re: #138 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

And tomatos.

I do not agree that all of Middle Earth is intended to be Europe.

And even the parts that are undoubtedly intended to be England-inspired (the Shire, and Rohan) still do not demand that all actors have lily white skin.

First off, Tolkien’s fiction is a truly fantasy world.

Secondly, even in real life the first (modern human) Europeans had brown skin.

Then all the other parts of Middle-earth are more technically called “Arda”, which comes from the root world for which English has “Earth”.

And the Amazon show is not about the Shire or Rohan. It’s about the larger Arda.

There is simply no place for a whites-only sign to be put on such a show.

I’m not suggesting that it should affect the casting decisions in the current show, but there is no question that Tolkien’s original intention was to create a mythology for England, and he noted (and changed where he could — tobacco became pipe-weed, for example) anachronisms in his work. It simply doesn’t matter what color they were, then or now — except to crazy white supremacists who mix a perverted version of Tolkien with Nazi ideology for their world view.