Gandalf the black

The Tolkien Society's decision to make diversity the subject of its seminar this weekend has opened a can of Smaug-sized worms

"Projecting Indian Myths, Culture and History onto Tolkien’s Worlds" is one of the papers that will be discussed on Zoom at the Tolkien Society's seminar this weekend. That the annual beano is about Tolkien and Diversity this year should not be an enormous surprise. The society explains in the promotional blurb: "While interest in the topic of diversity has steadily grown within Tolkien research, it is now receiving more critical attention than ever before. Spurred by recent interpretations of Tolkien’s creations and the cast list of the upcoming Amazon show The Lord of the Rings, it is crucial we discuss the theme of diversity in relation to Tolkien."

It seems to have been a shock, if not a surprise, to the Society of Tolkien (shades of the People's Front of Judea here), which has hit back with its own, traditionally themed, conference scheduled to clash with its rival's bash on Saturday. The Society of Tolkien's webinar will stick to safe topics such as "analysis of characters, situations and linguistics in the books", and the organisers have snarkily provided a list of subjects that are off limits: "concepts not included in Tolkien’s writing; the Black Speech of Mordor; and general foolishness". In general foolishness the society presumably includes trying to acquire new insights into a 70-year-old text and how it is received today by discussing "Pardoning Saruman?: the Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings".

When Amazon announced the cast of its Rings prequel series, due to be aired in the next year or so, ethnic minority actors were conspicuous by their scarcity. Apologists for straitened thinking wheeled out the tired old line that Tolkien's intention in Rings and the volumes and volumes of ancillary writing was to build an English creation myth. It is true that for the English people that inhabited Tolkien's real world, which for decades consisted in large part of the inside of two Oxford colleges, that would probably have been an all-white creation myth. But that doesn't wash now. A creation myth for today's England would include many races, and if the imaginary realm could include a 17ft cave troll, it could certainly include black hobbits and brown-skinned humans.

The elves come across as Tolkien's favourite creation. He meticulously constructed languages for them to speak, and great, rambling genealogical histories, and described their appearance more definitively than he did for any other creature except perhaps their counterparts, the orcs. Tolkien's elves had fair skin and grey eyes: no question about that. And when they are portrayed on screen, as in Peter Jackson's film hexalogy, much of their eldritch aura derives from their near-identical looks, as with the otherworldly nymphs in paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite John William Waterhouse. But why not use a little imagination and, instead of Tolkien's fair-haired elves, dark-haired elves and silver-haired elves, have elf races with different skin colours? Imagine the heart-stopping sight of ranks of black actors, Asian actors and white actors lining up for battle. This is not colour-blind casting but something more sophisticated: using colour-blind casting and its opposite to add texture and magic to the original.

To return to the diversity conference, though — you might almost imagine the Society of Tolkien had missed the past five or six decades of literary criticism, including deconstruction and similar techniques that attach importance to the reader's perception of the text rather than the author's intentions. Is not “'Something Mighty Queer': Destabilising Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien" a rather intriguing palantir with which to descry new dynamics in Frodo's relationship with Strider the mysterious ranger?