The three-posts-a-week thing is not my best plan so far, but we will hit twelve posts this fine month of October. It will happen.
However, not all of them are going to be clever sciencey posts. This one is a rewrite of a piece I did on another one of my odd little blogs. Since it seems like some sad internet people are mad that a man of color is going to play a role in a modern adaptation of the King Arthur mythos, I thought I would drop some classical-education truthbombs about the 5-ish Known Men Of Color in King Arthur.
First off, six percent of the Knights of the Round Table were men of color. Granted, that’s only three out of 49 men, but the entire expanded United States Congress is hovering around 13% people of color and only has one black Senator. See the man in Figure One? He’s Sir Palamedes the Saracen, and he’s pretty colorful. See this guy?
HE’S GREEN.
These are their stories. Click to read more.
So the Saracen Brothers were Sir Palamedes the Saracen (also spelled Pallamedes or Palomides) and his brothers Sir Safir and Sir Segwarides. They were Saracen (Arabic) princes, the sons of King Esclabor of Babylon, an area near modern Baghdad. (Technically, Arthur’s legend predates Islam, so descriptions of the brothers as Muslims are incorrect; they were added to make the stories seem more spicy and multicultural.) It’s not that they’re later additions or ‘token’ characters, since Palamedes and his brothers are described in Tristram and Isolde as well as Le Morte d’Arthur, two of the largest pieces of the Arthurian canon.
They are serious and important knights. They shouldn’t be overlooked.
(Sidenote for non-literature-nerds: The legends of King Arthur are pretty diverse, and they were written down/made up at various times by various different writers, who all wrote down different versions and did different things with their favorite characters. It’s pretty much all fanfiction, and there is no single piece you can point to as the True Story of King Arthur. It is a very fractured and enjoyable canon, and since it’s all made up anyway, why not play along? But if a character is in both Tristram and Morte then they’re pretty solidly placed as a canonical character, and since all sources agree that the Saracen brothers were natives of the Middle East, it’s about as true as Arthur ever gets. Oh, and you may know Tristram and Iseult as Tristan and Isolde. They have a movie and a famous romance.)
Anyway! Sir Palamedes was “A Saracen knight whose nobility and prowess were almost unsurpassed.” He falls madly in love with Iseult and makes a fool of himself over her, but she points out that his love, while flattering, creates no obligation on her part and has nothing to do with her own feelings; she chooses Tristram instead. Like an asshole, he tries kidnapping her, for some reason thinking that this will change her mind; but it doesn’t stick. During his long-standing rivalry with Tristan, which is excruciatingly boring, Palamedes pursues The Questing Beast, the most excellent creature in the world:
ISN’T SHE PERFECT?! This is the best beast ever and like 1000x better for your life than kidnapping sad ladies. But unlike King Pellinore, the previous Quester of the Beast, Palamedes manages to kill it.
Alternatively, in TH White’s “Once and Future King” series, he cheers the Beast up out of a depression by dressing up as another Beast and flirting with her, and their quest is more like a game of lovesick Tag. The series, made famous by Disney’s adaptation of “The Sword in the Stone,” does play fast and loose with the canon, but it’s notably the most modern adaptation to acknowledge Palamedes. In White’s “The Witch in the Wood,” published in 1939, Palamedes is described as black-as-in-African, and he gets a lot of great lines:
And then the magic barge whoa-ed, just where the currachs[1] were usually drawn up. Three knights got out, and it could be seen that the third was a black man. He was a learned paynim[2] or saracen,[3] called Sir Palomides.
“Happy landing,” said Sir Palomides, “by golly!”
[...]
“We dressed up,” bawled Sir Palomides miserably, “As a sort of Beast ourselves, respected sir, and she saw us coming into the castle. There are signs, ahem, of ardent affection. Now this creature will not go away, because she believes her mate to be inside, and it is a great unsafety to lower the drawbridge.”
