Tolkien “Demonises People of Colour”, University Teaches Students
A university is teaching students that J.R.R. Tolkien demonises “people of colour” in the Lord of the Rings books, claiming that orcs and other dark-skinned characters are victims of “ethnic chauvinism”. The Telegraph has more.
A history module called ‘Decolonising Tolkien et al.‘, taught at the University of Nottingham, uses a text that says orcs and other dark-skinned characters in the trilogy are the victims of “ethnic chauvinism”.
Dr Onyeka Nubia, a historian and writer who leads the module, argues that eastern races in the fictional realm of Middle Earth are depicted as evil while fairer-skinned peoples of the west are shown as virtuous.
In academia, ‘decolonising’ usually means re-examining or moving away from white, Western viewpoints.
In the module’s core text, Dr Onyeka writes that maligned peoples include Easterlings, Southrons and men from Harad. The trilogy also features the dark-skinned orcs, evil creatures that do the bidding of Sauron, known as the ‘Dark Lord’.
It adds that Tolkien’s treatment of the fictional races shares in a tradition of “anti-African antipathy”, in which people from Africa are painted as “the natural enemy of the white man”.
The module also examines racial issues in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Calormen in CS Lewis’s fantasy novel have long been seen by some as exhibiting oriental stereotypes. They are described as “cruel” people with “long beards” and “orange-coloured turbans”.
Students of the course in Nottingham will also learn to “repopulate” the canon of British myth and legend.
Dr Nubia, an occasional contributor to the BBC, provided articles saying medieval England “had diverse populations and Africans lived there”, but “ethnic chauvinism” was evident in literature, including Milton’s Paradise Lost, and that the tradition persisted in the works of Tolkien and Lewis.
He claims in the core module text that Shakespeare’s work helped to promote a vision of a “fictional, mono-ethnic English past”. His plays are said to be problematic for “missing direct references to Africans living in England”, creating the “illusion” of racial homogeneity in England.
Worth reading in full.
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Decolonise the UK and send Nubia back to the African hole he crawled out of. Spare us the marxist revisionism of everything by the class of halfwits who have nothing else to do. Maybe Nubia can go home to Nubia and read the Nubian equivalent of Tolkein.
But he glorifies dwarfs, so you know, swings and roundabouts.
The Goblins were baddies (not as malicious and clever as Orcs) and lived underground and rarely ventured out in daylight as it made their heads dizzy (if I recall the book correctly). I don’t recall any direct description of their colour but my imagination (before the films were made) had them as pale due to no sunlight.
Just spotted that the headline only mentions Lord of the Rings… not The Hobbit which is where Goblins have a good go.
I think Tolkien later struggled to reconcile Goblins with his broader mythology (at the outset, when he started writing The Hobbit, he wasn’t sure whether it fitted into his mythology or was a standalone thing for a children’s book). Goblins don’t appear in his mythology (in fact Hobbits don’t do either). I think he later got around this by saying Goblins were in fact Orcs.
Wonderful photo! The actors must have had a lot of fun making these films. The Third World whingers fail to notice that many of the orcs were white-skinned and had British accents, as is often the case for Hollywood movie villains.
Do I see a resemblance to Keir Starmer there?
Ha-ha! Yes! 🙂
Though the orc’s better looking…
I hate Orcs, there I said it!
Someone has lost the plot here, I don’t think its me!
Orcs are only a small percentage of the population but commit a huge proportion of violent crime.
I don’t remember them using small boats and living in 4 star hotels.
The good doctor is certainly absolutely right about that. Lord of the Rings is, after all, the story of the restoration of the kingdom of a nordic race of noble white supermen and among their enemies are indeed other humans described as brown-skinned and of a low and evil nature. Someone should politely inform her about Vikernes’ theory that the Orcs represent his ancestors, IOW, vikings, before he starts to sympathize with them too much.
OTOH, people born in the 19th century thought like people born in the 19th century did isn’t exactly a great scientific discovery.
Dr. Onyeka Nubia is another Nigerian man of the Igbo Tribe, just like his fellow Igbo Tribe member now refusing to resign from the Oxford Students Union. Nigeria is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Where is the Nigerian Shakespeare, whose literary works we can all study?
All these Third World Invaders who are lavished with British Taxpayers money, and the high positions in British society they crave, ALWAYS end up whingeing about “racism” and claiming to be “victims”.
Next he’ll be demanding “reparations”. I am thoroughly sick of them all.
Speaking of the Igbo tribe. From the BBC (surprisingly) « Nigerian journalist and novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani writes that one of her ancestors sold slaves, but argues that he should not be judged by today’s standards or values. My great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, was what I prefer to call a businessman, from the Igbo ethnic group of south-eastern Nigeria. He dealt in a number of goods, including tobacco and palm produce. He also sold human beings. “He had agents who captured slaves from different places and brought them to him,” my father told me. Nwaubani Ogogo’s slaves were sold through the ports of Calabar and Bonny in the south of what is today known as Nigeria. People from ethnic groups along the coast, such as the Efik and Ijaw, usually acted as stevedores for the white merchants and as middlemen for Igbo traders like my great-grandfather. They loaded and offloaded ships and supplied the foreigners with food and other provisions. They negotiated prices for slaves from the hinterlands, then collected royalties from both the sellers and buyers. About 1.5 million Igbo slaves were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean between the 15th and 19th Centuries. More than 1.5 million Africans were shipped… Read more »
Wow! Great find!
