Right-wing YouTuber Sargon of Akkad has a new video out, concerning The Lord of the Rings in general and Orcs in particular:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgFBDU4mE7I&t=167s

I mention this because while I have commented on Sargon’s clear misunderstanding of Tolkien before (https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2024/09/15/de-moralia-orcorum-sargon-of-akkad-rings-of-power-evil-and-george-r-r-martin/), this time it’s a video where I found myself in broad agreement for the first seven or so minutes. Which in turn ties back into a point I have long made on this subject – namely that if all the modern Left can see in Tolkien is “Racist!”, we encounter a Boy Who Cried Wolf at best, and a chance for genuine racists to appropriate Tolkien at worst.

Here we are dealing with people who read The Lord of the Rings as an allegory, with Orcs supposedly being black people. I wish this were a straw-man dreamt up by Sargon, but alas it is not. Nor is it the sort of playful engagement with Tolkien that gave us The Last Ringbearer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer), whereby the entire premise of The Lord of the Rings is upended, with villains as heroes. No, this is just straight-out people reading offensive things into the text, and then taking offence at the result. In essence, an analysis no more sophisticated than reading oneself as the villain of a story, and then getting offended that the villain is portrayed negatively.

And yet as Sargon correctly notes, The Lord of the Rings is a fictional story, and the Orcs are a fictional race. They are explicitly not human, and do not represent anyone in the real-world. Indeed, to quote an exasperated Tolkien himself – “To ask if the Orcs ‘are’ Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs” (Letter 203: 1957). Sixty-eight years after that letter, we have moved from mere speculation about political allegory in the text to people taking deliberate offence about political allegory in the text. That is not an improvement – albeit so very, very 2020s.

This in turn creates two problems.

Firstly, it devalues the term ‘racist,’ which once upon a time had a very specific (pejorative) meaning. Frankly, if Everything is Racist then Nothing is Racist. The word loses its meaning, and if one is reduced to angsting over whether The Lord of the Rings is racist, no-one is going to take you seriously when genuine racism rears its ugly head. It becomes the Boy Who Cried Wolf effect – overuse of the term (and misuse of the term with respect to Rings) literally destroys it.

Secondly – and more problematically – if all the modern Left is capable of doing when confronted with Art is to go looking for Things Wrong With It, they not only destroy their own ability to actually enjoy Art (its fundamental creative purpose), but they also allow genuinely unpleasant people to claim ownership of said Art. Genuine racists would love to appropriate Tolkien’s work for their own malign purposes, so the Left really should not be helping them. As I have said before, the notion that J.R.R. Tolkien might one day become to the twenty-first century what Richard Wagner was to the twentieth haunts my dreams. Wagner did not deserve what happened to him. And Tolkien sure as Hell would not deserve it.

But while Sargon spends an uncomfortable seven or so minutes actually being right about something, he then inevitably drops the ball by talking about the irredeemable nature of the Orcs. How, supposedly, a sapient species is inherently Bad by virtue of being twisted by Morgoth long ago… and supposedly how the very existence of literary Orcs is enough to destroy the assumptions of liberal ethics.

My previous reply to Sargon dealt with the famous Morgoth’s Ring essay, whereby I pointed out that killing Orcs was actually more morally complex than he was making out. Today, I thought to cite Tolkien’s Letter 153 (1954):

But if they ‘fell’, as the Diabolus Morgoth did, and started making things ‘for himself, to be their Lord’, these would then ‘be’, even if Morgoth broke the supreme ban against making other ‘rational’ creatures like Elves or Men. They would at least ‘be’ real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even ‘mocking’ the Children of God. They would be Morgoth’s greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote ‘irredeemably bad’; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good.) But whether they could have ‘souls’ or ‘spirits’ seems a different question; and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible ‘delegation’, I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them. That God would ‘tolerate’ that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today. There might be other ‘makings’ all the same which were more like puppets filled (only at a distance) with their maker’s mind and will, or ant-like operating under direction of a queen-centre.

The nature of the Orcs is easily the most vexed question in Tolkien – and for good reason. J.K. Rowling might have no problem considering a quarter of eleven year olds to be irredeemably evil, but for the devoutly Catholic Tolkien, a sentient intelligent race doomed to be bad would naturally evoke Calvinist Predestination. Peter Jackson – whom honestly seems a bigger influence on Sargon’s interpretation of Middle-earth than Tolkien – conveniently evaded the matter by turning the Uruk-hai into pod-people. But for Tolkien this was a serious issue, one he never did resolve, which is why one cannot throw around terms like irredeemable lightly. This is not a mere matter of liberal ethics, but actually something that pertains to the philosophical foundations of Middle-earth itself. I really wish Sargon would look beyond his video-game-level notions here.

A Phuulish Fellow

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