethnic Cleansing

    • Robert Stuart
    Pages 125-164

  6. Blood and Soil: Language, Myth, and Their Racial Roots

    • Robert Stuart
    Pages 165-234

  7. Tolkien and Anti-Semitism: The Jewish Question and the Question of the Dwarves

    • Robert Stuart
    Pages 235-265

  8. Aristocratic Racism: Gobineau in Gondor

    • Robert Stuart
    Pages 267-338

  9. Conclusion

    • Robert Stuart
    Pages 339-344

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 345-357
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Keywords

About this book

Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth is the first systematic examination of how Tolkien understood racial issues, how race manifests in his oeuvre, and how race in Middle-earth, his imaginary realm, has been understood, criticized, and appropriated by others. This book presents an analysis of Tolkien’s works for conceptions of race, both racist and anti-racist. It begins by demonstrating that Tolkien was a racialist, in that his mythology is established on the basis of different races with different characteristics, and then poses the key question “Was Tolkien racist?” Robert Stuart engages the discourse and research associated with the ways in which racism and anti-racism relate Tolkien to his fascist and imperialist contemporaries and to twenty-first-century neo-Nazis and White Supremacists—including White Supremacy, genocide, blood-and-soil philology, anti-Semitism, and aristocratic racism. Addressing a major gap in the field of Tolkien studies, Stuart focuses on race, racisms and the Tolkien legendarium.

Reviews

“Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth is still an extremely valuable contribution to Tolkien Studies, and it represents the most thorough treatment thus far of these matters. … Sturat’s book provides important research for such acknowledgement and analysis, and is therefore a worthy addition to the Tolkien scholar’s library.” (Robert T. Tally, Mythlore, Vol. 41 (1), October, 2022)

Authors and Affiliations

  • School of Humanities, The University of Western Australia, Nedlands, Australia

    Robert Stuart

About the author

Robert Stuart is Associate Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia, Australia. His research output has focused on the history of French Marxism, but is now concentrated on the ideological dimension of contemporary genre fantasy literature.

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