Okay it’s been a whole day and I’m still angry about that hobbit casting thing, so let’s lay down some Tolkien canon here.
Fact 1: Per Tolkien, there were originally three races of hobbit. The Stoors were a small group, they were broad and stocky, they grew facial hair, they liked rivers, and their skin color is not specified, so Tolkien probably meant them to be white (but there’s no reason they have to be, since again, not specified). The Fallohides were a tiny group, they were thin, pale and tall, they were bold and good with languages, and they like trees. The Harfoots were the distinct majority, they lived in holes, they had hairy feet, and they were brown. Tolkien is super clear on this. He explicitly calls out Harfoots as having browner skin than other hobbits when describing the races and he uses phrases like “nut-brown skin” and “long brown fingers” when describing specific hobbits to back it up.
Fact 2: Britain planted its ravenous imperial flag firmly in the soil of India three centuries before Tolkien wrote The Hobbit. He knew what a brown person looked like. He would know he was not evoking a slightly darker shade of Caucasian when he said a person had brown skin.
Fact 3: Bilbo, Frodo, and all of their friends are aristocracy. Sam is the only hobbit we ever meet who is an actual laborer. In Tolkien’s time, laborers worked in the sun and middle class and aristocracy stayed inside where there was something resembling temperature control. Apart from Sam and Aragorn, no one in the Fellowship (or Company) ever voluntarily got a sunburn. If Tolkien talks about brown skin he’s talking about brown skin, not a farmer’s tan.
Where does this leave us?
Well, Tolkien says that after colonizing the Shire, the three hobbit races mingled more closely and became one. This leaves us with two options.
Option A: He’s talking about that thing that sci-fi writers sometimes do where “everyone is mixed race.” So all three races would have smeared together into a single uniform color. What color? Mostly Harfoot, aka brown. The “strong strain of Fallohide” in the Tookish and Brandybuck lines means maybe they’re white-passing, but in this scenario all hobbits are brown.
Option B: He’s talking about a more melting-pot scenario where visual racial distinctions still exist but everyone lives side-by-side in a fairly uniform culure. The Tooks/Brandybucks having a “strong strain of Fallohide” means that they are themselves remaining strains of Fallohide, and are straight-up white. Merry, half Took and half Brandybuck, is thus white (possibly part Stoor, given Brandybuck comfort with water); Pippin, half Took and half Banks, is either white or biracial. The Baggins family, sensible owners of the oldest and most venerable hobbit-hole anyone knows of, are blatantly Harfoot, making Bilbo and Frodo (half Took and half Brandybuck respectively) also biracial. Fallohides being exclusively adventurous high-class types, and the Gamgees being staid low-class homebodies with a distrust of moving water, Sam is obviously Harfoot and thus completely brown. (Smeagol, a Stoor, is probably white, but as discussed above, doesn’t have to be.) In this scenario, a minimum of three of five heroic hobbits are various shades of brown, four out of five of them could be, and most background hobbits are brown.
In conclusion, if you think all hobbits are white, you are canonically wrong. If you geek out over Aragorn wearing the Ring of Barahir, rage about Faramir trying to take the Ring, and do not even notice, much less complain, that Sam, Bilbo and Frodo are being erroneously portrayed by white guys, you need to reexamine the focus of your nerdery.
Nobody’s going to deny that, as it’s conventionally depicted, Middle-Earth – the setting of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – is awfully monochrome. In art, basically everybody is drawn as white, and all major depictions in film have used white actors.
When this state of affairs is questioned, the defences typically revolve around “accuracy”, which can mean one of two things: fidelity to the source material, and the internal consistency of the setting. Being concerned primarily with languages and mythology, Tolkien left few clear descriptions of what the peoples of Middle-Earth actually look like, so in this case, arguments in favour of the status quo more often rest on setting consistency.
Of course, we need hold ourselves neither to fidelity nor to consistency – the author’s dead, and we can do what we want. However, what if I told you that there’s a reasonable argument to be made from that very standpoint of setting consistency that Aragorn – the one character you’d most expect to be depicted as a white dude – really ought to be portrayed as Middle Eastern and/or North African?