“You had better explain to her. Stand on the battlements and explain the mistake. After all,” [Merlyn] the magician said, “She is a magic beast”…
But the explanation was a failure – she looked at them as if she thought they were lying…
“The Beast will not believe us. What are we to do?”
[Merlyn] frowned. “Psycho-analyse her,” he said eventually.
[...]
“And now,” added Sir Palomides bitterly, “It is going to rain. Come to think of it, nearly always does rain in these parts.”
You and me both, Palomides. Also, people who think that Tolkien can totally be excused from racism because of his time: I raise my eyebrow at you. Tolkien and White were contemporaries, and it’s recorded that Tolkien had read Sword in the Stone. White’s Merlyn and Wart were also cited inspirations for the characters of Dumbledore and Harry Potter, and Rowling hardly had any people of color in her novels. Would it have been so very difficult to fit them in? It’s really not that there were no characters of color in medieval times or fantasy settings; it’s that these authors choose not to use them.
As for Palamedes’ brothers, they’re not as interesting, but they certainly existed. Sir Segwarides was unlucky with damsels; actually, he was the Worst at Damsels. Sir Safir was just unlucky in general. Palamedes and Safir sided with Lancelot during his big break with King Arthur, and they helped save Guinevere from being burned at the stake. Segwarides remained loyal to Arthur and was killed while trying to burn Guinevere.
Palamedes and his brothers are always described as Saracens, are portrayed variously as black or brown men, and are not textually described as lesser/Other because of their skin color. Interestingly, in Arthur’s time, race as we know it didn’t exist; Western Racism is a very modern, very colonialistic concept. Arthur’s Britain would have been fairly multicultural, as the Roman Empire included Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and brought many people of varying ethnic backgrounds into Britain. There were inarguably wealthy men and women of color living in Europe from Roman times onward and throughout the Middle Ages. We’ve all heard of the Lady of York, right?
Meanwhile, characters in these stories aren’t really visually described unless they have superlative characteristics, such as mysterious all-black armor or remarkably long golden hair. Many knights were described as dark in hair and features. Instead of placing a large flashing sign in the middle of a saga going “THIS PERSON IS TOTALLY A PERSON OF COLOR YOU GUYS, WE REALLY HOPE YOU WILL TAKE THIS INTO ACCOUNT IN FUTURE ADAPTATIONS” the narrative might well have said “Sir Bors, who was dark” and moved on, assuming that readers or listeners would interpret it the way the narrator meant.
Not all of the knights in the Arthurian sagas actually belonged to the Round Table. Sir Morien was a black man added to the written canon in the 1200s – around the same time as Galahad. The son of a Knight of the Round Table and an African noblewoman, Morien has his very own saga (It’s called Morien.) He decides to visit England alone in the hopes of finding his father, via the quirky but unproductive method of beating up every knight he comes across until they told him where his father was/were actually his father all along. As a teenager, he held his own against the disguised Sir Lancelot in hand-to-hand combat for so long that Sir Gawain begged them to stop fighting, as he couldn’t bear to see such good knights kill each other for stupid reasons. This sort of thing happened a lot. I think it’s because everyone was very lonely in Fictional England and their armor made it hard to hug it out.
Sir Morien is described as wearing North African armor, though most images of him are in European gear, possibly because the artists found Moorish armor too hard to draw. Interestingly, the narrative makes a large point of describing his skin color, possibly because it was thought to be unusual and dramatic, especially as he seems to match his own shield and armor. He also contrasts with his very well-kept teeth.
Here are some quotes from the translated saga of Morien:
He was all black, even as I tell ye: his head, his body, and his hands were all black, saving only his teeth. His shield and his armour were even those of a Moor, and black as a raven…
Had they not heard him call upon God no man had dared face him, deeming that he was the devil or one of his fellows out of hell, for that his steed was so great, and he was taller even than Sir Lancelot, and black withal, as I said afore…
When the Moor heard these words he laughed with heart and mouth (his teeth were white as chalk, otherwise was he altogether black)…
Morien’s saga ends when he finds his father (Sir Agrovale of the Round Table) and convinces him to return to Africa and marry Morien’s mother, thus making an honest woman of her and a legitimate son of Morien. Sir Agrovale goes “OH, hey, yeah, I completely forgot I was going to do that! Sorry, son!” and they get married and Sir Morien can therefore legally inherit his mother’s kingdom and gets to be a king yay.
