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Tolkien,
Race, and Racism
in Middle-earth
Robert Stuart
Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth
 Robert Stuart

Tolkien, Race, and

Racism in
Middle-earth
Robert Stuart
School of Humanities
The University of Western Australia
Nedlands, WA, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-97474-9    ISBN 978-3-030-97475-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97475-6

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 Acknowledgements

I’ve accumulated debts during the decade and more during which I’ve
researched Tolkien and his times. The quietly supportive work of librarians
has been invaluable. Interlibrary loan staff at the University of Western
Australia’s Reid Library have sourced hundreds of obscure publications,
always with impressive enterprise and good humour. Librarians at Oxford’s
Bodleian Library have repeatedly aided me in accessing that awe-inspiring
repository. The British Library’s personnel have, as always, been efficient
and helpful. And Bill Fliss and his associates at Marquette University’s
Raynor Memorial Library have been wonderfully supportive in guiding
me through their superb Tolkien collection, while providing one of the
best working-environments of any library I’ve encountered. I thank
them all.
Over the years, I’ve several times immersed myself in the places that
Tolkien knew and loved: expeditions that my wife calls our ‘Tolkien tours’.
Living in Oxford has always been a joy, of course, and many people have
made us feel at home there. Visits to Bournemouth and Poole, the
Malverns, the Vale of Evesham, Great Haywood, the Dorset coast, Tolkien
sites across Birmingham and its suburbs, the countrysides of Oxfordshire,
the Cotswolds, and Berkshire—all have been enriched by local people who
welcomed us, and often enough pointed us towards surprising Tolkien
heritage. I’m grateful for their kindness.
I owe a particular debt to the History Program of the University of
Western Australia, which for more than forty years has provided a stimu-
lating, affectionate, and supportive community that has enriched and
empowered my endeavours. And, since my retirement, the University’s

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

School of Humanities has enabled my research with a Senior Honorary

Research Fellowship. This book is very much an institutional as well as an
individual achievement. At the same time, friends and colleagues with an
interest in Middle-earth, theoretical knowledge of racism, or expertise in
Tolkien’s milieu have read drafts of all or parts of this book. I would like
to acknowledge Richard Bosworth, Chantal Bourgault du Coudray,
Giuseppe Finaldi, John Hooper, Andrew Lynch, and Jeremy Martens.
Finally, the incisive suggestions offered by my publisher’s reviewers have
supported the final evolution of my enterprise. Generous critique, whether
from friend or anonymous reader, has saved me from error, enhanced my
understanding, and improved my presentation. Needless to say, faults
remaining are entirely my responsibility.
Finally, family has sustained me over the many years during which I’ve
worked on Tolkien and his legacy. My daughters Nicole and Suzanne have
a deep commitment to the Fantasy genre, and have been wonderfully sup-
portive throughout the evolution of this project. They’ve been my
Fellowship as I’ve adventured in Middle-earth. But, above all, I thank Viv
for her patience, humour, and kindness over the years. She has lived toler-
antly with my Tolkien fixation for longer than could reasonably have been
expected, given her own literary tastes. This book is for the three of them.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Reflections on Writing About Tolkien and

Race  1
Bibliography  16

2 Tolkien, Race, and the Critics: Debating Racism in Middle-

earth 19
‘The way in which the Nazis saw the world’? The Racialisation
of Middle-earth  23
‘A foul people’: From Racialism to Racism?  38
‘The State of the Soul’: Race and Spirituality in Middle-earth  46
‘I’d go back to trees’: Tolkien, Anti-Modernity, and Modern
Racism  56
‘Always historicise!’: Tolkien and Race in Context  62
Bibliography  74

3 Manichean Racism? Black and White and Blacks and Whites 87

‘An unwitting defence of racial separatism’: Apartheid in
Middle-earth?  88
‘Black and hideous’: Tolkien and White Racism  93
‘The Colour of Salvation’: Tolkien and Spiritual Colouration 106
Bibliography 116

vii
viii Contents

4 Race War in Middle-earth: The Orcs, Genocide, and Ethnic

Cleansing125
‘The only good Orc is a dead Orc’: Race War in Middle-earth 129
‘Other Makings’: Orcs as Animals, Automatons, or Twisted Elves 138
‘Orcs aren’t monsters. We are.’ The Orcs and the Critics 143
‘The Inner War of Allegory’: Orcs and the War for the Soul 150
Bibliography 157

5 Blood and Soil: Language, Myth, and Their Racial Roots165

‘His country of the heart’: Home and Heimat 167
‘Sacred Geography’ and ‘Rooted Sustenance’: Grounding the Race 173
‘Things of racial and linguistic significance’: A Racial Philology? 190
‘Native Language’ and ‘Cradle-Tongue’: Racial Memory in
Tolkien’s Thought 202
‘Voices so fair to hear’: Phonaesthetics and Race 211
Bibliography 221

6 Tolkien and Anti-Semitism: The Jewish Question and the

Question of the Dwarves235
‘That Gifted People’: Debating Tolkien, Racism, and the Jews 236
‘Dwarves like Jews’: Philo-Semitism or Anti-Semitism? 240
‘The War against the West’: Historicising Tolkien’s Texts 252
Bibliography 260

7 Aristocratic Racism: Gobineau in Gondor267

‘A man of the Middle Ages’: Gobineau’s Aristocratic Racism 270
‘Tipping your hat to the Squire’: Tolkien and Racial Aristocracy 276
‘The Race of the Kings’: Númenóreans and the Dúnedain 285
‘As Tall as Lords’: Stature and Status 302
Lords of ‘the lesser kindreds’: High Elves, Fallohides, and
Aristocratic Animals 309
Bibliography 327

8 Conclusion339
Bibliography 344

Index345
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Reflections on Writing About

