Let's Read Tolkien 33: The Council of Elrond

Next day Frodo woke early, feeling refreshed and well.

For the second chapter in a row, we begin with Frodo waking up in Rivendell. He goes for a walk, but doesn't get far until he runs into Bilbo and Gandalf, who escort him to a porch of Elrond's hall, where a council is assembling. Elrond is presiding, and presents Frodo. Glorfindel, Glóin and Strider Frodo recognizes, and he's now introduced to Glóin's son Gimli. Among the elves present are Erestor, chief counsellor of Elrond, and Galdor from the Grey Havens west of the Shire, as well as Legolas from the Woodland Realm. Finally, Boromir is introduced as "a man from the South".

We're only given a selection from what gets debated at the council, but it's still quite a lot. First up is Glóin, who fills us in on how the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain have been doing since Bilbo left for home. For whatever reason, despite the recovery of Erebor, the dwarves became unhappy and started raving about Moria. We don't actually really learn what or where Moria is, exactly, except that it's some great undertaking of their fathers. "Too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear," Glóin says, but the fear remains nameless. Eventually - thirty years ago - Balin left for Moria, taking many other dwarves, including Ori and Óin, with him. At first, they had word of him at the Lonely Mountain, but then Moria was quiet.

Balin's fate, however, isn't the only thing bothering Glóin. A year ago, Dáin - still King under the Mountain - received a messenger from Mordor, asking after a hobbit thief and a ring he stole from Sauron. He promises that should the dwarves find this ring, "but a trifle that Sauron fancies", he will return three of the rings of the dwarves to them. If not, there will be war. So Glóin has been sent, to warn Bilbo and seek the wisdom of Elrond.

This Elrond promises Glóin he shall receive. The concerns of the dwarves - and the trifle that Sauron fancies - are all one and the same problem. Elrond then launches on his own exposition, telling the history of Sauron and the Ring: how the Elven-smiths of Eregion befriended Sauron, who wasn't yet blatantly obviously evil, and the Rings were forged; chief among them the One Ring, made in secret by Sauron to rule the others. Númenor fell, but the Kings of Men came from there to Middle-earth, and together with the elves fought Sauron. There's a digression when Elrond reminiscences on "the splendour of their banners", startling Frodo, who needs to have it explained to him that Elrond is like really old.

Elrond was the herald of Gil-galad, the Elven-king, and fought with him when both the kings of men and elves, Gil-galad and Elendil, died. They defeated Sauron, however, and Isildur, Elendil's son, took the Ring from him with his father's broken sword. Only Isildur, Elrond and Círdan of the Havens were there, and Isildur refused to destroy the Ring, claiming it as weregild for his father. Eventually Isildur died, betrayed by the Ring which was then named Isildur's Bane, but the shards of his sword were brought to the North.

Although the Free Peoples won the war, Sauron was not destroyed, and the winners were weakened. Many had died, and the elves began to be estranged from men. While the southern realm of Gondor built great fortresses to keep watch on Mordor, the men of the North dwindled. In our first encounter with Tolkien's pseudo-Howardian racial doctrines, the pure blood of Númenor weakened, and the northern realms fell into ruin. Gondor also declined, and the watch on Mordor was neglected.

Boromir protests at this, and I certainly don't blame him: I wouldn't sit around quietly listening to some asshole complain about how the blood of my people has declined through racial mixing either. He counters racism with racism: maybe their blood isn't what it used to be, but "by our valour the wild folk of the East are still restrained". Thank you, Boromir. He talks about the war between Gondor and Mordor, the latter now bolstered by the Easterlings and the people of Harad, as well as a terrifying black horseman that scares the shit out of everyone. He gets in a complaint that the people Gondor protects aren't very grateful, and then explains why he's there: to get Elrond to interpret his dream. Both Boromir and his brother had a dream that told them to seek out Imladris, that is Rivendell, and the Sword that Was Broken; there will also be a Halfling, and Isildur's Bane.

The dream-interpretation, of course, is right at hand: Strider throws down his broken sword, and gets his official introduction from Elrond as that dude who creeps on my daughter Aragorn son of Arathorn, the heir of Isildur and Elendil, chief of the Dúnedain of the North. Finally, Frodo reluctantly brings forth the Ring. Boromir doubts Aragorn, but Bilbo spits some rhyme at him, and now it's Aragorn's turn to speechify.

Aragorn talks about how the Rangers of the North keep people safe, also for little or no thanks. Attention readers, it has been one (1) chapter since anyone was fat-shamed.

"Strider" I am to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly.

Attention readers, it has now been zero (0) chapters since anyone was fat-shamed. Aragorn and Boromir are effectively having a really weird passive-aggressive victimization contest, where they're both making a whole production of their selfless secret sacrifices that no-one appreciates and that Aragorn claims they don't complain about while complaining about them. Eventually, he gets to the point, which is that he so is dead butch, and will come to Gondor to prove it.

Boromir, reasonably, wants to know how anyone knows that Frodo's ring is, in fact, Isildur's Bane, and how it ended up with a hobbit. This is Bilbo's cue, and he tells his story, complete with an acknowledgement that he lied to Glóin about it earlier. Frodo is up next, and after he's finished, Galdor of the Havens has several questions. Where was Gandalf? Where's Saruman? And how does anyone actually know that Frodo's ring is the One Ring? To answer all this, Elrond finally calls on Gandalf himself to speak.

For starters, Gandalf starts filling us in on recent events. We now learn that Gandalf's visit to the dungeons of the Necromancer, briefly mentioned in the Hobbit, revealed that the Necromancer was in fact Sauron. The White Council - that is, Elrond, Gandalf and their buddies - drove him out, only to see him establish himself in Mordor. Saruman, briefly mentioned in Chapter 2 as Gandalf's boss, advised everyone to not mind Sauron, and even when they learned he was seeking the One Ring, Saruman assured everyone it can't be found: having fallen into the river, it'll have ended up in the Sea.

Gandalf didn't trust him. He wanted to know how the Ring ended up with Gollum, but Gollum was nowhere to be found. While Aragorn started searching for Gollum, Gandalf traveled to Gondor, and in the archives of Minas Tirith he found a scroll where Isildur described the ring he took off the defeated Sauron. The Ring was still hot, and the writing on it could be read, so Isildur transcribed it. Meanwhile, Aragorn had found Gollum. Gandalf learned that Gollum had lived many lifespans of his kind already, and crucially, had found the Ring in the Great River, near the Gladden Fields where Isildur fell. Finally, Gandalf recites the phrase he read off the Ring in Bag End in Chapter 2, which is the same as recorded by Isildur.

So Bilbo's and Frodo's ring is definitely the One Ring. What's more, Gollum had also visited Mordor, so Sauron knew as well, and must by now know that it's in Rivendell. Boromir asks what became of Gollum, and Legolas speaks up to report that he's escaped from the Woodland Realm where he was being held.

