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Rings 'racist'

Shelina Begum
1/ 1/2003

THE just released Lord of the Rings saga is a racist film that will whip up war hatred against Islam it has been claimed.

University English lecturer Dr Stephen Shapiro has slammed the box-office hit 'The Two Towers' which has just opened in cinemas all over Greater Manchester. He claims it stirs up fears of Asian or black foreigners 'invading' 'white' Britain.

The film has already been endorsed by the extreme-right British National Party as consistent with their racist outlook.

Dr Shapiro who is researching Lord of the Ring and Hobbit author Tolkien said his works tend to make racial prejudice an "innocent" attitude. He said: "In The Lord of the Rings a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against the onset of a 'foreign dark', unattractive, inarticulate and psychologically underdeveloped horde, which makes long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-European populations.

"While Tolkien describes the hobbits and elves as amazingly white, ethnically pure clans, their antagonists, the orcs, are a motley dark-skinned mass, akin to Africans or Aborigines. The recent films amplify a 'fear' of a black planet and exaggerates this difference by insisting on stark black-white colour codes."

Dr Shapiro claims Tolkien's motive for writing the Rings trilogy was to revive memories of pre-Norman England with its shires and happy hobbits.

He says: "The concern for a fictional past quickly descends into portraying the encounter with racial and cultural 'others' as an event of terror and apocalyptic threat. For today's film fans, this older racial anxiety fuses with a current fear and hatred of Islam that supports a crusading war in the Middle East."

He said the Tolkein books were written just before de-colonisation of the British Empire when the first Asian and black immigrants were reaching Britain.

He adds: "The Midlands, Tolkien's model for the shire, was quickly becoming one of England's most multi-cultural regions. For the first set of his readers, Tolkien's tale of how the small isolated culture of the hobbits becomes threatened by the arrival of distant barbarian populations, the orcs, reinforced racial hatred in the Britain of the Ring's publication."

Dr Shapiro will publish an article and deliver a lecture on his Tolkien research in the New Year.