Tolkien and Race

By convention, a book’s introductory remarks can be personalised. That’s

fortunate, as convention also ordains that those of us who write about
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien locate ourselves very personally in relation to
that controversial author. So… I encountered The Lord of the Rings,
Tolkien’s masterwork, (henceforth LOTR) during my first year as a stu-
dent at the University of Saskatchewan: a geeky undergraduate, uneasily
observing the counter-culture from the university library, and thus being
totally unrepresentative of the stereotypical ‘hippy’ North-American
Tolkien fan of the time. No ‘pipe-weed’ for me! It was, for that recently
uprooted teenager, a lonely time in a new country, and also the moment
when Middle-earth gripped the global imagination, never to let go. Even
now, more than half a century later, I vividly recall the impact of the Shire’s
homeliness when I so missed home, as well as my puzzlement about the
emus parading on the cover of my Ballantine paperback edition of the
Fellowship volume—a bemusement shared by Tolkien at much the same
time, albeit in response to the similarly emu-infested cover of Ballantine’s
Hobbit (Tolkien 1981, 362). From that beginning, I’ve been a living refu-
tation of W.H. Auden’s observation that ‘nobody seems to have a moder-
ate opinion [about LOTR]’, with Auden reflecting that ‘people find it a
masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it’ (Auden 1956). No such
extremes for me. I loved, still love, Tolkien’s preternatural ability to evoke
historical depth beneath living landscapes. The ‘high speech’ of his book’s
later chapters…not so much. Unlike many of LOTR’s readers, I haven’t

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
R. Stuart, Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97475-6_1
2 R. STUART

ritualised an annual rereading of a work that has become, for millions,

virtually a sacred text. Indeed, as I was leaving Saskatoon for postgraduate
study in 1969, I took a heretical pleasure in laughing along with the
Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings. But Tolkien’s classic, once read,
did evoke a life-long love of ‘high fantasy’ as I revelled in the burgeoning
genre that he’d empowered.
Decades passed, with marriage, a doctorate, yet another wrenching
removal to a new country, pursuit of an academic career, and the birth of
children. Tolkien’s presence persisted, however, as a spectre haunting my
leisure-reading, where I encountered his shadowy presence in one fantasy
series after another—some of them virtual pastiches of his masterpiece. I
returned to LOTR when my daughters were of an age to immerse them-
selves in Middle-earth, again enjoying a cover-to-cover reading, but being
greatly surprised and much dismayed when both young women (preco-
cious feminists) rejected the book, although they had adored The Hobbit
when I’d read it to them as children. Later yet, during the latter years of
my teaching career at the University of Western Australia, I created a won-
derfully rewarding (at least for its creator) teaching unit on ‘The Historical
Imagination in Fantasy and Science Fiction’. Tolkien was, needless to say,
central to its curriculum, and the brilliant students who worked with me
over the years have stimulated many of my best insights. If nothing else, it
was great fun, reading and rereading LOTR together.
My pleasure in teaching Tolkien decided me to write about him. I’d
been trained as a historian of ideas, and had spent several decades elucidat-
ing the Marxist ideological tradition in France. By the early twenty-first
century, however, it was obvious that both French history and the history
of Marxism were in decline, while the fantasy genre had acquired a new-
found respectability. Why not redeploy my skills in textual interpretation
and ideology-theory to studying Tolkien, who seemed to impassion young
people at least as much as Marx had done when I was a student? Why, I
asked myself, had Tolkien become ‘the author of the century’? (Shippey
2000) What visions of political order and social hierarchy might so many
millions of readers have taken away from their sojourns in Tolkien’s realms?
So, in 2006, with the publication of my last book on Marxism, I embarked
on a project tentatively entitled ‘The Politics of Middle-earth’. There have
been times since then, however, when I’ve doubted the decision. It has
challenged me in ways that I’d not anticipated, and has proven to be at
least as taxing a topic as the history of Marxism had ever been.
Why taxing? First, studying the meaning of a work and the meaning
intended by its creator requires attention to authorial context. I had long
 1 INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON WRITING ABOUT TOLKIEN AND RACE 3

followed the Cambridge School in the history of ideas, with its reminder
that all texts have emerged in precise places and from specific times and
that they’ve all been addressed to particular audiences, with the School’s
consequent urging that the ‘meaning’ of a work is best elucidated by
locating it in its original milieu (Skinner 1969). For my study of the ideo-
logical dimension of Tolkien’s fantasy,1 these protocols impelled placing
his works in their period and place—among the ancient traditions, con-
temporary preoccupations, and hopes and fears for the future that ani-
mated Tolkien’s imagination, from his Edwardian youth to his post-1968
old age. After all, Tolkien, by his own estimation, was someone who
cloaked ‘such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he
knows it, under mythical and legendary dress’ (Tolkien 1981, 211). Inside
the myths of Arda, within the legends of Middle-earth, thus lie concealed
Tolkien’s views on his catastrophic époque.
He was not a systematic thinker, with even philological treatises such as
‘English and Welsh’ remaining relatively inchoate. But his ideas and ideals
are nonetheless evident ‘in solution’,2 saturating his fantasies. John Garth
is surely right in arguing that ‘Middle-earth was created to reflect what
[Tolkien] most loved and detested in his own world’ (Garth 2020, 184).
I wanted, above all else, to explore that act of creation. My book therefore
began under the very Cambridge-School guidance of Verlyn Flieger when
she urges us to read Tolkien ‘as a man of his time’, taking him ‘out of the
medieval box in which he has languished for too long and [setting] him
solidly in the context of the twentieth century that shaped him and pro-
duced his work’ (Flieger 2005, 26). It was only via such historicising
method, I was convinced, that I could discover, in Tolkien and his texts,
what Umberto Eco has characterised as the intentio auctoris, ‘the inten-
tion of the author’ (Eco 1992a, 25).
I began confidently. During many years of teaching twentieth-century
European history, I had acquired considerable background knowledge of
English cultural and intellectual life during Tolkien’s time (I’d taught a
unit on ‘Intellect and Ideology’ that included substantial twentieth-­
century British content). But how inadequate that knowledge proved to
be, given the demands of real research! I quickly discovered just how
demanding the relevant scholarly literature was, just how rich Tolkien’s
cultural context had been, and just how little of either I’d actually mas-
tered. Elucidating the textual world of a conservative English Catholic of
Tolkien’s time, for instance, meant reading the works of the Catholic ideo-
logues whose texts Tolkien certainly knew and valued, such as Christopher
4 R. STUART

