The historical context is of an Englishman during a period where the United Kingdom held India and much of Africa as colonies, who writes an epic story of good versus ultimate evil where good is multiple races, all white. He's not medieval, he's from 20th century Oxford.
Medieval is in reference to Dante. Tolkien is, of course, a modernist.
Secondly, Roland Barthes disagrees. His "The Death of the Author" is hardly a new idea, nor is reader-response criticism. For my own play on the latter, I would argue that you cannot judge one of the best selling books of all time solely from the perspective of one person. What the Lord of the Rings meant to Tolkien is but a tiny scratch on what the Lord of the Rings means to humanity.
Yes, the school of deconstructionism analyzes texts in that way, but is but only of many styles of critical analysis. What deconstructionism does not do, however, is disconnect a text from its literary precedents, in this case Dante and Germanic mythology. As I have said before, presenting evil as abhorrent, vile, and ignorant has nothing to do with race, nor does the association between darkness and evil, which appears even in African mythology.
And lastly, you can not simply make a movie of the Lord of the Rings or use his races in a game and then dump all the responsibility on Tolkien. That's a new author, a new historical context.
I have said nothing of the LotR film. I haven't seen it, and therefore have no opinion on the matter.
A citizen of a nation that ruled a multi-ethnic empire, who was born in the part of that empire that invented apartheid, will always have their race tangled in the background of their writing. To ignore that is to ignore the historical context of the writing. Tolkien's writings are rooted in the sources he chose, and said mythology was greatly expanded.
Source? I'm not necessarily going to buy that comment, seeing as most Englishman would have no little to no contact with the Empire at large. To the average Englishman, I except the Empire was little more than an abstract concept and, possible, a source of exoticism. Most of the English population, I would assume had little knowledge of the horrors which occurred throughout the larger empire except under the obscuring lens of British propaganda.
Furthermore, because of the deeply rooted symbolism of evil and darkness and evil as vile rather than seductive, both of which where long established before the British Empire was established, I see no reason by Tolkien's symbolism and race are
necessarily connected. It is just as likely that we have become a society obsessed with fighting and/or cementing racial divides and are looking at past works with an eye to discovering racial bias rather than allowing the greater picture of the western literary tradition speak for itself.
Like I said, you can argue that depicting allegoric evil as ugly, abhorrent, and ignorant is problematic in one way or another. Same with the connection of evil and darkness, but what should be replace it with? Milton's depiction of evil as seductive and alluring is one alternative. I'm sure there are other's, too (evil is present in the hearts of all men, for example). Unless you want D&D to remove the dualism of allegoric good and evil (which is one option), alternative depiction of allegoric evil is must be found.
Because Aladdin is Chinese, first written down by a French translator allegedly from a Syrian Christian. Because Tolkien wasn't writing from an isolated culture, he was writing from the core of a multi-racial empire. I don't expect something different in real European mythology, but Tolkien was not a writer of real European mythology. Tolkien was not medieval.
And again, this is not about the Lord of the Rings novel, per se. We rewrite literature all the time. When we turn Doctor Dolittle into a movie, we don't include a white Doctor Dolittle turning an African prince white as a reward.
To Tolkien is a writer of allegory, using the symbolism derived of a tradition old that predates the Empire itself.