After a brief complaint from Glóin, who also once escaped from the Woodland Realm, Gandalf answers Galdor's other questions, and tells the story of his encounter with Saruman. In June, Gandalf had met his co-wizard, Radagast the Brown, who told him that the Nazgûl - the Ring-wraiths - were on the move, looking for a place called the Shire. But Radagast also passed on a message from Saruman, offering his help; and so Gandalf leaves a letter with Barliman Butterbur at Bree and heads off to Saruman's digs: the tower of Orthanc in Isengard, way at the southern end of the Misty Mountains.

At Orthanc, Saruman gives Gandalf a speech on how they should either ally with Sauron or take the Ring for themselves, so they could rule over Middle-earth as benign dictators for the greater good of everyone. When Gandalf refuses, Saruman imprisons him on the pinnacle of Orthanc until he reveals the location of the Ring. With the help of the Great Eagles, Gandalf manages to escape to Rohan, where the king tells him to take a horse and leave, so Gandalf takes his best horse and heads for the Shire. He gets into a fight with the Nazgûl at Weathertop, which Frodo and co. saw in the distance in Chapter 11, and manages to draw off some of them on his way to Rivendell.

Finally, with the whole story told, the council needs to decide what to do with the Ring. Elrond leads with the summing-up, and the first suggestion, by Erestor, to send the Ring to Bombadil, is sensibly dismissed. Glorfindel suggests throwing it into the ocean, which Gandalf rejects:

There are many things in the deep waters; and seas and lands may change. And it is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one.

Going through their options, the council decide that the Ring can neither be hidden or sent away. Elrond speaks the last remaining option: sending the Ring to the Fire where it was made.

At this Boromir speaks up, wanting to know why they can't use the Ring themselves. Elrond explains that it was made by Sauron and is evil; anyone who uses it to vanquish Sauron will simply become another Sauron in his place. Boromir isn't convinced. Still, the question of who will take the Ring hangs in the air. Bilbo volunteers, but is gently refused.

Finally, Frodo speaks up, and offers to bear the Ring to Mordor.

**

I said last time that there was lots of exposition coming, and I meant it. This chapter is practically entirely made up of reported speech, at best I think third-order: Gandalf says Radagast told him that Saruman had said something. The second chapters of books in the Lord of the Rings tend to be heavy on exposition, and this is the heaviest of them all: led by Elrond, several characters go over what is, essentially, the whole story of the One Ring and Sauron's attempts to recover it. It sets the entire novel in context and places it firmly in Tolkien's mythos; after the Council, we know pretty much all the major players in the story and their histories, and crucially, what the Ring is and why it needs to be destroyed. In that sense, this is one of the most crucial chapters in the whole of the Lord of the Rings. And as such, there's a lot to get through here.

**

The first speaker, Glóin, is concerned that unless they help Sauron find the Ring, he'll attack them:

If we make no answer, the Enemy may move Men of his rule to assail King Brand, and Dáin also.

He's right, too: the first time I played War of the Ring, I invaded not only Dale but the Woodland Realm as well with my Easterlings. To unconscionably jump ahead of our chronology, Appendix B of the Lord of the Rings tells us that Sauron did this as well, and took Dale, but committed the rookie mistake of settling down to besiege Erebor rather than driving on into the Woodland Realm, which tends to be an easier two victory points and also frees the forces at Dol Guldur to focus on Lórien.

To return to the narrative, the reason Balin goes to Moria is "a shadow of disquiet" that falls on the dwarves. Unfortunately, as discussed previously, it's very possible that this is another one of Tolkien's meditations on Jewishness, which he claims dwarves are allegories things that aren't allegories but are exactly like them for. But the shadow also recalls (precalls?) some incidents in the Silmarillion where Morgoth was talented at sowing discord at a distance, and Glóin's admission that Balin went looking for a ring connects this escapade directly with the broader matters of the Council.

Starting with Glóin is a good choice, because whatever Tolkien's notions of Jewishness, he writes dwarves well, and Glóin serves to connect the council to the events of the Hobbit, letting us orient ourselves.

**

The history of the Ring introduces us to the notion at the heart of Tolkien's racism, and perhaps also his classism: blood. Throughout, Tolkien treats heredity as defining, explaining both individual character traits and collective behaviour with blood. We'll have more direct examples of this later on, but suffice to say that it's a recurring theme.

The waning of the blood of Númenor is where the blood trope meets an even more central concern of Tolkien's: decline. If I had to pick one theme that suffuses the Lord of the Rings, I'd say it's decline and loss. The fall of empires has been an European obsession since, well, a good part of the ancestors of modern Europeans found themselves among the ruins of Roman, Egyptian and other ancient empires. Thence the precursor trope in so much speculative fiction, then; an ongoing concern in the West at least since Gibbon, taken up by fascists with Spengler and still parroted on both ends of the political spectrum today. Intriguingly, as
an article in Foreign Policy last year pointed out, apocalyptic fiction isn't particularly popular in China, but we still love it. Tolkien's account of the waning of Gondor strikes a decidedly Spenglerian note, so much so that this is certainly where Tolkien comes closest to anything actually resembling fascism. Gondor declining because "the blood of the Númenorans became mingled with that of lesser men" could be straight out of a fever dream of Eurabia, or indeed Mein Kampf.

Tolkien, however, is not consistent with this. It's worth noting that both of his major protagonists are of "mixed blood"; in Chapter One we were treated to an extended bar-room discussion of Frodo's dubious parentage ("Baggins is his name, but he's more than half a Brandybuck, they say"), echoing the first chapter of the Hobbit, where Bilbo was defined through the conflict between his stolidly respectable Baggins heritage and his adventurous Took blood. Elrond is famed for his legendary wisdom - and his sobriquet is "Half-elven". What's more, the "pure blood of Númenor" is the result of intermingling three different races: elves, humans and through Lúthien's mother Melian, angels. In the central romance of Tolkien's legendarium, a half-elf, half-angel woman is wooed by a human man, and later two of their distant descendants, an elf-woman and a man of Númenoran descent, repeat the process. So while Tolkien framed the story of Gondor as a Spenglerian parable of racial decline, there's simply no way to read his work as a polemic against racial mixing. If anything, Elrond's speech on Gondor is an anomaly. Certainly Tolkien never suggests trying to arrest decline by safeguarding racial purity or any such properly fascist notion. Maybe Elrond is a Nazi?

Robert E. Howard conceived of his fictional world as a constant struggle between different races, intermittently rising toward civilization or collapsing into barbarism.

These stone age kingdoms clashed, and in a series of bloody wars, the outnumbered Atlanteans were hurled back into a state of savagery, and the evolution of the Picts was halted. Five hundred years after the Cataclysm the barbaric kingdoms have vanished. It is now a nation of savages - the Picts - carrying on continual warfare with tribes of savages - the Atlanteans.
- Robert E. Howard: The Hyborian Age, in Howard: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, Ballantine Books, 2003; p. 382

Howard's notions recall those of H.P. Blavatsky and her "root-races", as do several of his "races" and locales, like Lemuria and so on. Tolkien's ideas are very different, because they're rooted in Christianity. Christian time proceeds from creation to apocalypse, and it gets worse as the end gets nearer. This is also the nature of the decline in the Lord of the Rings: through the Fall, mankind (as it surely was to Tolkien!) has become estranged from God, and the rift will only be healed at the end of time. Until then, things are just going to keep on getting worse. So the decline of Gondor, say, couldn't have been averted with laws against mixing blood or anything like that, because no Machine can counteract the Fall. One of the strongest themes in the Lord of the Rings is that nothing will ever be the same: loss is irrevocable. The good old days are gone and will not return. So for Gondor, so for all mankind. This, rather than racial purity, is what the theme of decline is based on.