Dawson, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, as well as some he likely

knew, such as Vincent McNabb; perusing journals that expressed Tolkien’s
theological and political viewpoint, such as The English Review of the
1930s when under the Catholic-conservative editorship of Douglas
Jerrold; and mastering the scholarship on the political subculture of
English Catholicism. And what of Tolkien’s ecological vision, an obvious
passion imbuing his fantasies? I soon discovered that a primary resource of
the time would have been the ‘muck and mysticism’ circle that included
the Kinship in Husbandry and the English Mistery, neither of which I’d
encountered before. Reading the works of Rolf Gardiner, Harold
Massingham, Lord Lymington, and William Sanderson was demanding
enough, but there were scholarly studies of the coterie as well, which also
had to be read and assimilated.
Then there were Tolkien’s conservative ideological predilections,3
which patently resonated with Traditionalist Toryism rather than with the
big-business Conservatism of Baldwin and his ilk. Against the thoroughly
modern Conservative Party, Tolkien had been happy to identify with
‘reaction’ (Tolkien 1997, 149, 1981, 65), thus linking his political ideals
and ideas with those of his contemporaries who angrily repudiated ‘sci-
entism’, ‘progress’, and ‘modernity’ in favour of the ‘Old West’ so adored
by Tolkien’s Inklings Fellowship (Duriez 2015, 19–21, 102, and 218). I
was aware, of course, that Tolkien had been entranced by the rambunc-
tious reactionary poet Roy Campbell (Tolkien 1981, 95–96), and so read
Campbell’s notorious Spanish Civil War epic Flowering Rifle (1939),
emerging from the reading shaken by the vast poem’s murderous rhetoric
and overt anti-Semitism. Given Tolkien’s virtually Jacobite idealisation of
‘the return of the king’, I delved into the Tory persona of Arthur Bryant,
the most popular historian of ‘Olde England’ during Tolkien’s time, and
realised that Tolkien’s seemingly eccentric royalist and aristocratic predi-
lections had been more widely shared than I’d imagined. The ‘Diehard’
ultra-conservatism born during Tolkien’s Edwardian youth had obviously
survived into his maturity, and manifests in his fantasies. Reading the
scholarly literature on that almost forgotten ideological tradition, and
engaging with its leading lights, proved to be powerfully illuminating of
Tolkien and his texts.
And what of the contemporary literary culture in which the highly liter-
ate Tolkien had bathed? I already knew, as Tolkien obviously had, the fan-
tasies of his fellow Inklings C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, along with the
romances of William Morris that the youthful Tolkien had so adored,
 1 INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON WRITING ABOUT TOLKIEN AND RACE 5

particularly The Roots of the Mountains and The House of the Wolfings, as well
as the fantasy and science fiction that he had savoured as an adult, from
Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and E.R. Eddison to David Lindsay,
Arthur Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. But there was so much more. I engaged
with works that Tolkien had certainly known and loved, being quite over-
whelmed by the fiery faith animating Francis Thompson’s ‘Hound of
Heaven’, while remaining thoroughly underwhelmed by the serial murders
bloodying ‘the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs’—‘best of all’ in
Tolkien’s memories of his youthful reading (Tolkien 1997, 135). After
long struggle with John Inglesant, I could only agree with Tolkien that few
would now find the strange book ‘possible to read’ (Tolkien 1981, 348).
Finally, needless to say, I engaged with some of the medieval works that had
so preoccupied the great medievalist. Beowulf seemed a more extravagant
adventure, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a more exotic fantasy, The
King of Tars a weirder tale than anything encountered on the Fantasy and
Science Fiction shelves of my local bookshop.
And then there were works that Tolkien had likely known. Dedicated as
he was to England’s country people, I guessed, for instance, that Tolkien
would have read the ruralist bestseller Lark Rise to Candleford, or that the
emblematic work at least mirrored his intense countryside predilections. I
purchased Flora Thompson’s gentle trilogy on that assumption, and enor-
mously enjoyed it, quite apart from understanding Tolkien’s Hobbiton all
the better for having sojourned in Lark Rise and Candleford Green. Less
enjoyable was persevering through the ‘Oxford’ crime novels of Tolkien’s
good friend Katherine Farrer, although her mannered books proved to be
powerfully illuminating of the anti-‘scientistic’ views of Tolkien’s circle,
which, along with Tolkien himself, enjoyed Farrer’s genre (M.G.R. Tolkien
1995). Years passed as I worked to think myself into the world that Tolkien
knew. Nonetheless, however challenging the task, once contextualisation
had enfolded the author and his works, the multiple resonances between
Tolkien’s complex persona and contemporaries such as Dawson, Gardiner
or Bryant (even Farrer) echoed throughout Middle-earth—penetrating
into previously obscure recesses of his texts, allowing me to better
empathise with their creator’s passions and purpose.
Surely Tolkien himself would have approved, given his own belief that
‘a story cannot be judged from its summarized plot, but only from the way
this is told, and from the ideas and feelings which are stirred in the
author—whether consciously formulated by him or not—in the telling,
and which breathe a life and purpose into [his tale]’ (Tolkien 2002, 34).
6 R. STUART

