I woke this morning to read that The Lord of the Rings ‘demonises people of colour.’ For a moment I thought I’d stumbled into a parody site, or perhaps Mordor had opened a diversity department. But no – this was genuine academic commentary, the sort of thing one now finds oozing from the lecture halls like swamp water. Once, universities taught philology, theology, and the poetry of meaning; now they teach offence as an art form.
To claim that Tolkien’s mythic world is ‘racist’ is to reveal one’s own illiteracy. He built his universe from the roots of language itself – philology as theology. Light and dark, fair and foul, good and evil – these aren’t racial categories, they’re metaphysical realities. When Gandalf speaks of the Shadow spreading, he isn’t talking about melanin levels; he’s talking about moral corruption. But try telling that to a generation whose notion of enlightenment extends no further than a TikTok filter.
The tragedy of our time is that symbolism has been mistaken for sociology. The modern critic isn’t content to read – he must dissect, accuse, and destroy. Every myth must be rewritten as a manifesto, every hero condemned as a bigot. They’ve taken the Ring of Power for themselves: the right to redefine truth. And like all who wear it, they grow blind.
Tolkien himself detested allegory – he said so repeatedly. He wrote not of races but of souls, of corruption and redemption. The orcs were not ‘people of colour’; they were the spiritual wreckage of free will. Evil, for Tolkien, is a perversion of the good – and that, perhaps, is what galls the modern mind most of all. For if evil exists, so too must goodness. And goodness implies God – the one authority modern academia can’t abide.
I’ve noticed that the professors who scream ‘racism!’ at Tolkien are often the same who praise Game of Thrones for its ‘moral complexity.’ What they mean, of course, is moral relativism: a world without right or wrong, only shades of self-interest. Tolkien believed in truth; they believe in trend. He built a cathedral of words; they scrawl graffiti on the pillars.
We’re living through the intellectual equivalent of Mordor – the land where shadows think themselves enlightened. Students are told not to imagine virtue but to suspect it, not to seek beauty but to dismantle it. And yet, amid the ruins, Tolkien endures. His work speaks across the ages because it tells us what we’ve forgotten: that good and evil are not social constructs but eternal forces, and that courage means standing against the mob – whether of orcs or academics.
So yes, perhaps The Lord of the Rings does ‘demonise’ something – not people of colour, but the corruption of the soul. And judging by the headlines, that corruption has found new hosts. I can almost hear Gandalf now, standing at the gates of Oxford, staff in hand:
‘You shall not pass – until you’ve read a book properly.’
Wording 