Quickbeam Q&A: Tolkien Fandom at Crossroads
Part Two: TheOneRing.net fights for a diverse cast and fellowship of fans
There are those who will argue that J.R.R. Tolkien was Euro-centric in his views, but this also requires a limited definition of Europe. These days Europe includes people with ethnic backgrounds from all over the world, from willing immigrants to migrants fleeing wars to former colonial subjects. Tolkien, while steeped in European history and legend, was quite curious about the wider world. One can find this not just in the heroic paradigm he explored through Bilbo and Frodo Baggins — reluctant adventurers who grew by journeying outside their native corners and homeland — but also in many of his personal letters. As he once wrote, concerning the fantasy and reality of his invention:
“‘Middle-earth,’ by the way, is not a name of a never-never land without relation to the world we live in.… And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains and landmasses to what geologists may say or surmise about the nearer past, imaginatively this ‘history’ is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet.”
Most readers and viewers of his vast mythology also do not know that Tolkien was born in South Africa, and while he left at a young age, he remained fascinated and drawn to that land all of his life. In fact, one of his first adventures, as a baby, into any landscape, was with a black African boy named Isaak, who took him to meet his mother and family at their village farm. Right there, at the very beginning, is Tolkien’s story — one of unexpected travels, new worlds, and fellowship.
This was in the back of my mind as TheOneRing.net’s Clifford “Quickbeam” Broadway and I discussed the future of the Tolkien-verse, as Amazon Studios has broken important new ground with a very diverse cast. Actors from various parts of the world and ethnic backgrounds will play roles and bring Middle-earth to life like never before. This is scary for some fans, and certainly delicate. Personally, I am thrilled. Being biracial, I have always seen myself in Tolkien’s characters and world because Tolkien created a big-hearted and universal story with archetypes and personalities that speak to something deeper inside all of us. Not only that, the Middle-earth of the Second Age, the period the Amazon series will explore, may actually span the planet given the far-reaching sea voyages of the Númenóreans — Aragorn’s ancestors.
Gender is another key component of the coming series. Clearly from its cast announcements, women will play bigger starring roles in the Second Age than the Third Age works of Tolkien’s books: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. This is not without precedent if one considers the more equal distribution of characters among genders in The Silmarillion, and is also a welcome shift in the Tolkien-verse. I think it is also worth noting that Tolkien’s Elves in temperament and in their treatment so far in extended artistic renderings, are fairly androgynous. This aspect of the Tolkien-verse is well-trodden in the LGBTQ community. I recommend The Cut’s article on Aragorn vs. Legolas as a primer.
Also, not to be overlooked is the diversity behind the camera. Spanish director J.A. Bayona shot the first two episodes of the series. He is a well-respected artist and hails from a part of Europe with closer cultural, racial and historical ties to Africa and the Mideast than say, Norway. Wayne Che Yip is directing four episodes and was born in Britain but has a strong Asian family background. And Charlotte Brandström is directing two, and brings her Swedish, female and Paris-born perspective to the series. She has decades of experience.
This diversity is the key topic that Quickbeam identifies as part of a critical crossroads for the larger Tolkien fan community and modern fantasy fandom in general. Part One of our conversation covered his own childhood growing up with Middle-earth and how the 1970s set the stage for today’s massive fan cultures, his journey with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, and his experience making a documentary about Tolkien fans with director Carlene Cordova — Ringers: Lord of the Fans. In Part Two of our chat below, we go into the promise and dangers of the Amazon series which signals a new era of fantasy fandom, as well as touch on subjects like Blue Wizards and rumors about legendary Japanese actor Ken Watanabe and Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud. The interview has been lightly edited for pace and flow…
Wraith Land: With the new Amazon series and where the internet has gone the last several years, as well as culture in general, how are things different this time from when Peter Jackson’s films came out?