Immersing myself in the textual ocean in which Tolkien had swum sensi-
tised me to the ‘life and purpose’ that breathes through Tolkien’s oeuvre.
He need not have read all the works that, to informed understanding,
represented his ‘cultural imaginary’: that conceptual common ground
upon which he stood with others of his time. But that common ground
must be explored. To illustrate this method, not all American libertarians
have read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. But, nonetheless, reading The
Road to Serfdom is an imperative for understanding American libertarians.
For understanding Tolkien, Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West, for
instance, that great anti-Nazi polemic of 1938, is similarly an imperative
text. Tolkien may not have read the book, but it perfectly represents the
conservative Catholic hatred of Hitler that Tolkien so obviously shared.
I’ve not indulged in yet another variation on the game of ‘source-hunting’
played so often on the field of Tolkien Studies—the source-hunting that
Tolkien disliked as speciously reducing the true creativity of a text. He
was, indeed, at times inclined to deny any ‘influences’ inflecting his cre-
ative imagination (Kilby et al. 1984, 21). So, obeying Tolkien’s own stric-
tures (Tolkien 1997, 120), instead of extracting the referential ‘bones’
from the ‘soup’ of his stories—the skeletal remains of Grendel’s dismem-
bered arm, the desiccated skull of the decapitated Green Knight—I’ve
explored the cultural cuisine, the intellectual fare of his time, from which
Tolkien necessarily confected his own highly original textual dishes. As
Anna Vaninskaya has argued, it’s indispensable to find the ‘contemporary
analogues’ that best illuminate Tolkien’s creativity, thereby ‘assembling a
picture of a period to see where Tolkien fits into it’ (Vaninskaya 2006, 5).
Working with such texts of the time, I tasked myself with understanding
the mentalities to which Tolkien spoke, and which spoke through him.
So, the years passed as I pursued the long labour of interpreting Tolkien
in terms of ‘the ideas and feeling which are stirred in the author’, and
which had stirred the audience that Tolkien once addressed. Interpretation,
however, is always a collective enterprise, and that too presented a taxing
challenge. One owes respect, and attention, to others who have engaged
with one’s subject. Anyone who studies a body of texts is part of an inter-
pretive tradition (Outhwaite 1990). For those of us who care about
Tolkien, that tradition is astonishingly rich and rewarding. Hundreds
upon hundreds of scholars have explored Tolkien’s legacy, elucidating
every imaginable aspect of his work—almost always writing with fervour,
arguing from radically distinct and often conflicting perspectives, some-
times manifesting the most outré of prejudices. Few other authors have
 1 INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON WRITING ABOUT TOLKIEN AND RACE 7

amassed such a massive, diverse, and interesting critical archive. Perforce,

I set myself the task of reading as many of the studies of Tolkien as
possible.4
Why this onerous exercise, when most Tolkien scholars rarely reference
each other in any comprehensive way? (Drout and Wynne 2000, 101;
Timmons 1998, 229) The reasons have been twofold. Most obviously, the
work of fellow scholars has stimulated, challenged, and occasionally
refuted my own understanding of Tolkien. The contrast between my first
rereading of LOTR upon commencing my project and later readings has
astounded me—with those later readings so much more replete with
insight, often the insight of others. At the very least, our rich treasury of
‘Tolkien Studies’ has repeatedly saved me from error—alerting me to lacu-
nae in my understanding, deepening too-hurried readings of Tolkien’s
texts, reprimanding my more over-confident interpretations. I could not
have accomplished more than a poor fraction of my purpose without intel-
lectual capital inherited from my predecessors and contemporaries. I owe
them a great debt.
But, further, part of my project has been to elucidate how Tolkien has
been comprehended, critiqued, and appropriated,5 as well as to discover
what he intended—to understand, as Tolkien himself put it, ‘what stories
have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time
have produced in them’ (Tolkien 2008, 39). Texts that survive for any
considerable period, as Tolkien’s have, grow, evolve, and metamorphose
into entities sometimes as different from their origins as Homo sapiens is
from Australopithecus. The Cambridge-School hermeneutic of origina-
tion is here insufficient. Even the most catastrophically anachronistic mis-
readings of Tolkien’s texts, the pollution-products generated by failed
‘alchemic processes’, are still inescapable aspects of ‘the meaning of
Tolkien’ ground out by those inexorable ‘processes of time’. Such mean-
ings have accumulated over the decades via Eco’s intentio lectoris, ‘the
intention of the interpreter’ (Eco 1992b, 64), intentions that have often
diverged dramatically from anything that might be credibly attributed to
Tolkien himself. The good people of Middle-earth imagined by the enthu-
siastically carnivorous Tolkien, who thought the prohibition of meat-­
eating would be ‘unnatural’ (Tolkien 1981, 60), do not tend to be
vegetarians (contra, e.g. Spacks 1959, 33), but the assumption that they
do so tend, and that Tolkien intended such a reading, tells us much about
the more impassioned Green readings of the author. Some critics, indeed,
unabashedly admit that Tolkien himself, along with virtually all his many
8 R. STUART