**

In the tale of Isildur, the Ring is perhaps more clearly than ever sin, and a commentary on pre-Christian Germanic society. Isildur's actions in Mordor are straight out of a Norse saga: he claims the One Ring as weregild, literally man-money, for his father and brother. In Germanic customary law, practiced in Scandinavia, Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere, everyone had a price, and the penalty for injuring or killing a person was financial restitution, either to them or their kin. Isildur's claim seems to be in accordance with at least the spirit of this idea: the Ring is literally compensation for his dead kinsfolk. However, Isildur fails to realize that the Ring is cursed.

Now, cursed rings are nothing new to the sagas; in the Völsunga saga, arguably one of the most significant inspirations for Tolkien's Middle-earth stories, the famous story of the weregild of Otr is directly connected to the cursed ring Andvaranaut. I don't think we'd be wrong, however, to read a more significant commentary into Isildur's failure, because the One Ring is more than a cursed ring of the sagas: it's a Machine, i.e. it is sin. Remember that unlike Andvaranaut, there's no specific curse on the One Ring. It's an instrument of domination that grants power according to the measure of its wielder. In a saga, it might have been a powerful and valuable artifact. Its curse is that it's been designed to oppose God; in mortal hands, it circumvents death, which is, after all, the original sin. The reason Isildur makes the mistake of claiming the Ring is, arguably, that his Germanic system of weregilds and honor lacks the concepts necessary to understand and deal with sin. Because of this omission, all his pagan valor is for naught, and his claim of weregild is really nothing more than Gollum's absurd story of his birthday-present: a self-justification for succumbing to temptation.

**

Gandalf's conversation with Saruman deserves attention as one of the few passages in the Lord of the Rings where Tolkien is explicitly political. Here's Saruman:

The Younger Days are beginning. The time of the elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which We must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.

Reading this, it's difficult to avoid the impression that Michael Moorcock and the critics who follow him can't tell the difference between Gandalf and Saruman. Here's what Moorcock has to say of the works of Tolkien and other "enlightened Tories" in Epic Pooh:

They don't ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what's best for us.

There is simply no way to square this claim with the conversation between Gandalf and Saruman in this chapter. Saruman offers exactly what Moorcock claims Tolkien does: a world of law and order, presided over by powerful white men who know best. Somehow Moorcock must have missed the part where Gandalf unambiguously refuses to have any part in this whatsoever.

I recently happened upon Erin Horáková's wonderful Kirk Drift, where she argues that our idea of what Jim Kirk from the original Star Trek was like has been completely distorted, to the point where the popular notion of original series Kirk has practically nothing in common with how the character was portrayed. I strongly believe a similar argument needs to be made about Lord of the Rings; as with Horáková and Star Trek, not to immunize it from criticism, but rather to criticize the work itself, not the strange notion of it floating around in our popular culture. Tolkien has come to stand in for reactionary, patriarchal, racist fantasy in a way far beyond any examples of these tendencies found in his actual texts. To paraphrase Horáková, the Lord of the Rings has been colonised by a fascist reading by several mechanisms of mismemory. Saruman has become Gandalf.

The way popular notions of Tolkien manage to make Gandalf into the fascist of the piece and claim that good and evil are indistinguishable in the books is, simply put, a completely monstrous distortion of the original. This is especially bizarre in an era when the suave fascist demagogue Tolkien portrays Saruman as has made a comeback into Western politics that would have seemed unthinkable a little over a decade ago. Can many of us read Saruman's speech to Gandalf and not recognize the brutal fascism it conceals inside its rhetorical flourishes? It's among us now, as it was before Tolkien when he wrote this chapter. We may not agree that a privileged Catholic monarchism is the way to defeat the Sarumans of our time - I certainly do not! - but to lump Tolkien among them is completely, willfully ignorant. He was undoubtedly a reactionary conservative, his remarks on Jewishness alone make it clear he was a racist and an anti-Semite, and, well, he managed to write an entire novel without a single female character. But he was also strongly antifascist.

I'm inclined to speculate that one reason this has happened is that turning Tolkien into this fascist ghoul has been terribly handy for both sides of the culture wars. Left-wing reception of Tolkien has, to my knowledge, been consistently hostile, not least because of how useful a strawman the "arch-conservative" reading of Lord of the Rings is. There's a strange tendency in fantasy to self-advertise by insisting that one's fantasy offering isn't like "other fantasy" - not that it's ever clear what that "other fantasy" actually is. A fascist caricature of Tolkien is very handy for this.

Similarly, many on the extreme right have found inspiration and encouragement in a work that seems to be directly opposed to their worldview. As I'm writing this, the leadership of Finland's far-right racist party is being contested by two fascists, one an atheist at that, both of whom are avowed fans of Tolkien - and we find them competing for the position of Saruman. The caricature Tolkien's fascism must, to them, be an endorsement.

In my mind, one fundamental reason for this is the neglect and misunderstanding of Tolkien's theology. To read fascist values of obedience, authority and racist cruelty into Tolkien, one has to be almost wilfully blind to the theological underpinnings of his work. Even neglecting them, though, leaves large parts of the Lord of the Rings completely irreconcilable with the popular authoritarian caricature of Tolkien. Foremost among them is Gandalf's debate with Saruman in this chapter, which should make very clear that virtue is most definitely not found in submitting to the authority of white men in grey clothes. Saruman's language, ordering things "for that good which only the Wise can see", "deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order", is the language of 20th century totalitarianism, and it remains the language of 21st century authoritarians. Throw in a crack about unrestrained immigration and it could be a Theresa May speech. Tolkien firmly rejects it. Any critique that misses this is not a critique of Tolkien.

**

Finally, the council figures out what to do to the Ring. This is also a key part of the politics and ethics of the Lord of the Rings. Foremost, of course, is the idea that evil needs to be faced here and now, not postponed, ignored or hidden away. But most crucially, evil can't be fought with evil. This is why it's so preposterous to claim that the Lord of the Rings preaches submission to authority, or that it's a clash of "100% good" with "100% evil". If either of these were the case, the Council of Elrond would be a very simple affair: simply give the Ring to Gandalf and he'll destroy the Dark Lord, and everything will be fine. If this was Harry Potter and the Ring of Power, say, there'd be no trouble at all. But it isn't. In Tolkien's theology, the Ring is a Machine: an object fundamentally opposed to God. Not even the best of the good in the world can use it; as I argued in Chapter 2, that would be heresy. Power, especially the power of the Enemy, corrupts. No-one, not even the men who know what's best for us, can be trusted with it. If there's one theme at the very heart of the Lord of the Rings, this is it.