- This statue of a knight is usually attributed to Sir Morien.
There is even a knight of extremely unusual color. Even the newest Arthurian scholar has probably heard of the Ballad of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Right? COME ON, guys, you must have heard of the Green Knight.
He was called the Green Knight because he had green skin and hair.
The Green Knight basically shows up at Camelot at Christmas one day and storms into the middle of the feast and he’s all “WHO WANTS TO CUT MY HEAD OFF WITH MY AXE?!” like a troll suddenly entering a conversation. Or the Grinch Who Didn’t Understand Christmas.
And everyone is all “Errrrm, hahaha, who are you, and also, no.”
And Green Knight’s all like “COME AT ME BROS, Y’ALL ARE COWARDS, CUT OFF MY DAMN HEAD.”
So Sir Gawain gets so mad at this that he jumps up and straight-up cuts the knight’s green head off.
Then the Green Knight picks up his own damn head, sticks it back on his shoulders, and goes “Right, mate, now you have to come to my house for Christmas dinner next year, and I’ll cut your head off.”
Then after that? Shit gets weird. Read it sometime, it’s cultural!
Future adaptations decided to describe the Green Knight as a non-green person who was simply wearing all green, possibly because green-skinned regenerating knights who grow new heads were a little bit too weird. Presumably in a way that noble African knights who totally beat Sir Lancelot in combat were not.
CONCLUSIONS:
- Three major Knights of the Round Table were canonically men of color, which doesn’t raise any eyebrows in the narrative.
- Nobody finds it TERRIBLY OFFENSIVE AND INACCURATE that Morien exists. In fact, after Sir Lancelot battles Sir Morien, he’s full of praise for his strength and prowess. (Although he also adds, “Stop punching strangers in the face as a greeting, it’s not really the most logical way to find your dad.”)
- A knight with green skin shows up and everybody deals.
- In the fictional England in the fictional time where we set the fictional King Arthur story, we shouldn’t get upset about people of color existing, because they existed in England in real-time in reality-land.
- In Arthur’s time, skin color was not used to separate people – they preferred to war for religion, land ownership and random squabbles – and so characters in his legends may well have been dark or non-white, and it was never considered necessary to describe them.
- THIS IS A CANON WHERE GREEN GUYS CUT OFF THEIR OWN HEADS AND PEOPLE SLEEP WITH THEIR SISTERS AND THERE IS A GODDAMN GODLIKE WIZARD AND A SEMI-NAKED LADY IN A POND DISTRIBUTING SWORDS AS A METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. THIS. IS. FANTASY. THERE IS NO REASON WHY FANTASY SHOULD AUTOMATICALLY EQUAL WHITE PEOPLE EXCEPT FOR THE PART WHERE FANTASY ONLY EVER HAS WHITE PEOPLE IN IT.
- ETA October 16: As Myrin points out in the comments below, there is even a canonical mixed-race knight who is spotted. From Myrin:
The first two books (it consists of sixteen) are about Parzival’s father, Gahmuret (I imagine him like that, btw, because fitting description is fitting). He is good friends with the Caliph of Bagdad, fights for him and travels a lot serving him. On one of his travels he fights for a heathen town and subsequently falls in love with their queen, Belakane, whom he marries. As you say, it’s actually really unusual in these stories to write of people’s colour but here it is often mentioned that she’s a Moor. That doesn’t, however, make her ugly or anything (though she fears Gahmuret will think that way), in fact she’s described just as every other woman in this kind of story is described – as the most beautiful one the hero has ever seen. They later have a son (let’s ignore here that Gahmuret secretly leaves her because he wants to go on adventures and writes her a letter where he tells her it’s because of them having a different faith, mpf), Feirefîz, Parzival’s older half brother.
