Letter to Professor Margaret Sinex, commenting on her draft article
Tolkien's Haradrim and Medieval Constructions of the Other
which she allowed me to cite in my article on "The South"
Dear Professor Sinex,
I
have attached some comments or notes that I made on first reading the paper.
Overall,
my impression is that some of the parallels you see between the Haradrim and
the European images of the Africans/Outlanders (stature, yellow color
preference of the Jews) are not strong enough in Tolkien’s texts to bear
mention here. Also, I’m not a medievalist by any means, and I could not read
the quoted texts that were not translated – is that an accepted problem for
non-specialist readers?
What
I liked about the paper was that, as I guessed from my friend’s notes on your
lecture, you have demonstrated a strong medieval tradition of picturing
Africans by standard conventions that far predate the modern era of slavery or
our own conventions of race-prejudice, conventions that Tolkien to some extent
drew on. On the other hand, it’s easy enough to see where modern Europeans were
coming from when the Age of Exploration forced them to deal with darker peoples
from the South on a more realistic and continuing basis: any accusation of “racism” in Tolkien personally may be
misplaced, but he accurately mimics in his created world the European
perception, both modern and medieval, of the darker Southern peoples.
I
know your title is a draft, but your use of
“the Other” does not seem to appear very much in your text. I don’t know
much about modern academic buzzwords, but doesn’t “the Other” have a standard
set of associations and interpretive meanings that the title invites us to
expect in your analysis?
My
own interpretation of the Haradrim is that they occupy the “Edge” of
Middle-earth, giving Tolkien an indefinite “boundary” to his geography, the
equivalent in space of his famous “vistas” in time and legend, that he
maintained were crucial to giving a sense of realism to his secondary world.
See Tolkien’s Letter 247 and Shippey’s discussion of this in Road to Middle-earth, p. 229. That is
why I got nervous when you began taking Medieval geography farther afield into
the
Finally,
for my recent research I read Tolkien’s 1931-32 paper
Notes while reading:
p. 1. I’m not sure the Haradrim
as such (or their predecessors) appear in The
Silmarillion. p. 4: Oh, I see you mean in Akallabeth. Do most readers take a reference to The Silmarillion to mean what is
correctly the Quenta Silmarillion, or
the entire volume also including Akallabeth
and Of the Rings of Power?
p. 1. I don’t think the
Haradrim are of truly unusual size for Men. Orcs are generally squatter and
smaller than Western Men like the Dunedain and the Rohirrim. So Gollum’s
observation that the Haradrim are much bigger is more to the effect that their
evil, though less than Orcs’, is enhanced by their being, roughly, the size of
western Men. It’s their “cruel wickedness” that is important in the
description, I think: the Haradrim are the human equivalent of Orcs in evil.
p. 1. “They dwell in the far
South” is tricky. Tolkien marks Near Harad, Harad, and Far Harad on his map.
Insofar as Gondor is also South of our heroes’ northwestern homelands in
Middle-earth, Harad is definitely farther South than that. But “Far Harad” means
“Far South”, and the people from there are even more frightening than the
warrior Haradrim we see here. (as you note on p. 4, I see)
p. 6. I always feel like I’m
walking through a minefield when trying to distinguish between Tolkien’s
“darkness” and “blackness”. Sometimes Dark is a synonym for Black, and is
treated as a color; sometimes it implies Shadow and all the metaphors involving
Light that that implies. The color Black is not always evil in Tolkien (cf.
Elendil’s/Aragorn’s livery), but Darkness always is. Did medieval thought make
some kind of distinction along these lines too? For instance, is “swert” a
synonym for “black” – are “swertings” a Tolkien mock-medieval substitute for
“negro”? Or is “swert” more like dusky or dark, and more appropriate for what
we might call “brown-skinned” people like North Africans and Western Asians?
After all, even Sam has “faithful brown hands” appropriate to a servant-class
gardener.
p. 8. This is fascinating. If
I understand you, the Europeans reported Saracens (what I would call North
Africans, etc., as above) as having “pitch-black” skin to match their “black”
(=evil, sinful) hearts. I would have sworn that most of the Muslim (Paynim?)
opponents of Christian Europe were (again) what might be characterized as “brown-skinned.”