First, consider the framing device of Tolkien’s work. The central conceit of The Lord of the Rings – one retroactively extended to The Hobbit, and thereafter to later works – is that Tolkien himself is not the story’s author, but a mere translator of writings left behind by Bilbo, Frodo and other major characters. Similarly, Middle-Earth itself is positioned not as a fictional realm, but as the actual prehistory of our own world. As such, the languages and mythologies that Tolkien created were intended not merely to resemble their modern counterparts, but to stand as plausible ancestors for them.
Now, Aragorn is the king of a tribe or nation of people called the Dúnedain. Let’s take a closer look at them in the context of that prehistoric connection.
If the Dúnedain were meant to be the forebears of Western Europeans, we’d expect their language, Adûnaic, to exhibit signs of Germanic (or possibly Italic) derivation – but that’s not what we actually see. Instead, both the phonology and the general word-structure of Adûnaic seem to be of primarily Semitic derivation, i.e., the predominant language family throughout the Middle East and much of North Africa. Indeed, while relatively little Adûnaic vocabulary is present in Tolkien’s extant writings, some of the words we do know seem to be borrowed directly from classical Hebrew – a curious choice if the “men of the West” were intended to represent the ancestors of the Germanic peoples.
Additionally, the Dúnedain are descended from the survivors of the lost island of Númenor, which Tolkien had intended as an explicit analogue of Atlantis. Alone, this doesn’t give us much to go on – unless one happens to know that, in the legendarium from which Tolkien drew his inspirations, the Kingdoms of Egypt were alleged to be remnant colonies of Atlantis. This connection is explicitly reflected in the strong Egyptian influence upon Tolkien’s descriptions of Númenorean funereal customs. We thus have both linguistic and cultural/mythological ties linking the survivors of Númenor to North Africa.
Now, I’m not going to claim that Tolkien actually envisioned the Dúnedain as North African; he was almost certainly picturing white folks. However, when modern fans argue that Aragorn and his kin must be depicted as white as a matter of setting consistency, rather than one of mere authorial preference, strong arguments can be made that this need not be the case; i.e., that depicting the Dúnedain in a manner that would be racialised as Middle Eastern and/or North African by modern standards is, in fact, entirely consistent with the source material, ethnolinguistically speaking. Furthermore, whether they agreed with these arguments or not, any serious Tolkien scholar would at least be aware of them.
In other words, if some dude claims that obviously everyone in Tolkien is white and acts like the very notion of depicting them otherwise is some outlandish novelty, you’ve got yourself a fake geek boy.
(As an aside, if we turn our consideration to the Easterlings, the human allies of Sauron who have traditionally been depicted in art as Middle Eastern on no stronger evidence than the fact that they’re baddies from the East, a similar process of analysis suggests that they’d more reasonably be racialised as Slavic in modern terms. Taken together with the preceding discussion, an argument can be made that not only is the conventional racialisation of Tolkien’s human nations in contemporary art unsupported by the source material, we may well have it precisely backwards!)
x: a variable used to represent something unknown.
We’ve seen an influx of questions about how to write stories based around characters of color, disability, non-binary, etc. when the author does not fall into these categories. Rather than have these posts take over the site, we’ve decided to compile a list of resources to help our fellow writers become more educated about writing what they do not immediately know. However, this list is not the end-all-be-all of knowledge; one should always try to learn from someone with first hand experience in any topic. The world is constantly growing and changing, and because of that, there will always be more to learn. The admins at Plotline Hotline want to help writers form respectful, informed, and realistic characters that broaden the narrow range we see in literature today.
*Be wary that some of the topics listed below contain sensitive material. Reader discretion is advised.*
As always, the links I found to be especially apt will be in bold. Topics are listed alphabetically, excepting the “other” section.
I hope that this list will provide topics a writer may not initially think to research when writing. If there are any resources that you think would be fitting for this list, please let us know! We want to have as many helpful sources as possible to maximize learning opportunities.