And that Feirefîz is spotted. Yes, spotted. Chequered. Plaid. However you might want to call it. He does have white and black skin and hair (and it’s very clear that he’s not just of a lighter brown as it would be normal, he literally has two colours).
Does that prevent him from being one of the strongest, noblest and most impressive men of his time? Certainly not. And people actually find him pretty cool and when they describe his skin and hair they don’t do so in a condescending way but in an admiring one.
I love this. Feirefiz’s spotted nature may be metaphorical; Palamedes is often depicted with a black-and-white checkered shield, a reference to his namesake (The Greek mythogical figure Pallamedes supposedly invented the chessboard) and to the dualities in his nature (a Saracen living in England, a man who believes in Jesus but has not committed to Christianity, etc.) Feirefiz might also have been meant as a man of color with vitiligo. This skin condition causes depigmentation of areas of the skin and occurs across all ethnicities. Here’s a strikingly lovely woman with the condition:
Woman from “The Coiffure Project.” I recognize her from pictures on Tumblr, but I don’t remember her name – please let me know if you do!
Seriously, everyone: canonical knights of color in Arthur’s England! This has been a Missing Piece of Your Classical Education.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] currach: an ancient kind of Irish kayak made with animal skins.
[2] payim: a pagan, or a non-Christian, especially a Muslim.
[3] saracen: literally “a foreigner,” used to describe people from Arabia or Syria, especially Muslims. (Adorably, “saracen stones,” corrupted to “sarsen stones,” are what English people call certain rocks that are in the middle of a field for no apparent reason. In case you were wondering, yes, my brain is an attic.)
Best field of Sarsen stones ever, we plant them and over thousands of years they grow from these: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/412186
To these: http://sacredsites.com/europe/united_kingdom/avebury.html
Oh Elodie, you do not know how much this is my thing! I major in Germanistik (I think “German studies” is the English term? I never quite got that) with my specialty being Mediävistik (Older German language and literature) and I’m reading Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach right now! Well, okay, not right now while I’m writing to you but I’ve got the copies lying next to me on my table and I plan to finish the story after turning my computer off later. I love coincidences like that!
One of the three big “genres“ in medieval German literature are the Artusromane (Arthurian Stories/Books) which also shows what you said in your article: There is no such thing as “canon” when it comes to these stories (I mean, English folk tales written down by French writers [Chrétien de Troyes, I’m looking at you!] and then translated and interpreted and changed by German writers [Hartmann von Aue and the aforementioned Wolfram would be the most important ones] => no one canon).
Also a big YES to how it’s surprisingly unimportant in these stories what colour someone is (religion, though, is a different thing, although there are quite a few “heathen” personalities [includes both Jews and Muslims or those doing sorcery who apparently don’t have a religion at all] who are distinctly called “heathens” but really aren’t that different from the Christian people).
I’ll be going with Parzival here since that is freshly in my brain so everything that follows naturally cannot be applied to all Arthurian Stories but many themes are really similar – also note that the names are probably all different from how they are in English but I’ll just stick with them.
The first two books (it consists of sixteen) are about Parzival’s father, Gahmuret (I imagine him like that, btw, because fitting description is fitting). He is good friends with the Caliph of Bagdad, fights for him and travels a lot serving him. On one of his travels he fights for a heathen town and subsequently falls in love with their queen, Belakane, whom he marries. As you say, it’s actually really unusual in these stories to write of people’s colour but here it is often mentioned that she’s a Moor. That doesn’t, however, make her ugly or anything (though she fears Gahmuret will think that way), in fact she’s described just as every other woman in this kind of story is described – as the most beautiful one the hero has ever seen. They later have a son (let’s ignore here that Gahmuret secretly leaves her because he wants to go on adventures and writes her a letter where he tells her it’s because of them having a different faith, mpf), Feirefîz, Parzival’s older half brother.