**

Whew! That was some heavy exposition. Tolkien gets us through it, though, I think because the structure of the chapter is succesful. We start with Glóin, who takes a fairly small perspective that also ties into the Hobbit, giving us an easy start and broaching the subject of the Ring. Elrond can then give his talk on the history of the Ring, already foreshadowed earlier, and introduce both Aragorn and Boromir, as well as Gondor and the heirs of Isildur. With the scene now quite thoroughly set, Gandalf wraps up the exposition by linking it to the previous events of the book, and carrying the narrative to where we are now. So while this really is a huge amount of information, it works because the speeches lead into each other logically. There are also some good stylistic touches, like the subtly different ways the main participants speak, and the interjections, like Bilbo's poem, break up the exposition and make the whole sequence seem more alive.

Once the stories are all told, the council deliberates on what to do, setting down the key moral of the whole novel: ends do not justify means, and power corrupts. Finally, the chapter ends with Frodo taking on the mission of destroying the Ring. So we've now set up the entire rest of the book!

**

Next time: hiking and snow.

Let's Read Tolkien 4: Over Hill and Under Hill

There were many paths that led up into those mountains, and many passes over them.

The Last Homely House is well behind Thorin & Company; Bilbo muses on what's going on in the Shire as they wind their way through the foothills of the Misty Mountains, and everyone is cold and properly miserable.

One thing I haven't really talked about that deserves more attention is the way Tolkien writes about geography. He simply does a wonderful job of conveying a feel of the land, of terrain, space and history, so that the reader feels they're traveling through a rich and living landscape. Tolkien excels at creating a world the reader can really feel immersed in. One particularly striking way this comes up is the way he describes the Company's ascent into the Misty Mountains. Having given us a pretty good notion of the mountains, he gives the most wonderful description of a ferocious thunderstorm raging in the mountains. The detail I remembered best from my previous readings was the stone-giants throwing boulders at each other for fun in the storm, but what I didn't remember was how vividly he describes the storm and the company's utter misery in trying to weather it. You really feel like you're there with Bilbo and the dwarves, trying to snuggle under a rock overhang amidst an awesome display of nature's power.

It's this misery that drives the story forward, as young Fili and Kili are sent to look for a better shelter. They soon return, having found a cave big enough for the party to take cover in. They do their best to take care, exploring the cave thoroughly and refraining from lighting a fire so as not to draw attention to themselves. Finally satisfied that the cave is safe, they settle down for a smoke and go to sleep.

Of course, it isn't safe. After the party falls asleep, goblins emerge from deep inside the cave and surprise the sleeping dwarves. The only bit of luck is that Bilbo was having trouble falling asleep, and his scream of terror wakes Gandalf, just in time for the goblins trying to grab him to get a nasty surprise. The dwarves, hobbit and ponies, however, are captured by the goblins and driven into their deep tunnels, the goblins singing a song that creates a wonderful onomatopoetic effect with the swish and smack of the whip cracks driving them round and round underground.

Things don't look too good for the dwarves as they're hauled into Goblin-Town's great hall and paraded before the Great Goblin himself. Thorin puts on his best pompous manner to talk to him, and they learn that the safe cave they took shelter in was, in fact, the goblins' Front Porch. They're quite understandably suspicious of a party of dwarves at their front door, and the elven sword found on Thorin clinches the case. Just as the goblins are about to put Thorin and Company to death, Gandalf makes his expected reappearance, dousing the lights, creating general chaos and introducing the Great Goblin to the sword Glamdring of Gondolin - a fatal encounter.

Quickly, the company make their getaway, the dwarves taking turns carrying poor terrified Bilbo, stopping once so that Gandalf and Thorin can ambush the pursuing goblins. This buys them some time, but stealthy goblin runners set off in pursuit instead, and as they fall on the dwarves Bilbo is knocked off Dori's back, hits his head and loses consciousness.

**

After the previous chapter's pit stop, this one has plenty of action and leaves us very much in the thick of things. I'd be remiss, however, if I didn't take a moment to document our first meeting with the goblins, later known as orcs. Here's the description Tolkien gives us:

Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light.

There's really no two ways about it: that's a pretty miserable account to give of an entire people, let alone a whole race. But even here, the story we're told is actually quite a bit more complicated than the Always Chaotic Evil trope: the goblins actually have no particular malice against dwarves as such, and Tolkien mentions that "wicked dwarves" have even made alliances with them. Thorin and Company are brought before the Great Goblin who interrogates them, and Thorin has a civilized, if brief, dialogue with him, quite clearly proving that they're intelligent creatures one can have a conversation with. So even these goblins aren't latter-day video game villains who can't be interacted with in any way except through violence.

Obviously this is a major question that I'll be returning to as this project gets further along, but for now, I just want to note that in our first encounter with what will pretty much become the stock Always Chaotic Evil villain of fantasy, the picture is already more complicated than it will later be seen to be.

Let's Read Tolkien 3: A Short Rest

Previous part here.

**

They did not sing or tell stories that day, even though the weather improved; nor the next day, nor the day after.

Having recovered from their ordeal by troll, Bilbo and the dwarves continue their trip with Gandalf at their head and less of a picnic atmosphere in general. They trek over difficult and desolate wilderness, and when the Misty Mountains loom in the distance, Bilbo imagines they've nearly reached the Lonely Mountain already. He's corrected, and the enormity of the voyage really starts to sink in. This is definitely not a picnic any more.

Eventually Gandalf leads them to Rivendell, where the elves welcome the weary party. They hang out with the elves for a fortnight and meet Elrond, who provides a loremaster service by identifying the swords found in the trolls' lair as elven blades from Gondolin, and spotting some moon-letters on Thorin's map that reveal the time the secret door to Smaug's lair can be opened.

That's it, really: this chapter is a pit stop in Rivendell. Given that this is the first time we meet Tolkien's elves, they're really not all that impressive: they're mellow, childish dudes who like to hang out in trees, sing songs and shout whimsical jokes at passers-by. You might be forgiven for thinking they're stoners. Me, I like to think that Thorin & Co. got completely zonked with them for a week, stuffed themselves with food and finally got kicked out by Gandalf so the damn expedition would get somewhere for a change. Can you imagine a hobbit with the munchies? What were they thinking when they said "all expenses guaranteed"?

We get a glimpse of the wider mythos again with the mention of Gondolin, and it's worthy of note is that we also meet Elrond for the first time:

The master of the house was an elf-friend - one of those people whose fathers came into the strange stories before the beginnings of History, the wars of the evil goblins and the elves and the first men in the North. In those days of our tale there were still some people who had both elves and heroes of the North for their ancestors, and Elrond the master of the house was their chief.

In the first part, I talked about how Bilbo's personality is defined in terms of his heritage: his Took side and his Baggins side. Here Elrond is introduced in the same terms, by his parentage, even if readers familiar with the Lord of the Rings will notice it hasn't quite taken its final form.