A very important one to keep for future reference…
Found the link here:
‘My Nigerian great-grandfather sold slaves’ – BBC News
And notice in this map that Britain and Scandinavia were not included in this trade:
“but argues that he should not be judged by today’s standards or values.”. Exactly correct. Now how about putting some effort into other things like stopping todays slave trade.
The Benin Bronzes were made of bronze that the tribe who made them had obtained in payment for the slaves they’d captured then sold to Europeans.
Given that it was stronger tribes who captured slaves from weaker tribes, the slave trade went on for hundreds of years and the balance of power between the different tribes almost certainly changed during this time it’s likely that some tribes were both victims and beneficiaries of the slave trade at different points in time. Do they owe themselves reparations, or was the whole of Africa a peaceful Marxist cooperative before people were corrupted by evil European capitalists and therefore only white people are to blame for slavery?
I’m sick of people claiming that we urgently need to be decolonized by rewriting our history so that it better matches contemporay American political theories. Especially people from Nigeria. That was part of the former German colony Deutsch-Ostafrika where white and black soliders led by German officers fought side-by-side until 1918 because they weren’t particular keen on coming under British rule. The black soldiers became entitled to German state pensions because of this which were duly paid to them until their deaths.
But that’s the kind of stories critical race theorists to whom all the world is the USA prior to abolishment of segregation never tell.
That term “decolonizing the curriculum” originated not in America, but in the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign by Ethnic Africans in South Africa.
Whilst initially being focused on the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, Rhodes Must Fall states that “the fall of ‘Rhodes’ is symbolic for the inevitable fall of white supremacy and privilege at our campus.”
From the Wikipedia article. It’s not difficult to find the other usual keywords, eg, institutional racism. This is all just global critical race theory, which, like any theory calling itself critical, is part of the fallout of Post-Marxism which became really popular (with people having a faible for something like this) in the late 1960s and the 1970s. I’m tired of dealing with people living about 50 years in the past and trying to force their ‘hot’ student discussion topics from that time onto me.
The “Nigerian Shakespear” has been honing his (or her) skills in drafting emails to European targets, telling fantastic tales of Uncles of Royal Birth, and the quest for a safe haven for uncountable riches of unknown origin – with a share of it for you. From such writings great tragedies must emerge…
Brilliant! 🙂
Nigerian Shakespeare? Didn’t you know that Shakespeare was black but has been whitewashed by racist historians? Just like every other white composer, inventor or philosopher.
If i remember the race of men is portrayed as mostly weak and corruptible, particularly by the ring. The examples given of this are all white men- eg Boromir.Saruman got corrupted- he was white. Sauron in the Lord of the rings is a giant eye, but when in corporeal form he had a giant point helmet on so you can not tell. The Wormtongue character was another bad character – he was white bloke i think. People have very selective memories. The next question- how do you get a version of the Lord of the Rings that has not been re-written? True of any book. Ian Fleming for example.
Saruman isn’t human. He’s one of the Maiar, like all the other wizards.
Yes, i can appreciate that. but i am sure the elves would come under white supremisist thing. And they are not human.
Dr Onyeka Nubia… ah.
“Decolonisation of Tolkien” is the latest bridgehead in the ongoing colonisation of British universities by hostile invaders.
The man is delusional. Non whites were as rare as rocking horse droppings in Walsall, of all places, a mere 70 years ago.
People of Colour Activist demonises Tolkien?
Yes, but he fails to mention a Nigerian equivalent of Tolkien.
Where is such an epic tale written by a Nigerian author?
Or any Ethnic African author in the vast continent of Africa?
If it wasn’t for Europeans sharing the benefits of civilization Dr Nubia would be illiterate and running round the jungle in a loin cloth. Somebody needs to remind him of this fact.
Absolutely spot on.
He’s probably pissed off about that.
In academia, ‘decolonising’ usually means re-examining or moving away from white, Western viewpoints.
Nonsense! “Decolonisng is an Orwellianism which the anglophobes and anti-whitists have designed to promote the destruction of England and the English people.
We need Cromwell 2.0 to rid the country of these ungrateful, hateful, anti-White foreigners.
They’ll never admit to it but the real reason that the Elves left Middle Earth was because the Orcs moved in next to them, ruined the whole area.
I’d love to know if there’s similar woke idiots in other European countries claiming that books written 100 or more years ago are racist. I’m sure classic works of French, Spanish, Italian etc literature contain ideas that are considered racist today but were perfectly acceptable when the books were written.
What about slavery and empire? A lot of European countries had an empire in which they did some terrible things and were involved in the slave trade. Do some people in these countries or their former colonies keep going on about reparations and how everyone in that country, apart from recent immigrants, should feel guilty for things that happened hundreds of years before they were born.
Sure they do. It’s the same disease everywhere.
Surely orcs are not racist, it’s comparing black people to orcs that is racist.
Another diversity hire gone AWOL.
Billy Connolly had the perfect response to this sort of bollocks.
Dr Onyeka Nubia is making black people look quite pathetic.
And he doesn’t have to work too hard at it.
It’s what you get when you mix DEI with fake subjects.
Nonsense. The orcs are more civilised than Africans.
KNOB!
Dr Onyeka Nubia is a liar who racks his brains daily for new ways to keep his highly lucrative race scam going.
I think it’s a racist insult to all grey skinned people!🙄