Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth

Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth is the first systematic examination of how Tolkien understood racial issues, how race manifests in his oeuvre, and how race in Middle-earth, his imaginary realm, has been understood, criticized, and appropriated by others. This book presents an analysis of Tolkien's works for conceptions of race, both racist and anti-racist. It begins by demonstrating that Tolkien was a racialist, in that his mythology is established on the basis of different races with different characteristics, and then poses the key question "e;Was Tolkien racist?"e; Robert Stuart engages the discourse and research associated with the ways in which racism and anti-racism relate Tolkien to his fascist and imperialist contemporaries and to twenty-first-century neo-Nazis and White Supremacists-including White Supremacy, genocide, blood-and-soil philology, anti-Semitism, and aristocratic racism. Addressing a major gap in the field of Tolkien studies,Stuart focuses on race, racisms and the Tolkien legendarium.