There is trouble in Middle-earth – again. So far, all of the actors announced for the latest The Lord of the Rings film instalment, The Hunt for Gollum, to be released next year, are white. Kate Winslet, Jamie Dornan, Anya Taylor-Joy and Leo Woodall join a cast that has already been criticised for its lack of diversity. “Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology,” the film’s director, Andy Serkis, who plays Gollum, said. “The Shire feels very white.”
Ironically, Serkis invokes fidelity to Tolkien to defend the casting, yet his “modern film version” of Animal Farm, which came out this week, plays fast and loose with Orwell by replacing the novel’s crushing conclusion with a hopeful one.
The hugely successful (25 million global viewers on its first day) 2022 Amazon TV series The Rings of Power, a prequel to The Hobbit, cast actors of colour. Their absence in The Hunt for Gollum is a backward step. Elon Musk’s rants against the Kenyan-Mexican actor Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey are part of a wider pushback against “wokeism”.
Such objections seem particularly egregious, if not absurd, in relation to an imaginary world populated by hobbits, elves and talking trees. But questions over racial stereotypes and hierarchies (fair elves and dark orcs) have long stalked Tolkien’s work. CS Lewis defended his friend against such readings in a review in 1955.
Attitudes towards inclusivity and equality have shifted profoundly, not just since Tolkien embarked on The Hobbit in 1930, but also in the 25 years since the first Peter Jackson film. Thanks in no small part to the phenomenal success of the films, The Lord of the Rings has become one of the most influential stories of the 20th century. Guardian readers recently voted it No 1 in the list of 100 greatest novels of all time.
Tolkien firmly resisted any interpretation. “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations,” he wrote. But his tale of the triumph of the underdog, written in the shadows of two world wars, has inevitably been appropriated by various movements. Today, its Christian sensibility, suspicion of industrial modernity and attachment to home chimes with parts of the far right. Giorgia Meloni and JD Vance are admirers. Tolkien devotees will also recognise the names of Vance’s former venture-capital firm, Narya, and Peter Thiel’s defence and surveillance company, Palantir.
The Lord of the Rings should not become a weapon in today’s culture wars. That would be to misread its final message: evil can only be defeated by different peoples coming together. This is a drama of friendship, courage and the dangers of power. The books and films have been beloved companions for young Tolkienites as they set off on their own journeys to become adults. The Shire is the safety of childhood, a place of beauty and innocence. Who has not felt more hobbit than human along the way?
As the success of Nolan’s The Odyssey proves, great art can be reinterpreted for a new era. Children, regardless of race, already see themselves in Middle-earth. Cinema should reflect this. As Bilbo Baggins says to Frodo: “Don’t adventures ever have an end? I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story.” We owe it to Tolkien and future generations to take his story in the right direction.
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