And that Feirefîz is spotted. Yes, spotted. Chequered. Plaid. However you might want to call it. He does have white and black skin and hair (and it’s very clear that he’s not just of a lighter brown as it would be normal, he literally has two colours).
Does that prevent him from being one of the strongest, noblest and most impressive men of his time? Certainly not. And people actually find him pretty cool and when they describe his skin and hair they don’t do so in a condescending way but in an admiring one.
So, yeah. I guess I just wanted to add the spotted Feirefîz to your green knight because colour variety and awesomeness and all.
Sorry for rambling (again! >__<), but that’s exactly my topic and I could talk about it all day, so thanks for writing about it!
Ohhh my goodness I love coincidences like this… and I LOVE the spotted knight! Since I can only read in English, I miss out on all the best primary sources for this kind of literature! I’m going to add this to the original post.
YOU ARE SO BRILLIANT! THANK YOU
Oh my god, I’m a bit embarrassed (in a good way). The brilliant Elodie telling me that I’m brilliant. That’s a bit much, I’m seriously blushing right now.
Thank you for including my poorly worded comment to your article and I’m always happy to add something should the topic ever come up again (as I said, I could talk about this for days and be very content afterwards). <3
Awesome and educational! This was totally missing from my English degree, which basically did nothing but discuss Arthurian legends.
But I thought Rowling did have quite a lot of people of colour in Harry Potter; Kingsley Shacklebolt; Padma and Parvati Patil; Angelina Johnson; Lee Jordan; Cho Chang; Blaise Zabini; and, according to the Internet, Dean Thomas in the US edition. That’s seven/eight, not too bad perhaps? At the time I remember thinking Rowling was being relatively enlightened compared to the usual fantasy whitewash.
Thank you!
Oh my god, can I be really boring and talk about Harry Potter, because I love Harry Potter and talking about Harry Potter and you’re kind of holding still and haven’t told me to stop? Rowling isn’t completely awful, but 73 years out from “The Sword in the Stone” and I can only remember one good line from her characters of color: Kingsley Shacklebolt’s “Say what you want about Dumbledore, but he’s got style.” While she definitely placed POC in her text, they were low-stakes characters who never threatened the placement of the main characters. There are no Marauders of Color, no teachers, no parents, no fatherly figures, no close friends, no heroes or founders or ghosts or other historical figures. The story is about little British white kids and it’s expressly for little British white kids; the fact that the rest of the world enjoys it does not change the fact that Rowling’s Wizarding Britain is status quo. It’s like how she says that “Fat people are not automatically stupid or bad! Body positivity YAY!” and everyone’s like “WOW JK YOU ARE SO PROGRESSIVE!” and yet all of the fat people in her books are stupid or bad, except maybe Slughorn; the only slightly-chubby Good Guy is Neville, who is generally held in contempt. So it’s not so much progressiveness as Moving Slightly Forward From 1939.
The Patil twins exist to be girly and therefore lesser than Hermione; Ron and Harry date them briefly but ignore them. In the text their femininity is conflated with frivolousness and inferiority, although to be fair, they’re the only people in Hogwarts who actively practice a culture other than Idealized Englishe (I think they wear saris at the Yule Ball.) Likewise, Cho Chang is a colorful stop on the way, but only as an interlude to teach Harry how to kiss before he goes on to Ginny; likewise, Ginny dates Dean Thomas before graduating to Harry. Some critics complain that the main characters date minor POC before moving on in favor of More Perfect White Partners, and at the end of the series no POC was good enough to marry into the charmed circle of main characters.
Lee Jordan is just A Voice; Angelina is Just A Quidditch Player, admittedly a beautiful one who marries George Weasley. Interestingly, Dean and Angelina were supposed to be automatically taken as black in the UK – Dean’s love of a certain football team and descriptions of his hair were supposed to heavily imply that he is black to a British audience. In the US version Dean was explicitly described as black because it was assumed that the Yanks wouldn’t pick up on the references. I’m pretty sure the exact same thing happened when translating Angelina, because I remember several mentions in the text of her being totally black. So score one for reading comp in the UK!