PSA to all you fantasy writers because I have just had a truly frustrating twenty minutes talking to someone about this: it’s okay to put mobility aids in your novel and have them just be ordinary.
Like. Super okay.
I don’t give a shit if it’s high fantasy, low fantasy or somewhere between the lovechild of Tolkein meets My Immortal. It’s okay to use mobility devices in your narrative. It’s okay to use the word “wheelchair”. You don’t have to remake the fucking wheel. It’s already been done for you.
And no, it doesn’t detract from the “realism” of your fictional universe in which you get to set the standard for realism. Please don’t try to use that as a reason for not using these things.
There is no reason to lock the disabled people in your narrative into towers because “that’s the way it was”, least of all in your novel about dragons and mermaids and other made up creatures. There is no historical realism here. You are in charge. You get to decide what that means.
Also:
“Depiction of Chinese philosopher Confucius in a wheelchair, dating to ca. 1680. The artist may have been thinking of methods of transport common in his own day.”
“The earliest records of wheeled furniture are an inscription found on a stone slate in China and a child’s bed depicted in a frieze on a Greek vase, both dating between the 6th and 5th century BCE.[2][3][4][5]The first records of wheeled seats being used for transporting disabled people date to three centuries later in China; the Chinese used early wheelbarrows to move people as well as heavy objects. A distinction between the two functions was not made for another several hundred years, around 525 CE, when images of wheeled chairs made specifically to carry people begin to occur in Chinese art.[5]”
“In 1655,Stephan Farffler, a 22 year old paraplegic watchmaker, built the world’s first self-propelling chair on a three-wheel chassis using a system of cranks and cogwheels.[6][3] However, the device had an appearance of a hand bike more than a wheelchair since the design included hand cranks mounted at the front wheel.[2]
The invalid carriage or Bath chair brought the technology into more common use from around 1760.[7]
In 1887, wheelchairs (“rolling chairs”) were introduced to Atlantic City so invalid tourists could rent them to enjoy the Boardwalk. Soon, many healthy tourists also rented the decorated “rolling chairs” and servants to push them as a show of decadence and treatment they could never experience at home.[8]
In 1933 Harry C. Jennings, Sr. and his disabled friend Herbert Everest, both mechanical engineers, invented the first lightweight, steel, folding, portable wheelchair.[9] Everest had previously broken his back in a mining accident. Everest and Jennings saw the business potential of the invention and went on to become the first mass-market manufacturers of wheelchairs. Their “X-brace” design is still in common use, albeit with updated materials and other improvements. The X-brace idea came to Harry from the men’s folding “camp chairs / stools”, rotated 90 degrees, that Harry and Herbert used in the outdoors and at the mines.[citation needed]
“But Joy, how do I describe this contraption in a fantasy setting that wont make it seem out of place?”
“It was a chair on wheels, which Prince FancyPants McElferson propelled forwards using his arms to direct the motion of the chair.”
“It was a chair on wheels, which Prince EvenFancierPants McElferson used to get about, pushed along by one of his companions or one of his many attending servants.”
“But it’s a high realm magical fantas—”
“It was a floating chair, the hum of magical energy keeping it off the ground casting a faint glow against the cobblestones as {CHARACTER} guided it round with expert ease, gliding back and forth.”
“But it’s a stempunk nov—”
“Unlike other wheelchairs he’d seen before, this one appeared to be self propelling, powered by the gasket of steam at the back, and directed by the use of a rudder like toggle in the front.”
Give. Disabled. Characters. In. Fantasy. Novels. Mobility. Aids.
If you can spend 60 pages telling me the history of your world in innate detail down to the formation of how magical rocks were formed, you can god damn write three lines in passing about a wheelchair.
Signed, your editor who doesn’t have time for this ableist fantasy realm shit.
“But they’ve used magic to cure all disabilities – “
Your world is unrealistic and unbelievable, and it also smells like a Nazi euphemism. Sure, you can use magic to treat conditions and to assist your characters. But erasing or excluding these people from your narrative because it’s easier than including them or you think disabled people aren’t perfect enough and should all be cured is gross. This also cheats your readers out of a much richer world experience.
