Concerning (Brown) Hobbits

Andy Serkis, who was brilliant as the motion capture/voice actor for Gollum in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films, is in a bit of hot water. He's directing The Hunt for Gollum, a film I was already disinterested in because it seems to be an attempt to take a couple paragraphs of text and, like another nasty little creature in fantasy fiction, spin this threadbare straw into box office gold. But now he's really put his foot in it. He's also talking out of ignorance.

When asked why the casting for The Hunt for Gollum was all-white, Mr. Serkis replied that "Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology, there’s a lot of that feeling." He went on to say, "The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know… They’re not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of The Shire, but they know they don’t want people coming in." And "I don’t think we will be doing a politically correct just-casting-for-the sake-of-casting-and-ticking-boxes version of the film."

While acknowledging that it's possible he's been told to say and do this by higher ups who have been watching the hateful backlash Amazon's Rings of Power has gotten for hobbits and elves of color, it's still an ignorant, misinformed thing for someone who narrated an unabridged audiobook of Lord of the Rings, and therefore, presumably, you know, read it.

First, according to Tolkien himself, there were brown hobbits.

Here it is, right at the start of the book, in the prologue of all places:

"Before the crossing of the mountains the Hobbits had already become divided into three somewhat different breeds: Harfoots,Stoors, and Fallohides. The Harfoots were browner of skin, smaller, and shorter, and they were beardless and bootless; their hands and feet were neat and nimble; and they preferred highlands and hillsides.....The Harfoots had much to do with Dwarves in ancient times, and long lived in the foothills of the mountains. They moved westward early, and roamed over Eriador as far as Weathertop while the others were still in Wilderland. They were the most normal and representative variety of Hobbit, and far the most numerous. They were the most inclined to settle in one place, and longest preserved their ancestral habit of living in tunnels and holes."

So, according to Tolkien himself, they arrived first, most resembled what we think of as hobbits (i.e., beardless and bootless), were the most numerous, and the most inclined to live in hobbit holes. Because if you actually read the text, you also know a lot of hobbits live in regular houses. And apparently have beards and wear shoes. So what we think a hobbit looks like and lives like is very much what the brown Harfoots were.

And Sam Gamgee himself is described as brown.

"Sam sat propped against the stone, his head dropping sideways and his breathing heavy. In his lap lay Frodo’s head, drowned deep in sleep; upon his white forehead lay one of Sam’s brown hands, and the other lay softly upon his master’s breast." — The Two Towers, "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol"

"Sam drew out the elven-glass of Galadriel again. As if to do honor to his hardihood, and to grace with splendor his faithful brown hobbit-hand that had done such deeds, the phial blazed forth suddenly, so that all the shadowy court was lit with a dazzling radiance like lightning." —Return of the King, "The Tower of Cirith Ungol"

Now, you could argue that he was just tanned from being a gardener, but, to get really pedantic, in The Two Towers in the chapter "Treebeard," Tolkien says, "For the Entwives were bent and browned by their labour." It's more than reasonable, given that Tolkien was a linguist, that he wrote "brown" when he meant brown and "browned" when he meant browned.

And hobbits aren't the only brown people in Middle Earth (fighting for the good guys). In The Return of the King's first chapter, "Minas Tirith", we see this written of some who came riding to Gondor's aid:

"''Forlong has come,' Bergil answered; 'old Forlong the Fat, the Lord of Lossarnach. That is where my grandsire lives. Hurrah! Here he is. Good old Forlong!'

"Leading the line there came walking a big thick-limbed horse, and on it sat a man of wide shoulders and huge girth, but old and grey-bearded, yet mail-clad and black-helmed and bearing a long heavy spear. Behind him marched proudly a dusty line of men, well-armed and bearing great battle-axes; grim-faced they were, and shorter and somewhat swarthier than any men that Pippin had yet seen in Gondor."

Finally, to Mr. Serkis' last point that "Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology." Yes, yes he was. But did you know that Tolkien, who treated The Lord of the Rings as if he were translating a long, lost actual text, wrote in the appendix that he had anglicized the names for his audience. Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins aren't their "real" names. Their actual names were Banazîr Galbasi and Maura Labingi. Now that doesn't sound very Norse to me.

So, while there are certainly things to criticize about The Lord of the Rings, whether you love Tolkien or hate him, watch The Hunt for Gollum or don't, you're dead wrong if you pretend that Tolkien wrote a white monoculture for his Middle Earth. That simply isn't true.