Race in Tolkien Masterpost

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Peace in paradise

↳ And there in the forest of Neldoreth Lúthien was born, and the white flowers of niphredil came forth to greet her as stars from the earth.

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If you've ever wanted to see more of my art I don't post anywhere, it would mean the world to me if you guys could boost my patreon ♡ I really want to restart ssris to manage my ocd better, if you'd like to help at all ♡- I'm also only 40 usd short from my goal on patreon! Thank you so much!

Adding the link in an rb so tumblr doesn't kill the post ♡

My patreon is here! (Link)

Hi friends. Added new art to my patreon page.

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Our girls Findis and Írimë!

I missed @finweanladiesweek 😭

I've been mulling something over lately. It's almost a given that one will find questionable elements to older texts; some are overt and some sneaky even to the modern eye. There are, undeniably, many such elements in Tolkien's work, and they cause a lot of trouble for marginalized readers and for fan creators grappling with it in relation to meta and fic.

That the Silmarillion is a largely-omniscient myth-text narrative, composed from a variety of drafts, the discarded versions of which we also have access to, further compounds the issue. Who has read what? Who samples from what? How deeply do some themes pervade both the text and the fandom? There are discarded portions that raise eyebrows (and thankfully, were edited out at some point). However, there are moments where those discarded portions shine through the cracks in exposition, dialogue and reasoning left in the official composite text by the sweeping style of the narrative. The composite can be seen to still rest on certain narrative and valuational presuppositions of Tolkien's - presuppositions he assumes the reader to share.

In the text, of course some have value or more of it, some have honor or more of it, some overcome darkness while some naturally succumb to it. The narrative certainty in these characterizations rests on these lurking (racist, antisemitic, ableist) presuppositions, and in some cases handwaves any deeper exploration or explanation.

There seem to be two fan solutions to reckoning with a cross-draft-consistent bigoted theme. 1) Write meta that explores its traits and manifestations in the text and syncretizes canon assertions with authorial biases, and/or fic that directly addresses the in-text impact of these biases. 2) With an awareness of the bigoted themes, create headcanons, new verses, and fic that subverts, rewrites, or negates the original theme. The former refuses to allow the presuppositions of the text to become the presuppositions of the fandom. The latter allows (particularly marginalized) fans generative space, fodder to create anew, breathing room, and expanded perspectives. Different functions, parallel purposes, both important.

Because it's fandom, and it's large, and our idea of on-the-side fun and not our job or our marriage, we do not have the same preferences for how we go about dealing with these textual issues or the cohesive pressure to be like minded (even as we recognize the need to deal with them). One person's way of reckoning with textual biases or gaps may strike another as reaching too far from canon to be of appeal. This is a common reaction to headcanons, canon divergences and alternate universes, and crack or humor, particularly in the tolkien fandom. However, personal preference is not a basis for asserting that someone is reading the text wrong, especially when the issue at hand is one of reparative analysis and creation.

I am drawn to the issue of the Petty Dwarves. Most information on them comes in pieces from disparate drafts and satellite texts. Some information was erased entirely from the published Silmarillion. However, many people have noted the continual issues in Tolkien's treatment of the Dwarves, the iterative issues with his treatment of the Petty Dwarves, and rightly begin to link the two, plumb them down to their connecting factor, and begin excavating the silences in the narrative which Tolkien allows to be filled by presupposition.

I have found that people who cite personal preference may bring up canon elements to excuse or disprove certain readings; I would argue that the canon elements cited are less often exculpatory of our faves and more often proof of deeper biases, proof of biased presupposition as a stand in for rich characterization. Let me explain.