“Your world is unrealistic and unbelievable, and it also smells like a Nazi euphemism.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ THIS ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
@ everyone coming at me this morning over how they’ve “fixed” the world by removing people like me from their narrative, this is exactly what you’re perpetuating and it’s making me extremely Uncomfortable to realize just how deeply rooted this kind of thinking is from people who supposedly ought to know better.
Me saying disabilities and mobility aids can and should be included in fantasy and sci-fi narratives should not incite the level of vitriol I woke up to this morning.
If the thought of having disabled people existing in your “perfect world” makes you upset, then you make me upset in this world, and unfortunately we both have to live in this one.
I’m gonna need you to find two hours of your life ASAP and watch the pilot of Pose. I’m totally serious. If I have to arrange a group watch via Discord, I WILL DO THAT. (Do I need to do that? I will. I bought the season on Amazon because we don’t have cable and supporting this is really fucking important to me.)
Why? I mean, Tumblr, y’all have to have been talking about this, because I heard about it through Tumblr, but let’s talk about it again:
The series is expected to include over fifty transgender characters total. FIFTY. f i f t y.
A blunt history lesson wrapped up in two hours of drama. There will be things you knew or knew about or heard about kinda and then you’ll realize how much you can learn, even if Queer History is one of your Special Interests.
One of the main characters is from Allentown. This is only vaguely relevant but it made me go ‘yey’.
Seriously, this media only gets made if people watch it. Vote with your eyeballs. Vote with your eyeballs and let’s bring more of this to TV, to the screens. We need this. I was honestly really nervous that something was gonna blow up or this was going to be somehow terrible and so I was nervously chewing my lower lip until I could actually watch the pilot and it’s not perfect but it’s a pilot and like… it’s … this is our history and our present. We need to make this shit happen.
Seriously, I’m probably going to watch this with @mistresskabooms this summer. Kids These Days need to know some dang history. We can trade off between RWBY and Pose.
Look, I can knit during anything. I have knitted during concerts, I have knitted in the car on cross-country trips, I knit my way through hurricanes and migraines and medical procedures and movies, I don’t have to look at my hands anymore when I knit kippot. There were a couple of points when I realized only after I had stopped knitting to stare at the television, totally entranced, that I had stopped knitting so I could concentrate on the screen. I cannot express enough how much that just does not happen.
I feel very passionately about this show already, now that I’ve stopped holding my breath and have allowed myself to feel things about it, aaaand I’ve only seen the pilot. Is it perfect? No. But it doesn’t need to be.
It’s real and raw and vulnerable and beautiful and triumphant and the MC’s name is Pray Tell which I found out in the first 2m from the subtitles and I love him already and we need to make it happen.
So who wants to do a watch party on this with me? @thebibliosphere, you wanna do something on the Discord? Seriously. Watch Party at the Wizard House, I’ll bring the popcorn.
Oh hell yes we can absolutely watch this. Lets figure out a time and date.
it’s the queer historical road trip novel you never realised you needed
the friends-to-lovers trope! the sharing-a-bed trope!! the mutual pining trope!!! the everyone-knows-their-feelings-are-reciprocated-except-for-them trope!!!!
basically monty and percy are the cutest and i can 100% guarantee they’re going to be everyone’s new otp
a super smart, no-nonsense girl who is basically the embodiment of a slytherclaw (and also seems very aroace after deciding that kissing isn’t really her thing)
main characters with disabilities! incl. a disabled love interest who adamantly doesn’t want a cure-all, and whose disability doesn’t make him any less desirable
comically inept and lovable pirates
tl;dr: a historical novel that acknowledges that queer people, disabled people and people of colour have always existed and puts them front and centre, while acknowledging the hardships they faced
“The elevator pitch was an “Indigenous Mad Max: Fury Road.” I
think that really captures the pacing and the sensibility of the book.
This is an all-out breakneck apocalyptic adventure with a primary cast
of Navajo characters, and it takes place wholly on the Navajo
reservation.”
Well hell, I’m SOLD. Book comes out June 26th from @sagapress.
willowfoot 