Quickbeam: Well, like I was saying, there's a lot of polarization these days. Star Wars fans and the toxicity certain fandoms have with diversity has unfolded, like a really unfortunate blossom. It's really unfolded on its own, because of the format of these new social media platforms that were already in a position.
By the very nature of this new programming, going into the Second Age, and by the very nature of the storytelling being centered on Númenóreans and their far travels, we're talking about “colonization.” You're automatically talking about this thing that has made people feel so squishy, or strangely reactive without them needing to be so reactive. We're going to be looking at a program where previous books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, kept the framework really really really tight on just that part of Middle-earth. Now the framework is going to go out and out and be a lot of Arda, many other places in Arda, because that is the demand of the narrative.*
And Professor Tolkien was interested in that. He wrote stuff about that, the Númenóreans bringing shipbuilding techniques, and agricultural techniques, irrigation, and tools and advancements to all the people and they found that there were people in places and nations that had already been influenced by Morgoth from centuries before their arrival. And some of the Númenóreans also oppress and mistreat their fellow human beings in these other lands. Well, that's exactly what Tolkien wrote about, it's not “woke-ness.” It's not Middle-earth, you know, all of a sudden introducing people of color, for the sake of woke-ness. It's literally taking the canvas further back to J.R.R. Tolkien's larger discussions of the world, and what geopolitical concerns were at play in this wider world.
So it is perfectly natural and understandable for us to have lots of other cultures and ethnicities and other people represented on Arda, because Tolkien himself wrote about it, and now we're getting a chance to explore it. So I keep pushing for fans to expand their imaginations on this. I'm gonna stick with my guns on that, because it is absolutely normal for us to go to the far eastern lands of Rhûn, and that's just an elvish word for “east,” you know? There are other drafted maps by Christopher Tolkien and that his father worked on, that show the Red Mountains to the far far east, and they were called the Orocarni. There are other nations and other regions that Tolkien spent years meditating on, saying, well, Morgoth had been here, playing and manipulating these people and their fears, by giving them gifts and warranting their trust and their worship.
So by the time the Númenóreans arrive or the Blue Wizards arrived, you have this Amazon story of the Second Age. We're going to be all over the east and the south and other places where Númenóreans arrived. And not everyone's going to be porcelain white. It's not going to be that way. And I get really disturbed when I look at the YouTubers, and you've seen maybe a couple of them yourself, who reacted so negatively to the casting announcements.
Wraith Land: I watched some of them. It was sad to hear some fans, mostly a minority, but Tolkien fans nonetheless, talk about this topic in a negative light. It was painful to listen to some of it. Most YouTubers were actually really into the diversity and praising it from what I saw, but it is strange to realize some are also digging into a different narrative more to do with our own complicated present.
Quickbeam: Absolutely. Yeah, one dude was like, “I’m a Tolkien scholar and I know all about his languages and his interest in Anglo-Saxon things, and his specific Norse, Finnish and Icelandic interests, and I'm telling you this is a terrible troubling mistake that they would cast all these different ethnicities for the show that has nothing to do with Tolkien’s interests.” And I'm like, “No, buddy, you are woefully missing the scope of Professor Tolkien’s larger imaginarium. It’s a secondary world for a reason. It's not a secondary nation-state of Gondor.” So, that's where I'm at right now. I'm really trying to deal with people hijacking the narrative, and we’re struggling with a cultural time of tribalism, which is rearing its ugly head.
Wraith Land: It's good to hear you’re fighting the good fight. It’s something I've thought about a lot too and I've actually written about it as well about what I call the “mixed heritage of Tolkien” and how his expansive humanism speaks a lot to his universal appeal. And while most of the characters are European-resonant, he explored obviously the mingling of the elves and humans, but he also explored the importance of plurality across cultures, races and even a disability like mental illness, if you consider the holy trinity of Sam, Frodo and Gollum.