The importance of heredity in Tolkien's works is perhaps one of the most uncomfortable themes for the 21st century reader, and is often referred to whenever someone wants to argue that he was a crazy racist. I don't think that's quite fair, mostly for other reasons that I'll point out as we come across them, but the fact remains that Tolkien talks about things like "pure blood" in a way that is, frankly, troubling, and while I don't agree with much of the political criticism levelled at him, I don't want to shy away from the difficult issues with his works either. So this is a theme we will have to return to.

For now, I do want to point out that while this kind of language is clearly objectionable to us, it wasn't to a man of Tolkien's background. Talking about the importance of inherited characteristics, even national ones, and notions of pure and mixed blood, will have been quite normal in his day, especially to conservatives. Much of that thinking is still with us today in the form of racism. Having said that, I do think that Tolkien doesn't regard blood as destiny: whatever a person's heritage is imagined to be, it's what they do with it that counts. Tolkien, I maintain, does not create a fantasy world straight out of the fevered dreams of a modern racist, where people are reduced to biological automata. It's also worth noting that in contrast to racist fantasies of "pure blood", nearly all of Tolkien's heroes are somehow of mixed heritage, and even multi-cultural. Observe, so far, Bilbo's dual nature and unhobbitlike craving for adventure, and Elrond as a sort of heroic mixture of races, to adapt the lingo. This theme of race and blood will have to be explored further as we go along.

Having now mentioned both class and race, I must also mention gender, and honestly, the Bechdel test ain't in it: a grand total of three women have been as much as mentioned in the text. Namely Bilbo's mother, Belladonna Took, and her two sisters, the latter two identified only as daughters of Old Took. There has not been a single female character in the story itself. In that sense at least, this is literally a Boys' Own adventure.

Next time, the homosocial caravan hits the Misty Mountains and stays dead butch.

The NHL and foreign names

As anyone who watches the NHL knows, North American hockey broadcasters don't have the faintest idea how to pronounce European names. At first I thought it was simple ignorance, but I was wrong: in fact, the travesty of language we European NHL fans are used to cringing at comes courtesy of the NHL Pronounciation Guide. You can find the 2002 copy here. We'll do an exercise: I'll give you the NHL "pronounciation", you try to figure out who the hell it is. Answers in the hyperlinks!

suh LAH nee (answer)
nih tee MAK ee (answer)
NEE nuh muh (answer)
huh LEHN ee uhz (answer)

These are 2002 examples, but I assure you, the quality of the product hasn't changed one bit. My Russian isn't nearly good enough to comment, except to say that my guesses have been better than the NHL's, but here's a Swedish example:

SHOH struhm (answer)

Yeah, you probably guessed that one, but seriously, even surly Finnish teenagers flunking compulsory Swedish class know better than that.

For any readers who don't speak Finnish or Swedish, take my word for it: the people behind that "pronounciation guide" don't have the faintest idea what they're doing. But it's not just that the league and the broadcasters don't know how to pronounce European names, it's that they're deliberately disseminating, almost mandating, the incorrect pronounciation of those names. In the information age, frankly, it's offensive. It cannot be beyond the league and the broadcasters to find out how players' names are actually pronounced. That they refuse to do so is, quite simply, racist.

There is, of course, a political side to this. The most notable exponent of mispronounciation is, unsurprisingly, Don Cherry, whose renditions of European names are, well, wrong. He's admitted to doing it on purpose, because he's a racist. That isn't surprising, but it was a little surprising to read this tweet from Adam Proteau of the Hockey News, one of the more liberal voices in hockey:

So remember this: according to Proteau, pronouncing foreign names correctly is racist. I have to admit, I don't even know what to say to that. On reflection, I suppose it shows how deeply internalized the racism is. Even to a liberal commentator who regularly calls out Cherry and his ilk for their racist and misogynistic nonsense, the notion of finding out how to pronounce a foreign name is so repulsive that he creates a convoluted, MRA-esque pseudo-logic that makes respecting a foreign language racist. I don't think I'm going to be able to read his columns the same way again.

We, at least, can try to be constructive about this. To avoid being racist against our North American friends, I suggest that if Finnish readers want to refer to the creator of the NHL "pronounciation" guide, broadcaster Mike Emrich, they pronounce his name miik umrääk. Be sure to respect hockey journalism and avoid racism by carefully enunciating Adam Proteau as älän prötöö, and Don Cherry's robustly Canadian name is correctly pronounced reimond luksuri jätst. Remember: they would want you to say it like that. Because the "correct" way would be racist.

Mass Effect 2 is a white supremacist game

To begin, a disclaimer to avoid misunderstanding. I have no knowledge or opinions of the Mass Effect 2 designers' and developers' actual political views, so I'm not talking about them. What I intend to show is that Mass Effect 2 tells a story that shares many characteristics with the way white supremacist movements see themselves, and co-opts the player into sharing that narrative. Contains spoilers.

Despite being a big fan of the first Mass Effect, I really didn't like its sequel. I found ME2 incredibly disappointing in many ways, and I share many of the views put forward in this article. While the gameplay in itself was a big letdown, what made the game actively distasteful for me was the way it not only trampled all over continuity from ME, but it does this to make you participate in a white supremacist story.

In Mass Effect, the player encounters a rogue Alliance black project called Cerberus, which aims to create super-soldiers. During the course of the game, it becomes obvious that they've gone totally insane, fighting Alliance personnel, including the player character, and perpetrating all kinds of atrocities. They're basically Unit 731, only worse. In fact, if your character has the Sole Survivor background option, it turns out that the people responsible for the death of your former unit, who spent years torturing the only other survivor, are in fact Cerberus. Because the first game is quite immersive, I have to admit that by the end I figured my character had a fairly negative opinion of Cerberus, to say the least.

Having said that, it was a bit of a shock for me when the Cerberus we meet in Mass Effect 2 seems to have nothing to do with Cerberus from the previous game. In the second game, Shepard dies and is resurrected by Cerberus to work for them. The Cerberus operatives you meet enthusiastically explain to you that you've got it all wrong: Cerberus isn't a bad organization at all! They're an independent human supremacist group, bankrolled by a reclusive millionaire, and not some horrible terrorist organization that murdered your entire unit!

What makes the game truly shocking, and totally killed the series for me, was that your character is forced to go along with this. Yes, that's right: my character, who's an Alliance military officer and has seen first hand what Cerberus does, who indeed was mainly known before the events of the first game as the only survivor of a Cerberus atrocity, is now gladly putting on a Cerberus uniform.

It gets worse when you're introduced to your new ship, which is exactly like the old ship. There are even some of your old crew members on board, but they all seem to have entered some strange parallel universe, having renounced their former loyalties, if not even their personalities, and gladly joined a paramilitary human supremacist organization. If this smacks rather strongly of rewriting history in general and Holocaust denial in particular, that's because the game does. What's worse is that this isn't just a couple of characters talking. It's not like this is their version of what Cerberus is; instead, this seems to be the common view of everyone you encounter on Cerberus. Back in Mass Effect, Cerberus and its atrocities were headline news; now it seems collective amnesia has set in, to such an extent that the in-game documentation now gives a whole new view of Cerberus. You're also effectively prevented from seriously questioning it; such topics as the Sole Survivor background being pretty much taboo.