Blaise Zabini is another low-stakes character; he spent years in fanfiction as a white girl, because Rowling didn’t describe him as male and black for several books. Sarah Rees Brennan did a nice line in White-Female-Sexy-Blaise back when she was writing fanfiction!
It’s kind of like how, after the last book had been published and there were no stakes, she outs Dumbledore as gay. Like, okay, Jo, here is half a cookie for trying, but it doesn’t make any actual difference and that’s exactly how you intended it. It’s not written in the books, so when that interview gets snowed under and the trivia forgotten, it will never matter. It would have been pleasant to see that the witches and wizards who casually reproduce with non-human species are also allowed to practice same-sex love; but she didn’t give Madame Rosmerta a busty bar-wench girlfriend, even though it would have changed nothing. Dumbledore’s gayness will never help or comfort a queer child.
So in conclusion, no, Rowling’s not terrible, but I’m not going to give her cookies for basically noticing that Britain contains Asian people, Black people and Indian people. I mean, it’s not that hard to notice; I’ve been here for about a year and I’m like “Hey! There are also Middle Eastern people here too!” At the moment, I’m creepily staring at some people of color over the top of my monitor! There are more than eight of them in my lab!
In conclusion, Miss Piggy, of course, you are totally right, and you are really good at your Harry Potter! But I raise my eyebrow at Rowling all the same. THIS IS MY BLOG AND I LIKE TO TALK ABOUT HARRY POTTER
The whole “Do you want a cookie…?” meme is often unkind and generally poor strategy. Many of the people who want cookies for doing what looks like a marginal job /ought to/ get cookies because they have either improved themselves or are pushing their social circle forward. Saying “Do you want a cookie (for doing what I think you should have been doing from the very beginning)?” carries the implication “… and what you’re doing isn’t worth much.” Sure, self improvement should be its own reward, but if it incurs contemptuous dismissal it often will be abandoned. If we want to reach out to people who are not at the cutting edge we shouldn’t be cutting them down.
Oh, bless. This is the funniest thing I’ve seen all day!
Basically, I appreciate that you’d like people to be nice to each other, but I have no interest in you, Dave, coming onto my blog and bothering me with three pages from Derailing for Dummies. (If You Won’t Educate Me How Can I Learn! If You Cared About These Matters You’d Be Willing To Educate Me! You’re Being Hostile!) You don’t get to lecture me about being nice, Dave. Like, at Captain Awkward you probably could, but this is my personal goddamn blog. I hope you realize this. I am trying to be really really nice about it.
I’m sorry. You’re new here, Dave B-Z. You’re new and I like that about you. But no. No, I really do not care; I am 100% sure that if I do not give JK Rowling my cookies, SHE WILL NOT FUCKING STARVE. SHE IS JK ROWLING. THE LACK OF ONE COOKIE WILL NOT BREAK HER LITTLE HEART. SHE IS AN ENTIRE MEDIA EMPIRE. So in this case, I am not exactly marginalizing her by denying her credit for acknowledging minorities? (Because she’s a media empire.) Sometimes, phrases can be used to exclude or be unkind (I engage with “mansplain” here) but… well, Dave my dear, “we” are not reaching out to any “people on the edge.” I’m on my blog talking to my friends. When I say that it would be nice if good old JK had given Cho an actual meaningful Asian name , rather than nonsense syllables? I’m saying that it isn’t that much labor for a multimillionaire author of one of the most widely-read series of all time to do a little more work than naming a character the equivalent of “Lalala Sally” or “Featherington-Smythe Gaga.”