millions of dedicated readers, would categorically reject their own inter-

pretation, as when a Freudian tells us that ‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s escapist fantasy
novel, The Lord of the Rings, is an extended treatment of the castration
complex,’ arguing that most of the book’s ‘aficionados are quite incapable
of noticing what it says’ (Jackson 2014, 77, 80). Critical sovereignty
indeed, imperiously dismissing all of us oblivious to Frodo’s penis-­anxiety!
My study, then, investigates, exploits, and appreciates a vast, fascinating,
and often confounding scholarly domain (with some fannish outliers) that
has remained surprisingly unexplored.
Studying readers’ responses to Middle-earth has proven both enthrall-
ing and maddening, particularly when the field extends beyond scholar-
ship. How can the Silmarillion fandom on Tumblr, in celebrating ‘Noldor
Independence Day’, applaud Fëanor’s disastrous defiance of the Valar,
thereby transgressing the fundamental narrative-line of the War of the
Jewels legend and travestying Tolkien’s theistic values?6 As for online Fan
Fiction… What would the prudish Tolkien have made of his wholesome
Rosie Cotton reimagined as sexual wanton, vampire, or Ring-possessing
dominatrix? (Sturgis 2006, 175–176, 180, and 182).7 And, even when
reading more scholarly studies, I’ve encountered some very strange schol-
arship. Why do simple errors emerge so easily into critiques of Tolkien’s
work? Hobbits are not ‘semi-human hoofed creatures’ (Evans 1973, 256).
How often I’ve ground my teeth!
At the same time, I’ve revelled among brilliant works honouring virtu-
ally every discipline and mode in the Humanities—from human geogra-
phy to queer theory, from Marxism to libertarianism, from new criticism
to new historicism. Reading Mallorn and Mythlore, those long-time house
organs of British and American Tolkienists, for instance, from near-fanzine
origin to peer-reviewed prestige, has been a great joy, not least because
even the early fannish issues are so rich in insight. The English-language
offerings from German and Dutch Tolkienists proffered in Hither Shore
and Lembas Extra have often proven as invaluable as the fine scholarship
available from the Anglosphere’s Tolkien Studies and Journal of Tolkien
Research. Surprising riches also lie buried in the obscure archives of ama-
teur productions such as Minas Tirith Evening-Star or Beyond Bree. The
tortuous course of Tolkien’s reception has been endlessly fascinating.
Even the most perverse readings of Tolkien’s works have rewarded engage-
ment, since they’re sometimes the most revealing of the obsessions, pieties,
and prejudices that have peopled the stranger shores of Tolkien reader-
ship. Noldor Independence Day reflects American libertarianism; Rosie as
 1 INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON WRITING ABOUT TOLKIEN AND RACE 9

dominatrix tells us something about contemporary gender politics. That

‘alchemical process’ of appropriation that Tolkien noted may often have
generated toxic residue rather than golden treasure, but ours have some-
times been toxic times, and Tolkien scholarship and Tolkien fandom have
taught me much about both the golden and the toxic in recent cultural
history.
Beyond Eco’s ‘intention of the author’ and ‘intention of the inter-
preter’, there’s a third intentionality: the Italian semiotician’s controversial
category of the intentio operis, ‘the intention of the text’ (Eco 1992b, 64).
Eco, along with most of us (certainly most of us who have published
books), was well aware that the meaning of a text often escapes its author’s
intentions. Tolkien would have agreed with Eco, having wryly conceded
of LOTR that ‘what appreciative readers have got out of the work or seen
in it has seemed fair enough, even when I do not agree with it’ (Tolkien
1981, 212). Hear his views on George MacDonald’s ‘The Golden Key’,
where he suggests that the story will not

have the same ‘meaning’ for [other readers] as for me. But that does not
trouble me. These pictures or visions that come in such tales are large and
alive and no one who sees them, not even the writer himself, understands
the whole of them. (Tolkien 2005, 72)

There are thus multiple good readings of any ‘large and alive’ work, read-
ings that were not always intended even by ‘the writer himself’. At the
same time, however, most of us know that there must be limits to uncon-
strained interpretation. Tolkien himself, despite his supposed tolerance of
others’ readings of his work, could be incandescent about the more stupid
of them (e.g. Tolkien 1981, 305–307). He may have genuinely believed it
when he wrote that ‘The L.R. [The Lord of the Rings] does not belong to
me. It has been brought forth and must now go its appointed way in the
world, though naturally I take a deep interest in its fortunes, as a parent
would of a child’ (Tolkien 1981, 413). But he treated bad interpretation
of his work as a parent would a child molester. Indeed, on one occasion,
he irritably repudiated any interpretive research into his life and works.
‘After all’, he complained, ‘I hold the key’ (Tolkien 1967, 38). One sym-
pathises. There can be multiple good readings of any complex work, but
there can also be a multitude of bad, sometimes very bad, interpretations.
Some interpreters (certainly some who have interpreted Tolkien) are man-
ifestly lazy, or obviously incompetent, or blindly fanatical, or deviously
10 R. STUART

malicious, and sometimes all these in malign combination. Good interpre-

tation, in contrast to such malignancy, requires a profound understanding
of Eco’s ‘intention of the text’—with such understanding dependent upon
close reading, careful rereading, awareness of and control over one’s
biases, the dogged search for instances that might contradict even one’s
most treasured interpretations, and an honest willingness to surrender
oneself to the work in hand.
These imperatives have made searching out the ‘intentions’ of even
LOTR alone a challenging task indeed. It’s not really the case that
‘Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, by sheer virtue of its material size, pres-
ents a near-impossible challenge for any type of critical or revisionist imag-
ining’ (Battis 2004, 909). But, at times, it felt like it. To tease out the vast
book’s coherence and contradictions, to search for meaningful absences,
to read for rhetoric—such method has imposed the labour of years. What’s
more, any serious engagement with Tolkien requires the same close read-
ing of The Hobbit, the posthumous Silmarillion compilation, Tolkien’s
minor fantasies, the Unfinished Tales collection, his scholarly publications,
and, most dauntingly, Christopher Tolkien’s splendid twelve-volume
assemblage of his father’s drafts as The History of Middle-earth, now ampli-
fied by Carl Hostetter’s edition of Tolkien’s late-life jottings in The Nature
of Middle-earth. Christopher was right about his parent’s work:

Every person, every feature of the imagined world that seemed significant to
its author is…worthy of attention in its own right. Manwë or Fëanor no less
than Gandalf or Galadriel, the Silmarils no less than the Rings; the Great
Music, the divine hierarchies, the abodes of the Valar, the fates of the chil-
dren of Ilúvatar, are essential elements in the perception of the whole. (in
Tolkien 1983b, xv–xvi)