The absolute nadir of the game comes when you encounter a former squadmate from ME, who asks you how you can possibly be working with a disgusting terrorist organization like Cerberus. This isn't even lampshading, it's much worse: your character is being called out on the game's retconning. What are you supposed to say? My answer: because the game forced me to. I can't even begin to imagine what my character would say, because I'd pretty much lost all immersion in the world by then.

The jarring continuity problems are so bad that the most sensible explanation for ME2 would seem to be that your character wakes up in a parallel universe. I've been struggling to find a good analogy to how the rebranding and whitewash of Cerberus felt for me. It's rather like if one were to write a story about an Israeli commando who wakes up from a coma to find that his unit has defected en masse to Hamas, and explain to him that Hamas isn't a terrorist organization at all but a pacifist charity. Or a British left-wing pacifist deciding that maybe the SS isn't so bad after all and joining it when he's told that the Holocaust was really just a lie. And Josef Mengele, who would have fit right in at Cerberus, was a good Samaritan.

**

If it was just that Mass Effect 2 is really bad at continuity, I could just chalk it up to the generally juvenile and subpar quality of the writing, which produces memorable scenes like this one:

The "ass" in "Mass Effect" seen in the picture is one of the new characters, whose only real game functions are to explain away your previous notions of Cerberus and, well, that. Speaking of characters, most of the recurring characters are also more like parodies of themselves, from Tali and Garrus both actively ridiculing the previous game and delivering frankly embarrassing fan service, to the totally ludicrous transformation of Liara that reminds me very strongly of the Mad parody of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. Liara's reinvention as a gangster and "information broker", and Garrus's new personality as a sort of lame Turian Punisher, are not only ridiculous but again, offensive to the previous game. Remember the whole side plot with Garrus, where you investigate an unsolved case from his C-Sec days? Where you can guide him in either the "paragon" or "renegade" direction? Turns out you needn't have bothered, because he's going to go and become the Turian Punisher either way.

One of the new NPCs you recruit is Jack, a powerful biotic who was the victim of cruel Cerberus experiments and, unsurprisingly, hates them. You get the same old propaganda line from Cerberus and their on-board cheerleader: the great leader didn't know about it and so on. That may be an attempt at narrative ambiguity; either you believe them or you don't. But the problem with that is that you're not allowed to act on it in any way.

By the way, biotics have been completely nerfed, so you don't actually need her for anything. She only has special cutscene powers.

More jarring universe-breaking follows when you meet the ship's AI. That's right; in the first installment of the series, everyone completely freaked out when AIs were even mentioned, and now here they are, happily living on a ship with a built-in AI. The only person who even notices is Tali, and even she can just be talked out of it. Then again, you can talk her into happily co-operating with a Geth, too.

But the problem isn't just poor continuity: what's being done with Cerberus is morally distasteful as well. In Mass Effect, Cerberus was an organization dedicated to human supremacy and the creation of a "super-man" in order to defeat the aliens and conquer the galaxy for man's living space. Sound familiar? It should, because Cerberus seems to be rather directly based on the SS.

So in Mass Effect 2, you're revived by the SS, and two cheerful SS officers explain to you that you've got it all wrong! They have nothing against the Jews or Slavs as such, it's just that they're concerned with maintaining Germany's racial purity and standing in the world community. Of course, some individual SS members or member organizations, even, may have undertaken some suspicious activities in the past, but those have probably been misrepresented and anyway, they can't keep track of everyone. (The really atrocious examples are simply ignored, and you're not allowed to ask.) What matters is that their leader is a great man with a great vision for the future of our race. Surely you'll put on this SS uniform and follow his orders!

**

So right at the start of the game, you're forced to go along with rewriting history in a manner that rather too strongly resembles Holocaust denial. It then starts getting worse. Soon enough, you're initiated into the main plot of the game. Evil aliens are abducting thousands of people, and the Alliance government doesn't care. Therefore, it's up to the heroic racist militia of Cerberus to stop the evil aliens and save humanity. You see? It turns out the racists were the good guys! The government is corrupt, and its entanglement in a sinister one-galaxy government means it doesn't care what happens to ordinary folks. Luckily, the racist militia does care, and by defying the government, they save lives from the alien threat.

This is a narrative that could have been cooked up for a video game by a Midwestern racist militia or a European neo-fascist group. The main character is a brave government agent fighting on the side of good. He's resurrected by a racist group he's previously fought against, but finds out that after his death, the government has stopped caring about the people. Some of his former colleagues are now members of the racist group, and talk about their alienation with the goverment and its cover-ups of their heroic deeds and the coming alien menace. Only the enlightened elite that make up this militia group understand that the government's destructive policies of multiculturalism are leading to the destruction of the human race, but for saying this they're branded as racists. So the main character realizes that the racists are, after all, really the good guys, and the corrupt government is evil. He gladly joins a racial supremacist organization and battles the evil aliens.

In sum, Mass Effect 2 is the most disgustingly racist game I've ever played in my life.

Oh, sure, there are aliens on your team. That's not historically inappropriate; there were all sorts of nationalities in the Waffen-SS, too. The plot of the game still is that the government doesn't care if thousands of people are dying, because it's more interested in covering up alien attacks for some senseless nefarious reason, and people need armed anti-government racists to protect them from foreigners. I'm surprised they don't make you plant a truck bomb at an Alliance office building.

From what I've heard, in ME3 Cerberus will once again be your enemy. I wonder how they're going to pull that off. Retcon the retcon? Unless ME2 is rewritten out of existence (it was all a dream!), the fact will still remain that while the Alliance (federal government) stood by and did nothing, Cerberus (white supremacist militia) saved thousands of people from the aliens. Never mind that this whole notion of the Alliance being so corrupt and evil that they don't care about people any more comes out of nowhere.

I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest some more plot points for Mass Effect 3, in line with the new creative direction taken by ME2:

- the Alliance bans firearms and sends squads of aliens to collect them from human patriots
- main character discovers the "Protocols of the Elders of the Volus", proving the Volus are secretly allies of the Reapers
- the Council races join forces to create a New Galactic Order, a socialist one-galaxy government
- the New Galactic Order brands all humans with a barcode and bans the non-coded from buying and selling
- main character finds out that an ultra-secret cult, the Space Masons, secretly controls the Alliance

There's a lot of mileage to be covered here. The game could be called Mass Effect 3: The Shepard Diaries.

**

Mass Effect 2 was an insultingly bad game. If you were a fan of the first Mass Effect, ME2 went out of its way to slap you in the face. Instead of a dynamic, ambitious CRPG, we get a second-rate Gears of War clone that occasionally masquerades as a racist adventure game. Oh, and don't forget the planet-scanning mini-game, which was almost as much fun as stabbing yourself with a rusty knife.

The game also manages to be disgustingly sexist. As part of your crew, you have a sort of SS yeoman, who, of course, is a cute girl. If you get talking with her, it's possible for your character to develop a kind of romantic sub-plot with her. The consummation? A kiss? A sex scene? No.