I'm biracial. I'm half Japanese-descent, half European-descent, and his books have always spoken to me. That said, I recognize there's an absence of African-descent described characters or peoples in his books for example, save for the Haradrim, which are vaguely in the vein of desert armies a la the Crusades or Alexander the Great. There is some unfortunate othering in some of the Orc descriptions, and again, the Haradrim and the Easterlings. Each reader has to give those physical aspects some thought, and decide for themselves if it goes over the line or negates the positives of his stories. That said, there’s also no blanket statement that says everyone was white in his stories. To my mind, perhaps even the Valar could be incarnated as non-European.
As you know, Tolkien was from South Africa and he made comments about how he was disgusted by Apartheid and was no fan of the British colonial empire. I mean, he certainly was writing from his time. He was not woke, like you said. But overall I think the books are very open-hearted. We’ve come really far as a species in some ways, but I also caught wind of a lot of this online intolerance stuff years ago. For many years I was in journalism, though more recently I have been working in digital entertainment. It has been growing in my mind.
I've been watching from afar what's been happening with the internet and social media and Facebook. Early in the internet, there was this more positive attitude. It was optimistic in the ‘90s. You know, you had things like a major company called “Yahoo!,” and I worked at Yahoo! for a number of years, and it had this fun vibe — commercials with punk dudes knitting quilts with old grannies, and doing these offbeat fun things. It really has changed. It's become a more open platform, and social media in a lot of ways is great, that it's really opened up that much more dialog. But there's been this darker and darker flip side, and I think what you're describing makes total sense. I’m glad you're trying to help cultivate and shape the direction of folk’s consciousness around this stuff, because there's some people who maybe don't understand the full humanity of what Tolkien was doing.
If you read about his life and his biography, there's a reason why you have Sam seeing the Harad soldier dying and Sam being sorry he’s dead — the idea that war sucks and makes enemies out of ordinary decent people. I think Tolkien is pretty hard to categorize on some things. But not on this. He clearly wanted peace. He was also clearly a super environmentalist. He would be all about fighting climate change, I think.
Quickbeam: Yeah, he was a conservative Catholic, and in terms of spiritual, moral behaviors, he was pretty straight. But he was super green. But he was not interested in any anybody else's “pernicious race doctrine,” for example.
Wraith Land: Right, he was conservative in many ways — he certainly was wary of technology. He was also progressive I think in a lot of his views about things, and I think his overall message about love — the idea that compassion for a homeless vagrant like Gollum could save the world, is radical even if it is also very Christian of him. I think the message about the power of love and forgiveness and reconciliation in the books is undeniable.
I think it's really interesting, that there's something really powerful to explore there about the Númenóreans and their culture and how they sailed around the world and may have been not just European. He talked about how they were tall and had grey eyes and dark hair. He didn't write so much about it that that's not a possibility that there were houses in Númenor that were more kind of Asian or African or whatever. I don't know if we're gonna go that far with it, but it's interesting.
Quickbeam: I definitely think that we're going to experience where they've seen territory there, and when they come up with the concept of Ken Watanabe, or Ghassan Massoud being Blue Wizards…
Wraith Land: I hadn’t yet read about that rumor yet! Is that what they are talking about? Because there has been a lot of noise about the Blue Wizards, like with the black British actor Sir Lenny Henry too.
Quickbeam: Oh yeah, for months. I mean, our two Blue Wizards could be our first people of color cast as major roles. One of the actors is Japanese and one is Syrian. The job the Valar give the Blue Wizards is to go to those eastern countries and lands, to talk and interact with them. As Professor Tolkien revisited this later in his life and wrote more materials about the Blue Wizards, he even changed their names and changed how effective they were in stopping the advancement of Morgoth and Sauron in the far eastern places. And so Ghassan Massoud who played opposite Orlando Bloom in Kingdom of Heaven may be in Middle-earth.
Wraith Land: Wow, it'd be really cool to see Ghassan and Ken Watanabe in anything, much less in Tolkien’s world, how cool. I really hope it’s true.