Following this good guidance has directed me down seemingly endless

and endlessly convoluted pathways, but also into rich fields of
understanding.
Over the years, then, my study of Tolkien in his time crystallised into a
strong sense of his intent as an author; my engagement with libraries of
Tolkien criticism evoked delight and provoked fury, along with much
insight; and my reading and rereading of Tolkien’s works spiralled back
through the hermeneutic circle to further inform my understanding of
both Tolkien and his critics. Years passed, pleasantly on the whole, despite
multiple methodological challenges, as I read fascinating material and
 1 INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON WRITING ABOUT TOLKIEN AND RACE 11

deepened my understanding of Tolkien’s meaning: his original meaning

for his time, and the meanings that have (often wrongly) since been attrib-
uted to him. They were pleasant years indeed, however taxing. Less pleas-
ant was an implacable Dean of Arts demanding publications that were
always deferred by further research.
In any case, after more than a decade of intensive reading and intense
thinking, after three expeditions to the northern hemisphere to access eso-
terica in the British Library and to delve into the magnificent Tolkien col-
lections held in Oxford’s Bodleian Library and at Milwaukee’s Marquette
University, and, finally and decisively, after retirement, I began writing
that very big book on Tolkien’s ideological vision that had rested for so
long in utero. More than half way through the project, I commenced a
chapter on ‘Tolkien and Race’. The history of racism had been a central
part of my scholarship for many years, above all while teaching the ugly
origins of the Holocaust and researching the disastrous Marxist encounter
with French ethnicity (Stuart 2006). And I’d been disturbed even during
my first youthful reading of LOTR by what seemed to be the work’s racist
moments, not least when I tried to imagine Middle-earth from an Orc’s-­
eye perspective. Later immersion in Tolkien’s oeuvre only worried me the
more, as I came across obscure but telling texts such as ‘Tal-elmar’, with
its overt racism (Tolkien 1996, 422–438). Tolkien’s life-experience also
puzzled. How could he have possibly enjoyed Robert Howard’s viciously
racist ‘sword and sorcery’ tales? (De Camp 1976, 244; Shippey 2019, xiv)
In one particularly fraught encounter, I’d been delighted to discover
(alerted by Burns 2009, 22–23) that Tolkien had donated a boy’s book
with its adventures set in my own Western Australia to the King Edward’s
School library…until I read it and encountered its ‘Nigs’—Australian
indigenous people viciously described as ‘more ape than man’, and blasted
into oblivion by intrepid White explorers (Macdonald 1907, 211).
Engagement with Tolkien criticism then exposed me to critics who alleged
Tolkien’s quasi-fascist or White-Supremacist proclivities, while the vaga-
ries of Tolkien fandom introduced me to fans whose malignant politics
seemed to confirm the critics’ allegations. The Tolkien Society itself, usu-
ally so warmly supportive of its tight-knit membership, has been accused
of resistance to racial inclusivity (Choi 2020).8 Was it really possible that
Tolkien had been a racist? How could it be that his legacy has apparently
empowered racism, even neo-Nazism?
At the same time, as I immersed myself in Tolkien’s Christian-humanist
ideological persona, I found it impossible to believe that he could have
12 R. STUART

sympathised with the often fascist and usually imperialist ultra-racists of his
time, an incredulity reinforced by Tolkien’s own anti-racist testimony in
correspondence (Tolkien 1981, 37–38) and in scholarly essays such as
‘English and Welsh’ (Tolkien 1983a, 166). Then, of course, there were
the many passionate vindications of the author by well-informed critics,
who categorically refuted the charge of racism. How to reconcile Tolkien’s
testimonies against racism with his racist fantasy texts? Who was right
among the critics, given their utterly conflicting views yet seemingly equal
scholarship? It was a controversy that couldn’t be avoided in any study of
‘the politics of Middle-earth’. My long-planned book had to address
the issue.
After only a few months of writing, however, the incipient chapter on
race and racism had blown out to over 20,000 words of drafting, without
end in sight. ‘Tolkien and Race’ was obviously the subject of a book, not
a chapter, and the original project on ‘The Politics of Middle-earth’ was
temporarily set aside for a subsidiary one: the work before you. It has
proven to be some of the most challenging writing I’ve ever attempted,
given the intricacy of Tolkien’s thoughts on race, the brutally conflicted
nature of the relevant Tolkien criticism, and the necessity of further con-
textual research in particularly challenging sources. I soon discovered fas-
cinating work debating racism in the medieval literature that Tolkien had
so obsessively explored, and endeavoured to incorporate its insights into
my understanding of his lifework. Challenged by the ambiguities of
Tolkien’s texts, I engaged in more depth with critical race theory and
other recent modes of studying race and racism. And, inescapably, I delved
more deeply into works by the racist and anti-racist thinkers of Tolkien’s
time, while further probing the scholarly literature on British racism.
Many months passed, but then, with my retirement, so had the dean’s
campaign for publication.
One vexing issue throughout this enterprise has been the word ‘race’
itself. My very use of the term can seem to make me complicit with racism,
implying acceptance of ‘race’ as a foundational reality rather than a cul-
tural prejudice, as something ‘naturally given’ rather than ‘socially defined’
(Malik 1996, 4–5). I must, therefore, as a White academic myself poten-
tially liable to that ‘colour-blind racism’ (Bonilla-Silva 2003, 275–277)
endemic to Whites, here at the beginning, affirm my own anti-racist con-
victions, increasingly sensitised by engagement with a generation of impas-
sioned critique. Like Elisabeth Leonard, ‘I can no longer pass over
references to “Black Elves” without thinking about what they meant and
 1 INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON WRITING ABOUT TOLKIEN AND RACE 13