You get to use her as a cabin ornament.

It's literally sickening. And, of course, there are no more same-sex romance options, because in the Space SS, that's just wrong.

In this hyper-sexist environment, what was merely poorly executed in the first game becomes actively troubling: every alien race is made up of a single gender. The only exception is the quarians, who seem to come in male and female; in neither of the games do we encounter a single krogan, salarian or turian female. On the wiki, we can have some reasons: the salarian "females are cloistered on their worlds out of tradition and respect". The krogan: "Female krogan rarely leave their home worlds, focusing on breeding in an attempt to keep krogan numbers from declining too quickly. The few remaining fertile females who can carry young to term are treated as prizes of war, to be seized, bartered or fought over." And even though there's no "fluff" justification for never meeting a turian female, we just...don't.

In the first game, the stated reason for never seeing a turian female was, as per the wiki, insufficient time and resources. I can believe that, and I'm certainly not saying that every permutation of alien race and gender needs to be represented in every sci-fi game. Still, for every major alien species we meet, the females are cloistered on their homeworlds or kept as chattel, or are just inexplicably absent. The quarians are the only exception, and when it comes to the more exotic aliens, gender isn't even mentioned but the assumption seems to be that everyone is male. The more unusual alien species are confined to brief walk-on roles, so they're not very relevant. Notable among them are, of course, the volus, a mysterious race of merchant profiteers with prominent noses whose race is denied membership in the galactic council because it's inferior.

And then there are the asari. Even though the asari have only one gender, the in-game Codex describes them as an "all-female" race, surely a mindless statement. The Orion slave girls of Mass Effect, the asari look and act like blue-skinned human women. They're promiscuous bisexuals who, despite looking very human, are inexplicably sexually desired by all of the major races of the Mass Effect universe. The asari can be found throughout the galaxy as strippers and prostitutes, and the game makes sure to bring some loose blue women your way for flirtation and more regularly.

So each major race maps nicely onto a gender. The turians, krogans and salarians are all men, and the asari are all women. The former provide NPC soldiers and scientists, while the asari get by on their biotic powers. As a point of note, while ME1 included a female soldier, in Mass Effect 2 your squad members divide neatly along gender lines. The men are soldiers or scientists, or at best semi-biotics, while the women are biotics, plus a thief added in the downloadable content. In other words, in ME2 women need special powers to be useful team members, while men can just pack a gun and come along.

Yes, it's a man's life in the Mass Effect galaxy.

So, if you've always wanted to be a space nazi, heroically rescuing the overwhelmingly white and heterosexual human race from evil space foreigners, this is the game for you. It made me want to vomit.

Racial thinking in fantasy role-playing

Years ago, I've run a couple of role-playing campaigns with ICE's Rolemaster standard system. For all its flaws, not least of which is encumbering the GM with a metric ton of tables and charts, it works surprisingly smoothly, and even if I wouldn't say I like it, I've found it useful. As a curiosity, one of the first things I ever wrote was a small article for a role-playing "netzine".

A while back I picked up a copy of ICE's RM supplement "Races and Cultures", from 2004. The way they published the system was that they came out with the basic rules, the Rolemaster Standard System (RMSS), and then started adding supplements to cover areas they'd only done sketchily in the basic ruleset. Some examples include the ludicrously overpowered Martial Arts Companion and various sets of magic rules.

Races and Cultures (R&C) aims to expand on character creation. In the RMSS, each character had a race, and if they were human, a culture. So dwarves and high elves were just dwarves or high elves, while humans were hillmen, mariners or something like that in addition to being humans. So humans had cultures, while everyone else just had race. As a side note, I have a personal gripe with R&C because it practically eliminates urban cultures, and a lot of the material on cultures is, to a person with even a nodding acquaintance with anthropology or cultural studies, ridiculous. But that's beside the point.

Now, using RM as an example, I'm going to argue that the vast majority of fantasy role-playing games reproduce European racism. I'm sure that some people reading this are going to be completely turned off by that, but bear with me. This is important.

As far as I know, one of the first civilizations to put an intellectual gloss on "us versus them" were the ancient Greeks. To them, the world was divided into Greeks and barbarians. "Barbarian" was a racial pejorative; while Greeks spoke Greek, the barbarians didn't even have real languages but just made a kind of "bar-bar-bar" noise when they talked. Modern Finnish also has several racial pejoratives for people from the Middle East and Africa based on the same idea.

In Greek thinking, all Greeks were individuals with their own motivations, desires and personality. If a Greek did something, and you wanted to know why he did it, you would find the reasons in his individual attributes. On the other hand, if a barbarian did something, it was because he was a barbarian. For example, a Greek who murdered a fellow Greek would probably do it because he was somehow disturbed, or maybe the other guy had insulted him, or whatever. If a barbarian killed a Greek, it was because of his "barbarian nature". Greeks were individuals with personalities, but barbarians were just animals driven by their animal natures.

This thinking went on to form the basis of all European racism since. Alert readers may notice powerful parallels between what I've just described and the discussion on immigration and Islam going on in Europe right now. In that discussion as well, European violent crime is caused by a complex series of forces and motivations, but immigrant crime is caused by the fact that immigrants are immigrants. The IRA, for example, are terrorists because they are pursuing a political agenda through violent means, but Hamas are terrorists because they're Muslims. This kind of thinking is still everywhere, and that's why it's interesting, and scary, to find it replicated in fantasy role-playing.

**

In fantasy, humans take the place of Greeks/Romans/white Europeans. As I said, in the original RMSS, humans had different cultures that determined their background and outlook, while Halflings were just Halflings no matter where they lived. In other words, for humans their cultural background determined a lot about the character, but for the other races, their race determined everything.

R&C tries to eliminate this by giving every character both a race and a culture. Now elves, dwarves and even orcs have cultures, too! However, it isn't quite that simple.

The writers of R&C couldn't bring themselves to jettison the determining role race plays in their world. Here's some pieces of text from the race entry for Common Men:

However, the prejudices of all Men, their affections and disaffections, are always subject to local circumstance. (...)

Religious Attitudes: Mannish religious practice generally conforms to the norms for their particular cultural template.

Preferred Professions: All professions are open to Common Men. (...)

Typical Cultures: A full range of culture options are available to Common Men. (...)

Character Concepts

Men are everywhere; they exist in just about every cultural niche, every profession, every situation in which an intelligent being can find himself.

Basically, humans don't have racial attributes in R&C. They can go anywhere, do anything, and their attitudes are a product of their culture and environment. To a 21st century person, this seems like a reasonable description, and I'm sure the ancient Greeks would have agreed.

However, when it comes to other races, it turns out they're not such a tabula rasa.

As a race, Dwarves have a universal reputation for ruggedness, practicality, unwavering loyalty - and stubbornness. They are intensely clannish and stand up for their fellow Dwarves regardless of circumstance and come what may. (...)

Character Concepts

A concept for a Dwarven character could take into account his inherent racial prejudice.

