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Racism in fantasy
Oct. 13th, 2003 11:13 pmOne topic that pops up occasionally among fans of fantasy novels and role-playing games is the question of whether the treatment of the various fantasy races — elves, dwarves, orcs, etc. — is racist. I think it generally is, though it’s not the serious, toxic racism of The Turner Diaries. It’s a more dilute racism, introduced for fictional convenience.
One common form of racism is the belief that a person’s character is determined by his ethnicity. This is a boon to writers of adventure fiction. If you and your audience share the same notions of what character traits go with what ethnicities, then all you have to do is give a character an ethnic name and maybe a spot of funny accent or touch of description and your audience will know to assume that he’s crafty or stubborn or greedy or lazy or whatever.
That sort of thing is deservedly frowned upon nowadays, but it’s common in fantasy and science-fiction. Greedy dwarves, logical Vulcans, belligerent orcs, inscrutable elves, all tropes straight out of pulp adventure fiction. Why else do you think we so often refer to “alien races” when they are more properly alien species?
I was reminded of this while reading CS Lewis’s review of Lord of the Rings in On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature (which I borrowed, along with Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, from Beth, who’s a big Lewis fan). He says:
Confirmation of what I’ve long believed.
I’m not claiming that Tolkien was a racist (though the thread running through LotR, the belief that nobility of character runs in bloodlines, is one that bothers me whenever I try to reread the series), or that modern fantasy authors are racists (though some of them might be), just that the common habit of assigning personality by “race” is a lazy one, and the descendent of a racist worldview, and something that an author might look towards trying to transcend if he wants to create a work of lasting quality (or even just of attention-getting novelty).
One common form of racism is the belief that a person’s character is determined by his ethnicity. This is a boon to writers of adventure fiction. If you and your audience share the same notions of what character traits go with what ethnicities, then all you have to do is give a character an ethnic name and maybe a spot of funny accent or touch of description and your audience will know to assume that he’s crafty or stubborn or greedy or lazy or whatever.
That sort of thing is deservedly frowned upon nowadays, but it’s common in fantasy and science-fiction. Greedy dwarves, logical Vulcans, belligerent orcs, inscrutable elves, all tropes straight out of pulp adventure fiction. Why else do you think we so often refer to “alien races” when they are more properly alien species?
I was reminded of this while reading CS Lewis’s review of Lord of the Rings in On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature (which I borrowed, along with Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, from Beth, who’s a big Lewis fan). He says:
Much that in a realistic work would be done by ‘character deliniation’ is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls.
Confirmation of what I’ve long believed.
I’m not claiming that Tolkien was a racist (though the thread running through LotR, the belief that nobility of character runs in bloodlines, is one that bothers me whenever I try to reread the series), or that modern fantasy authors are racists (though some of them might be), just that the common habit of assigning personality by “race” is a lazy one, and the descendent of a racist worldview, and something that an author might look towards trying to transcend if he wants to create a work of lasting quality (or even just of attention-getting novelty).