We hear from the Sindar that the Petty Dwarves are reclusive, aggressive, and territorial (on this they base their initial assessment that the Petty Dwarves are two-legged animals for hunting). We hear from the Dwarves who cross the Blue Mountains later that the Petty Dwarves descend from expelled Dwarves who were the smallest, weakest, most conniving and self-serving, and violent persons. At one point, Tolkien describes the Petty Dwarves as older residents in Beleriand than both the Sindar and the eastern Dwarves, and the original inhabitants of Nargothrond, and it is them who Finrod hires to finish its construction. Tolkien describes the Petty Dwarves as agreeing to do this under false and duplicitous pretenses (for what reason, he doesn't say); later, Mim tries to kill Finrod (again, the narrative is sparse on motive), and Finrod alternately outs the Petty Dwarves from Nargothrond or pays the other Dwarves to turn them out. Tolkien evidently means for this to paint a picture of a group of people who are inherently wicked, cannot help but be so, are hated and pitied (for one does not preclude the other, and all good people should pity bad people, after all), and bring about their own diminishment. There's the in-universe justification for it.

I mean to explore why it is not satisfactory to leave the matter alone at "the Petty Dwarves brought about their own downfall." To begin, why does Tolkien rely on the characteristics he does when describing both the Petty Dwarves and Dwarves in general? These are multiple pieces of bigotry at play, chiefly some old antisemitic stereotypes (which have already been unpacked at length and by Jewish fans who are more knowledgable than I; if other have more to add, please do so). But I will give it a try.

First, Tolkien never pins down why the Petty Dwarves are expelled westward, only vaguely pinning it on their inborn characteristics. One old piece of antisemitism held that Jewish people were smaller and weaker than gentiles; Jewish men are still held to be less masculine, which can be traced from a medieval supposition that Jewish men menstruated. Coupled with the ableism of expelling the stunted and the inutile, Tolkien describes here a sort of itinerant and pitiful scrounger who does not belong in a society to which it cannot contribute and into which it cannot assimilate. The concept of vagrancy and the homelandlessness (consider the antisemitism in the concept of the cosmopolitan Jew, and Tolkien's deliberate linkage of Dwarves and losing their homes), is further connected to antisemitism by the Petty Dwarves being duplicitous, self-serving backstabbers toward Finrod, who Tolkien sets up as innocent and trusting enough to sleep unguarded near Mim, further juxtaposing the two. Furthermore, the gentile assertion that Jewish people are violent is escalated to accusations of blood libel and sorcery. Tolkien may not go that far, but he ties this predisposition for violence into the passage about Nargothrond, and their territorial defensiveness and their aggression toward the Sindar. Jewish people have long been stereotyped as insular, traditional, and cold to outsiders (consider the gentile furor over "goy"). All of this passes under the surface of the text - where Tolkien does not elaborate, this rises to the surface to color the reading.

When fans identify these elements in the text (and realize they are very similar to Tolkien's handling of the Dwarvish sacking of Doriath, or gold sickness, or Dwarvish isolationism as a whole), they begin to investigate the places they show up in text. The meta they write must try to syncretize the canon of what is said with the authorial context applied in the characterization. The fic they write must try to fill in lazy gaps left, and to imagine and then confront the missing exigence to the conflict while refuting the antisemitic presuppositions upon which the text relies in place of characterization.

Because it's fanwork, some people may have concepts that you think miss the mark or push further with assertions than you think is logical. However, no one who is in good faith creating, exploring, or trying to remedy the issues of the text, can be accused of using their ideas as a cudgel against canon or against others. Discussion is welcome, when it is conducted in good faith as well.

Relying too heavily on the surface-level assertions of canon to shoot down these musings at times verges upon what I have described above: leaning into the in-world justifications of hierarchy and subjugation to excuse the real-world hierarchies upon which these presuppositions are built. It is not so important how or when the Sindar realized the Petty Dwarves were people: what matters is that Tolkien created a character group, designed to be hated and pitied but never respected, onto whom he mapped real world stereotypes, and set them up in events where these stereotypes lead. It's highly worth considering why we are defending portions of text that are inherently bigoted. The whole broth here is the issue, but people are quibbling over whether they've fished out a potato versus a turnip.

@meadowlarkx no need to apologize, your tags are very compatible with my post! Sorry to yoink them into reblog thread but I wanted to share them.