The entry for Dwarves also describes their distrust of elves, their hatred of the "evil" underground races, and their religious beliefs. Remember that these are racial characteristics; Dwarves are this way because they're Dwarves. In the R&C system, a Dwarf raised in a harbor city hundreds of miles from the nearest mountains would "instinctively" hate other underground races. The same thing goes for Halflings and Elves, too. And then there are the Orcs.

Prejudices: Orcs hate all other races (...)

Religious Attitudes: Orcs worship dark gods and calue nothing so much as power and dominion over others.

Preferred Professions: Common Orcs stick to the non-spell using professions: Fighter, Rogue, Thief. They are not intelligent enough to make good spell users and they never bother to try.

That last bit isn't even true, by the way: going by their stat bonuses and power point progressions, Common Orcs could actually become spellcasters. Except that they're expressly prohibited because of their race. In the "Character Concepts" section they lay it on particularly thick:

Orcs are living, breathing fighting machines. They exist for no other purpose than to do violence, and war and mayhem are all they ever really think about.

Again, remember that this describes any Orc anywhere, regardless of where or how they grew up. They can pick any culture template they like, but apparently none of it really applies to them, because the fact that they're orcs overrides any influence their environment could possibly have on them. For them, the culture template only provides adolescence skills and starting items.

**

So, the Races & Cultures supplement sets out to undo RMSS's confusion of race and culture, but ends up replicating it exactly. Elves were actually the only race that was in any significant way freed from the constraints of its "racial nature"; Dwarves are still always Dwarves, Halflings are always Halflings, and Orcs are always Lawful Evil, as the trope goes. It's a D&D trope, by the way, and it's alive and well in third edition D&D: elves are always good, orcs are always evil, humans are anything they want to be or end up being.

This is precisely the same thinking as the original Greek racism and its descendants, and it persists throughout fantasy role-playing. A human's individual outlook and personality are shaped by his personal attributes and background, but a non-human's is a product of his racial characteristics. It is testament to how deeply rooted this thinking is that even a determined effort to break away from it, the Races & Cultures supplement, failed to do so.

To a large extent this is because the other races don't really have any intrinsic value. They're mostly there to define humans, not themselves. R&C is quite explicit about this:

Build: In a sense, it is useless to describe the body shape of a Common Man, because it is the baseline to which the shape of all other races and creatures are compared. All other reference points relate to the typical range of body types for Common Men, so to use those other reference points to try to define Common Men would create a circular description.

Obviously, this selection shows a terrible intellectual poverty. Surely one can fairly describe humans as, for instance, bipedal mammals with a given average height and weight? That isn't a circular definition. But more importantly, this piece of text very powerfully conveys the way the authors, and I daresay nearly all other fantasy RPG authors, think about the various races. Humans are the baseline, and everything else is defined by how it's different from humans.

This informs the racial thinking when it comes to culture and attitudes as well. Really, the definitions of the other races aren't there to define themselves, but to define humans. Dwarves are stubborn and prejudiced; compared to them, humans are open-minded. Elves are unworldly and haughty; compared to them, humans are humble and practical. Halflings are comfort-loving and gluttonous; compared to them, humans are rugged and Spartan. The other races serve to define us. In order to do this, they have to be denied the same subjectivity and freedom of choice that humans have, to preserve the caricature. A liberal, open-minded and cosmopolitan Dwarf would destroy the very idea of the Dwarf as a cultural marker.

The most drastic contrast is with Orcs, who in most fantasy role-playing games are little more than animals. Orcs are inherently evil and violent, and they hate everyone else. How could anyone not fight orcs? After all, they're always evil! Orcs are a handy way to escape any kind of moral dilemmas: killing orcs is always right.

The history of orcs in fantasy fiction is very informative in this respect. J.R.R. Tolkien "invented" orcs as we know them, and his orcs were originally elves who had been corrupted by the Great Enemy, Morgoth. So in Tolkien's world, even the orcs are ultimately victims, not offenders. In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has Gandalf express pity "even for Sauron's slaves". Much of the Lord of the Rings is informed by Tolkien's experience of World War I, and it's not hard to understand how witnessing the senseless slaughter of trench warfare would make him feel sorry even for the enemy.

After Tolkien, though, these distinctions have gone out of the window. To most of the English-speaking world, the Second World War was morally absolutely black-and-white, and the same mentality entered into fiction as well. Orcs are the Nazis of fantasy; fighting and killing them is so deeply, inherently right that it never needs to be questioned. In much of post-Tolkien fantasy, orcs have simply become cartoon villains.

Later, there's been a partial rehabilitation of orcs, and in many games and books they've come to symbolize strength and stupidity. The big, dumb, working-class orc has even taken on something of a class nature, and I say this as someone who abhors Marxism in any way, shape or form.

**

In conclusion, fantasy literature and games have become one of the most direct ways in which racism and racial thinking are reproduced. Given that fantasy is usually considered "young people's" reading, this is actually more than a bit scary. It's been fashionable in leftist circles to lambast Tolkien for this for decades, but I believe this is based on a fundamental, and to some extent deliberate, misunderstanding of his works and of the context he wanted to set them in. After the Second World War, Tolkien's imitators met with the other big strand of fantasy, pulp, which was usually explicitly right-wing, chauvinist and conservative. Conan the Republican is hardly an exaggeration in contemporary American terms. Two of the most influential pulp authors to modern readers were Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft; the first occasionally wrote blatantly racist stories, and the second we know was a nearly hysterical racist.

Like conspiracy theories, part of the appeal of fantasy literature is that it often provides simplicity in the middle of a complex world. Unless you're a lunatic, the world just doesn't divide neatly into friends and foes who you can tell apart by their flags and uniforms. In this day and age, the kind of fantasy where elves are always good and orcs are always evil has a definite appeal.

There's nothing wrong with that in itself. All the partly leftist counter-movement to the perceived right-wing character of fantasy has managed to accomplish is to produce "intellectual" fantasy that usually collapses under the weight of its own pretentiousness and is only read by fellow travelers, or fantasy works that are practically indistinguishable from the ones they supposedly oppose. A case in point is Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea series, which makes a point of making the villains white and the "good guys" colored. How the author feels that upholding the fundamental idea of different "races" fighting each other is antiracist is beyond me, and anyway, the first time I read the books I didn't even notice that she'd swapped the skin colors, so to speak.

So I don't mean to endorse the left-wing "countermovement", because as far as I'm concerned, China Mieville is just as bad, if not worse, than Andy Remic. Mieville has accused Tolkien of furthering exactly the thinking I'm talking about here, which to me indicates that like many other Tolkien critics, he hasn't actually bothered to read the Lord of the Rings.

I don't really mean to endorse anything. I do, however, want to draw attention to the way in which fantasy role-playing games and literature perpetuate and reproduce a way of thinking that I find worrying and frightening. In fantasy, ethnicity is more important in determining a person's nature than culture, upbringing, environment or anything else. Our worldview is so permeated by racism that this is perfectly natural to us, and we accept it without question. After all, it doesn't matter how an orc is brought up or what he's like as a person, he's Always Chaotic Evil. Because he's an orc. Because that's just how orcs are. All of them.

And that's really racism in a nutshell.