where they come from’ (Leonard 1997, 2). Racist bigotry—I’ve always
been convinced, but now more so than ever—is the ultimate narcissism of
minor differences. Growing up in Hawaii, even in Tolkien’s time recog-
nised as a place where ‘the code of racial separatism has been conspicu-
ously lacking’ (Benedict 1943, 48), I had been utterly indifferent as to
whether my friends were Haole (White) like me, Korean, Japanese, or one
of the many other peoples who cohabited happily on the Islands.9 If I’d
bumped into the little brown kid who would one day become President, I
wouldn’t have noticed his colour.
Over the years, youthful Hawaiian experience has been translated into
mature theoretical conviction. We humans, I know, are a remarkably
homogenous species, so that the tiny physiological distinctions between us
are virtually irrelevant by comparison with our commonalities. And the
cultural associations of those minor physical differences are entirely con-
tingent. As British imperialists discovered to their consternation, one
doesn’t need sandy hair and freckles in order to play brilliant cricket. Race,
if we must have such an identity, is an acquired (and often enough imposed)
trait: historical and cultural, but never inherent. The only real race, surely,
is ‘the human race’ (Appiah 1996, 32). I fervently believe that ‘the process
of using genetics to define “race” is like slicing soup. You can cut where
you want, but the soup stays mixed’ (Isaac et al. 2009, 29)—an insight
already available to Tolkien’s time (Huxley and Haddon 1935, chapter 3),
albeit an insight then rarely heeded. Nonetheless, however thin the soup
of genetic racial difference, race-thinking has been substantial enough.
Roger Scruton, that incisive conservative philosopher, having scathingly
dismissed the racism of inherited genes and lineage ‘blood’, has conceded
that ‘nevertheless, it is difficult to avoid terms like “race”, not least because
they accurately reflect ways of conceiving social reality’ (Scruton 1990, 58
emphasis in original). Millions have died because of such conceptions,
heroic solidarities have emerged from struggles against them, and they
have suffused great works of literature. Race in this sense is well worth
studying, not least as it has emerged from Middle-earth. In exploring
Tolkien’s richly imagined ‘secondary world’, as here in our mundane pri-
mary one, no one should ever be ‘colour-blind’ to race.
This study, then, examines Tolkien’s oeuvre for its conceptions of race,
whether racist or anti-racist. It seeks to discern Eco’s ‘intention of the
text’—searching out the good readings that Tolkien’s works empower,
even if they were not Tolkien’s own, and discrediting the bad readings that
have been inflicted on him. At the same time, doubting Barthes’s ‘death
14 R. STUART

of the author’, this book cares deeply about Tolkien’s living presence in his
texts. What, it asks, was the ‘intention of the author’? That question
demands that Tolkien be placed in context. What traditions had he inher-
ited from the racist nineteenth century? Indeed, what traditions had he
inherited from the medieval romances he so obsessively studied, immers-
ing himself as he did in an antique genre that, according to one of its
students, was particularly conducive to ‘the creation of races’? (Heng
2003, 7) And how might he have related to the racial discourse of his own
terrible époque? What had he meant, writing from his time and for his
time? Finally, this study surveys Tolkien’s legacy. Unlike most studies of
the author, it engages systematically with the vast range of writing about
Tolkien. How have so many scholars and fans (not always separate identi-
ties in Tolkien Studies!) made sense of race and racism in Middle-earth?
How goes the war of critics between those who charge the great fantasist
with racism and those who repudiate the indictment? What Tolkien means
(rather than what he meant) depends, after all, on ‘the intention of the
interpreter’, on the passions and prejudices of Tolkien’s multitude of read-
ers as they have appropriated his works for their own purposes during the
many decades since Hobbits10 first invaded the world’s cultural conscious-
ness. Overall, then, by rigorously engaging with text, context, and cri-
tique, this study answers vital questions about ‘the author of the century’.
Was Tolkien a racist? Does the most popular author of our times really
empower the neo-Nazis and White Supremacists who claim him?

Notes
1. Some readers will find attribution of an ‘ideological’ dimension to Tolkien’s
works questionable, even troubling. ‘Ideology’ is, after all, a contentious
term—a term often used pejoratively to assign irrational bias to one’s polit-
ical enemies. This is certainly not the usage in this book. Here, following
upon a galaxy of distinguished studies (see Stuart 1986), ‘ideology’ desig-
nates a viewpoint on the socio-political world. Individuals and communi-
ties necessarily regard their societies from partial points of view—‘partial’
in limited perspective, given that only God is omniscient, and ‘partial’ in
values, since impartiality is a goal to which we may aspire, but at which we
will never arrive. An ideology thereby establishes the salience of various
aspects of the social domain—whether they matter, whether they’re noticed
at all—and values them as beneficent or malignant, as virtuous or perni-
cious. By this definition, Tolkien, like all of us, was ideological: some social
1 INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON WRITING ABOUT TOLKIEN AND RACE 15

and political issues mattered more to him than others did; he had distinc-
tive criteria for judging them.
2. According to an assessment by his son and literary legatee Christopher
Tolkien, commenting in J.R.R.T.: A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien, direc-
tor D. Bailey, Lanseer, 1996.
3. ‘Conservative’, like ‘ideological’, is a highly contentious term (see Stuart
2006, 181). In this study, ‘conservative’ does not mean ‘defending the
established order’—the stance that one would associate with the British
Conservative Party of Tolkien’s time (in which case Tolkien would have
been anything but a conservative, given that he detested the established
socio-political regime). Instead, the term designates a Traditionalist ‘Old
West’ ideological stance in revolt against the twentieth century. Such
Traditionalism valued authority, hierarchy, and community, the values of
Europe’s Ancien Régime, as opposed to modernity’s revolutionary princi-
ples of ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’. A commitment to ‘Tradition’
(often enough capitalized at the time and in subsequent scholarship) links
the conservative Diehard Tories of Tolkien’s time to the equally conserva-
tive ecologists of the Kinship in Husbandry, and both movements to simi-
larly conservative anti-modern Catholics and Anglicans. These
Traditionalists were just as ‘radical’ as their Communist enemies, but radi-
cally committed to a golden past rather than a radiant future. Traditionalist
conservatism was the marginal milieu in which Tolkien and his Inklings
friends immersed themselves, sheltering from the invasive modernity that
dominated their conflicted time (Butynskyi 2020).
4. With referencing greatly facilitated, albeit at some years’ delay, by ‘The
Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies’ and ‘Bibliography’ sections of the invalu-
able Tolkien Studies. Some obscure items have remained out of reach, how-
ever, or, needless to say, are as yet unidentified, while I’ve avoided the
technical literature on Tolkien’s invented languages, which is both largely
irrelevant to a study of ideology and inaccessible to those of us untrained
in linguistics. And there is, of course, much criticism available in languages
other than English. I’ve read a good deal of that published in French, and
(with difficulty) some in German, but this book is limited to the English-
language critical domain. Limits must be set! Finally, like any scholar with
human limitations, I’ve only sipped from the vast reservoir of online
Tolkien commentary and fanfic, albeit often to the point of near indigestion.
5. Including cinematic appropriations. Peter Jackson’s envisaging of LOTR
(if not his much less impressive interpretation of The Hobbit) is undoubt-
edly the most significant ‘reading’ of Tolkien, and is now, in some ways, at
least as influential as the original book. The three films require consider-
ation in any study of the ways in which Tolkien is today appreciated.
16 R. STUART