A further issue with the multiple drafts is that people have their own favorite (and therefore more personally canon) ones. I also really like the published Silm, I think it works great as a standalone text (and one can do lots of analysis about Silm-specific issues, even separate from tracking how alternative drafts or old opinions got soaked up into it). At least personally, when I’m stumped by trying to distill a coherent cross-draft canon (which is always), I divert instead to identifying discrete issues so that I can at least avoid mimicking them. Like you said, cleaving so strongly to canon causes a lot of issues, particularly when it’s like. Which bit of canon? Trying to iron out a canon before we can talk about the issues of The One Canon is a self-defeating endeavor.

There’s a lot to unpack about Tolkien’s Dwarves, and between drafts I think we can even see Tolkien get uncomfortable with what he’s written. I leaned very heavily on the gaps in the narrative being filled with presupposition. But, I’m glad you brought up that as a myth-text, it doesn’t necessarily offer specific instruction on how to feel about some of the myths. Once the reader is wise to the presence of presupposition, and can lift it off, I think it’s much easier to interpret the myth with nuance and even identify where the text is uncomfortable with the assertions it makes and recognize like you said, that the text is presenting something but not necessarily supporting it.

In the case of the hunting of the petty dwarves, I think we can definitely see the text present this as a horrifying thing and a moment where powerful people do a bad thing to a less powerful people. Furthermore, I think the text calls out how we should be wary of how we center ourselves and our context in real life, because if we’re so focused on our own paradigm, we’ll likely hurt people/things that don’t share our paradigm, and only come to recognize it when some more sympathetic middle man points it out (as is the case of the eastern Dwarves putting a stop to Sindar Petty-Dwarf hunting).

And still, the traits Tolkien gives the Petty Dwarves are a narrative crutch, meant to evoke disgust and pity by calling upon ancient canards (the presupposition at work). So as you say, no conversation can be had when one side wields a defense of canon in such a manner - particularly when the defense of canon is really a defense of the presupposition, and not actually a call to investigate how canon itself offers a nuanced and less-complimentary picture of its heroes in those narrative silences. (And there’s already a basis for textual flawed heroes - Turin is a great example of the text creating a hero that overtly does bad or foolish things).

I think you bring up something important with fic. Saying it all and saying it clearly is something I struggle deeply with in regard to meta (see the issues with first needing to pin down canon) that isn’t confined strictly to one text or another. I think people get turned upside down and confuse fic for meta, like a fic is a declaration of canon analysis, canon compliance, or universal theory. And sometimes it can be, but like you said, it’s about hilighting things to tell a new story (… transformation…).

Thus we must accept that fic can be allowed to say things without needing to be meta. Similarly we must accept that a fic doesn’t need to say everything at once, and that the presence of one hi-lighted element in a fic doesn’t mean that the author scorns other elements or is making a unified statement of truth in what they choose to hi-light for that fic. I think about this a lot because I struggle to write long fic and multi chapter fic, so most of what people read from me are brief windows into larger things I hold in my head, and the pressure to make everything in my head fit into that small window (to the detriment of POV, thematic story telling, etc) so as to avoid accusations of short-sightedness makes me not want to write.

I think you're right that in the end, fostering that sort of critical atmosphere is going to chase away people who already have the most tenuous footing and acceptance in the fandom (namely marginalized fans or anyone who is not willing to swallow the idea that the presupposition and canon are one and the same).

Ahhhh this got long again. My apologies to your dash. Thank you for leaving such a detailed message.

Happy indigenous day!💛

These were created over the last year or so when i indigenized popular media✨

Fingolfin speedpaint from twitter

Came back wrong this, came back monstrous that

What if they came back loving? What if they came back in love. What if the necromancy worked and you cheated death and it's everything you've ever wanted, but now they love you in a way they never did before and you cannot know if that is because they finally know the lengths you are willing to go for them, or because something in this deathless magic bound their soul to yours to guide them home and it left them no. choice.