Quickbeam: Yeah, no, he's great, I love Watanabe too. We haven't heard this officially, so well you know it’s definitely more of a rumour — a super rumor. But it's a persistent, persistent rumor. But, I mean, that's going to be the first attack wave of people being racially like anti-woke-ness and who may start screaming about the casting of the Blue Wizards, when I think it's absolutely perfect. Why wouldn’t they study and take the form of those people in those areas that would be most able to communicate and look like them and get assimilated into the society, and start to work against the enemy.
Wraith Land: Yeah, makes total sense that the Valar would do that, have the wizards take the form that enables them to connect and better fulfill their mission. That would be really super innovative.
Quickbeam: I would be thrilled, and then we're gonna have to go online and fight with the trolls about it for a week. Because I know what it was like when I went down there to New Zealand and visited them 20 years ago for Peter Jackson’s films. They weren't being attacked like Kelly Marie was, you know?
Wraith Land: It is a different world now and what's tolerated and what's not. The internet has allowed an inflammation of intolerance. Most of the platforms have not moderated or steered their communities. It’s been a dereliction in my view, in the name of so-called “freedom of speech,” which is a farce, because even before the more recent pull back, they forbade plenty of things. A lot of it was naiveté, as well as denial, greed and arrogance, in my opinion. The flood of money blinded.
It seems everyone forgot that there is darkness in people's hearts, and that it's not all going to be happy. There's always going to be those things there that we're gonna have to deal with and I think, you know, the internet and the way it sort of has been unmanaged, has been really sloppy and shortsighted. I was sort of overly optimistic too, but I could also see the warning signs for years.
So now we’ve learned otherwise. There is a cost. In a way you could say Tolkien was right there warning us the whole time. The whole time, critics have accused him of being black and white, that he is either, “Oh, he's so pessimistic about evil and the Ring,” or that he does this at the expense of the grey. Yet I think that’s a simplistic take on what is there. So many literary critics have criticized him for this. But he was onto something. This stuff is there and we have to work on it.
And I think talking with you, it only reinforces my belief that his message is so important nowadays, more important now than it has ever been since he wrote his books. It’s going to be interesting because as Amazon tries to broaden it, and rightly so, the vision of what he was doing there will grow, because I think he wrote it for all humanity.
Quickbeam: Absolutely. I think there's gonna be some pushback. There's a lot of pushback, and that's going to bring up questions of the charges of him being, you know, overly Euro-centric or racist, charges that have been laid against him sweepingly and broadly by some of the literary class. So we're gonna have to defend him on that side too, because we're still looking at the fact that Peter Jackson gave us, you know, wonderful wonderful adaptations. But they were porcelain white.
Until he decided to put different people in The Hobbit. All of a sudden in Lake-town, there were faces from around the world. It seems so quiet and small and nobody raised a fuss. There was nobody online screaming about it like I thought there was going to be. Because you're talking about a hub, a hub of trade at the center of trade routes in western Middle-earth, like Damascus used to be, which would attract lots of people from all over the map.
That was the first time though. It wasn't lost on me all those years ago when Whoopi Goldberg was hosting the Oscars, when The Fellowship of the Ring was up for all those Oscars, and she actually said, “Hey Peter, where are all of the black hobbits? Aren’t there any in Middle-earth, and what would you call them if there were? Blobbits?”
Cut to the camera of Peter going like this, with his hands over his face, the audience laughing, and Elijah Wood was embarrassed and, you know, it was super awkward, but true. We're at that point where things are going to look a little bit more like the bridge of the Enterprise than they do the Fellowship of the Ring.
So, yeah, here we go. I'm ready. I'm ready to put the emphasis on the conversation of Tolkien's reflections on larger themes across a larger world canvas, and as long as we can do that, we can drive the conversation as best as we can.
More with Quickbeam on Amazon, hobbits and music — continued…
*Arda is Tolkien’s Elvish name for the Earth, and all that it contains, both physically, biologically and spiritually.