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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 8320885" data-attributes="member: 21169">This post considers fantasy races with the characteristics of real world races in two Appendix N works – Edgar Rice Burroughs, At the Earth's Core (1914), and JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). In the first case the connection to a real world race is explicit, in the second it is only made explicit in a private letter. At the Earth's Core (emphasis mine):Chattering and gibbering through the lower branches of the trees came a company of manlike creatures evidently urging on the dog pack. They were to all appearances strikingly similar in aspect to the Negro of Africa. Their skins were very black, and their features much like those of the more pronounced Negroid type except that the head receded more rapidly above the eyes, leaving little or no forehead. Their arms were rather longer and their legs shorter in proportion to the torso than in man, and later I noticed that their great toes protruded at right angles from their feet – because of their arboreal habits, I presume. Behind them trailed long, slender tails which they used in climbing quite as much as they did either their hands or feet.In The Lord of the Rings, orcs are described as "swart" (an archaic term for dark-skinned), "slant-eyed", and "crook-legged" or "bow-legged". Human-orc hybrids are "sallow faced" and "squint-eyed". The Uruk-hai, another hybrid, are "black orcs". Orcs call the Riders of Rohan "Whiteskins"."Whiteskins" may derive from James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. In these stories, "white-skins" is used frequently to refer to Europeans. For example The Pioneers (1823): "I look — but I see no white-skins; there are none to be seen but just and brave Indians."<a href="https://youtu.be/bzDtmMXJ1B4?t=148" target="_blank">Tolkien interview</a> (1964): "It [Middle-earth] resembles some of the history of Greece and Rome as against the perpetual infiltration of people out of the East."In Letter #210 (1958) to Forrest J Ackerman Tolkien commented on a movie script he had received. It therefore represents his carefully considered opinion. He corrected the way orcs had been described:The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.Dimitra Fimi explains this passage in Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History (2008):This statement is important from an anthropological point of view, as it seems to reflect popular ideas of the traditional hierarchy of the three extreme human racial types: the Caucasoid, the Mongoloid and the Negroid... In this case, Tolkien seems to identify himself with the 'European' race, usually associated with the Caucasoid, and chooses for his villains the physical characteristics in extreme of the so-called Mongoloid race, traditionally seen as inferior from a western European perspective. At the same time, the identification of Orcs with the Mongoloid race evokes popular ideas on racial degeneration and mental disability. For many years – officially until 1961 – the medical condition today known as 'Down's Syndrome' – was referred to as 'Mongolian idiocy' or 'Mongolism'. The term originated in the writing of John Langdon Down, who was the first to describe and study the condition… Writing during the second half of the nineteenth century and influenced by racial anthropology, Down came to view mental disability as a regression to earlier, less 'developed' races of humans.</blockquote>

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