This is a common phenomenon in racist typology, obviously, and takes place even
today. It is a triumph of language over observation.
Unless the Europeans were
really encountering very dark-skinned Africans from the Equatorial regions (who
are as close to “black”-skinned as anyone on earth), who had been recruited,
kidnapped, or otherwise transported to the front line of the conflict.
p. 17. The medieval moral
world cartography and details on the questions of the
p. 18. Interesting that
Albert the Great should conclude (a
priori, I should guess) that the people of the south are “small and
feeble”, while Les Narbonnais (your
p. 8) has them “huge and black as ink”. Again, one wonders how the “huge”
Saracens became so black… This also relates to the discussion on p. 26.
p. 23. I agree that red and
gold and black are the Haradrim’s heraldic colors. I’m not sure I buy the
identity of the Medieval Jew’s “yellow” with the Haradrim’s color, for whom
gold is far more commonly used by Tolkien than yellow. In Tolkien, red is a
generally evil color, linking blood, flame, and anger. Gold is more ambiguous:
it and yellow are characteristically identified with the Sun and the light of
the second Tree as much as with any negative characteristic like the greed that
gold arouses, or the color harmony that yellow makes with red in any pictorial
composition.
p. 24. “They are a handsome
people” This hasn’t really been demonstrated yet, I think, if by handsome you
mean their facial or bodily appearance. The bold colors serve to make them
fearsome, rather than handsome, as I read the descriptions. Tolkien
deliberately hides the dead soldier’s face from Sam and the reader, to avoid
having to commit on whether the face, seen “close up”, would betray any sign of
evil.
p. 26. Any connection with
the giant Goliath in the Bible? Was he a stock figure of evil in the medieval
imagination?
p. 28. The reference to the
Mumak’s handler being a “giant among the Swertings” yet tiny next to the beast,
always suggested to me that Swertings were otherwise of relative normal size
for Men. See also my note on Gollum’s observation on p. 1 above. Remember that
the Edain and the Eldar in Middle-earth are “tall.” (At times Tolkien
speculated that the Eldar were as much as 8 or 9 feet tall!) Tolkien uses
physical stature as a sign of moral greatness or spiritual power. Although
Morgoth and Sauron are also gigantic, as fallen spirit-beings they have kept
that attribute from their “good” days; all the Valar/Maiar are gigantic because
their spiritual presence is so immense compared to the Children. It would seem
odd to me if Tolkien thought of the Haradrim as a race taller than the Dunedain
of Gondor.
p. 30. The troll-men of Far
Harad. This is important. Tolkien is being more accurate to regional
anthropology than the medievals were. The Haradrim (as Saracens) are
brown-skinned, but the Far Harad men are black, and truly ugly (as Negroid
features would be seen by Europeans--just as he characterized Orcs as
‘least-lovely Oriental types to European eyes’). The connection of distance to
deformity is clear.
“Troll-men” is a very
puzzling term here, since elsewhere Trolls in Tolkien are European stock
folk-demons with some relation to Goblins or Orcs, and occupying a place in
Morgoth’s stable equivalent to Yavanna’s Ents. I wonder if he was deliberately
displacing the “ape” comparison so invidiously used by modern racists in
discussing Negroid Africans? But no – you have it! Troll is short-hand for
“monster” in Tolkien, if anything is, and he must be translating the
“monstrous” convention you’ve documented, into his own world’s equivalent. Ah.
That makes sense.
p. 31. Nice catch that
Tolkien never renders the southern or eastern languages, just the sound – since
he never seems to hesitate with anyone else. Too harsh for Tolkien to render as
words? Or, as I might guess, too marginal to rate such attention? The other
harsh language we encounter, by the way, is the Dunlendings’ at the siege of
Helm’s Deep, and those people are marginal but not southern – in fact they
typify Faramir’s “Men of Darkness,” showing that the edge is not strictly
geographical.
The harshness of a language
should correlate with the harshness of the appearance, since Tolkien’s verbal
and visual esthetics are so closely linked. To me this is another indicator
that we are not meant to see the Haradrim as “handsome” in any pleasing way.
I don’t think the comparison
with Frodo’s ability to understand Faramir’s rangers really belongs here: it
opens up a huge can of worms to speculate on the meaning of being able to
understand another language and its sounds--at least with Tolkien it does.