CAPTCHA does better character-naming than that! I could Google that, or crack open a baby name book or a phone directory; I could name a character after a Chinese female friend; I could stand up in my workplace and shout “WHAT ARE SOME NICE NAMES FOR A BRITISH FEMALE CHARACTER OF CHINESE (?) DESCENT” and have several British female people of Chinese descent give me a list of answers. JK made up syllables. Even her most devoted fans realize this. When I say that she doesn’t get cookies, I’m coming from a place where “that shit doesn’t get you cookies because with fifteen seconds of labor I could give an Asian character an actual Asian name, and also, JK has £560 million with which to buy her very own cookies, she doesn’t need my approval.” DAVID TENNANT, MAKE THIS POINT FOR ME.
WELL DONE TENNANT. Sadly, I’m not yet at the stage of life where I can pet and coddle billionaires into recognizing their privileges and doing my bidding by making books better for everybody! If so, you would know, because I would be reclining on a throne made out of ponies and cake, stroking my miniature leopard as I reshape the coastline of Norway into a lovely evocation of my silhouette.
LOOK GUYS, I AM CAPABLE OF STEERING THE LIVES OF ALL. INSTEAD OF A DARK LORD YOU SHALL HAVE A QUEEN, GLORIOUS AND TERRIBLE, BEAUTIFUL AS THE MOTHERFUCKING DAWN. ALL SHALL ASK ME FOR SELF-IMPROVEMENT TIPS AND DESPAIR.
What you’re saying is that you don’t like my comment on my blog because it wasn’t nice enough. Nice is not currency here. Compassion, generosity, humility, humor, criticism and analysis are currency at elodieunderglass-dot-wordpress-com, but your hand-wringing is not. Neither are White Male Tears, although I do not deliberately cultivate them, I am told they make a delicious drink with a flavorful bouquet.
In the interest of clarifying, I am not particularly impressed by JK Rowling (though I do like Harry Potter, as evidenced by an entire comment DEALING WITH THAT) and the use of “cookies” does not undermine the points I made in my post. Perhaps you’d like the new Testostify! post?
This, however, was a hilarious teaching moment. Thank you for this. NOW WHO THE FUCK LINKED TO MY BLOG? DON’T YOU KNOW I HATE THAT? DON’T DO THAT. GO AWAY.
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Also, please, Tolkien’s not Racist. Firstly, the location of the story in Middle-Earth would cause ratification (though as you indicate, by no means necessarily a total absence) of non-whites (yeah, and because all white people are the same race haha No). Secondly, the basis of Middle-Earth is linguistic, and Tolkien based the majority of his story off of European language. Thirdly, of course, there is the good ol’ “shame on you Nazis” letter. Fourthly, he does have many (non-white) peoples in his stories, and I doubt Ghan-Buri-Ghan was presented in a condescending way (the opposite, actually); also, in the Silmarillion there are “Swarthy Men” (Bor and his Sons) whose people are wiped out cause in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (they were betrayed like everyone else). And if you consider the general history of Europe and the Islamic invasion(s) it’s rather …historical, to cast them as the enemies of more Western people. And anyway there’s too much of a Song of Roland element to some of the description in the battle for Minas Tirith to say he degrades in a racist way the martial virtue of Eastern peoples.
Okay please pardon the Tolkien Nerdfest going on here. But as a half-Japanese person I’m saying that I found nothing racist in Tolkien, or at least anything offensive to me (although this may be due to purely geographical reasons).
Bless the child.
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Well, it’s true that the Green Knight is green but only because of an enchantment of disguise. Still, I love this article. I will forever link it for the next “omg but Lancelot/Guinevere/insertnamehere can’t be of colour!”
D
And I’ve completely forgot about Feirefîz!
Just here to say I loved your article and thank you for writing it
(fangirlish extra: Palamedes! <3)
Ah, what a lovely name you have!
The Green Knight is really only brought in for the humor; I think it’s amusing that folks who get all het up about POC playing Arthurian characters haven’t even read the works that they’re a fan of. Thus,
Since I’m not a humanities scholar by any stretch of the imagination, I didn’t even know about Feirefiz myself until Commenter Myrin wrote in! So I learned a lot from this article as well.
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