6. See, for instance, ‘In Honour of the Noldor Independence Day’, with its
chain of links. https://gwenniel.tumblr.com/post/55335839228/
in-­honour-­of-­the-­noldor-­independence-­day
7. ‘FanFiction.net—Lord of the Rings’ is an inexhaustible resource—some-
times illuminating and enjoyable, often frustrating, and occasionally
repulsive.
8. Choi’s intervention has been met with a welcome Society seminar on
‘Tolkien and Diversity’ (Tolkien Society 2021), although discussion of race
and racism there took second place to fascinating papers on gender and
sexuality.
9. Happy multiculturalism nonetheless (colour)blinded me to the brutal dis-
possession of indigenous Polynesians that had made it possible, not to
mention occluding the implicit hierarchies (not least between ‘Asians’)
that so disadvantaged the Islands’ Filipinos. There are no racial utopias.
10. Both Tolkien and his critics are inconsistent in their capitalisation of his
racial nomenclature. This work will follow the convention of capitalising
ethnic terms such as ‘Hobbits’ and ‘a Hobbit’, as with the conventional
‘Germans’ and ‘a German’, apart from alternative usage within quotations.

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 CHAPTER 2

Tolkien, Race, and the Critics: Debating

Racism in Middle-earth

Tolkien’s rich creative career was lived among the racial, imperial, and
national clashes that convulsed his time. We have been seduced by images
of the Edwardian years of Tolkien’s youth as a tranquil golden age, but he
would actually have experienced that era as the near collapse of his coun-
try’s political system, during which a furious aristocratic elite rallied against
the egalitarian reforms of the period’s Liberal government, birthing a
‘Diehard’ reactionary (and racist) movement that persisted into Tolkien’s
maturity (Canadine 1990, 516–530; Phillips 1979). Revelling as a club-
bable student in the companionship of his TCBS coterie (the jocularly
named ‘Tea Club, Barrovian Society’) at King Edward’s School in
Birmingham, he would have witnessed the bitter battles over Irish auton-
omy that eventually plunged the putatively ‘United’ Kingdom into civil
war, battles imbued with the long-festering hostilities between the Isles’
Celts and Saxons that had supposedly lingered from the Dark Ages (Davies
1999, 902–906). At the same time, the fervent aestheticism of the TCBS
exemplified the revulsion against both scientific positivism and symbolist
decadence that was such a feature of the youthful ultra-conservative,
deeply religious, and ultra-nationalist resurgence of those years.1 And,
already, immigration had entered into its long centrality in Britain’s racial
(and often racist) consciousness, as terrified Jews, fleeing Czarist Russia’s
pogroms, flooded into East London. Meanwhile, as the ward of a Catholic
priest, the orphaned Tolkien bathed in a religious milieu confined within
the intensely reactionary ‘Fortress Church’ of his period—a milieu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2022
R. Stuart, Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97475-6_2
20 R. STUART

electrified by the brilliantly Traditionalist polemics of Hilaire Belloc and

G.K. Chesterton (Aspden 2002; Corrin 1981). Translated from
Birmingham to Oxford, and recruited from his university studies into the
cataclysm of the Great War, he was lucky to survive the virtually certain
death sentence of having been commissioned a junior officer in 1915,
emerging from the appalling bloodbath of the Somme as an inspired
storyteller.
Then, in Britain as elsewhere in Europe, the War’s hecatombs empow-
ered radical-Right movements in transition to fascism, although the British
Fascisti of the 1920s lacked the force of their Italian model. Nonetheless,
Tolkien would have encountered their blue-shirted bullies as he initiated
his career in Oxford and Leeds as a gifted medievalist and philologist—a
career itself contorted by scholarly infighting and the racist legacies of
nineteenth-century linguistic politics. A decade later, with the coming of
the Great Depression, Professor Tolkien, now a luminary of the Oxford
English Faculty, would have noted a burgeoning of Blackshirts, militants
of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) led by Sir Oswald Mosley, one of
the most charismatic of inter-war Europe’s proliferating Führers. As East
London was bloodied by skirmishes between the BUF’s cosh-wielding
anti-Semites and beleaguered Jews, Tolkien’s Oxford, too, suffered vio-
lent, if less-noticed, confrontations between fascists and anti-fascists
(Renton 1996). Then, during the later 1930s, Oxford common rooms no
less than London alleyways lapsed into near civil war as Britons took sides
for and against Franco’s insurgency in Spain, that conflict which so obvi-
ously augured a general European conflagration. These were times of
blood and thunder: racist blood and fascist thunder.
While Europe moved inexorably towards a second world war, Tolkien
began to present portions of what was to become The Lord of the Rings
(itself a tale of worldwide warfare) to the Inklings—yet another coterie of
brilliant intellects and, like the TCBS, animated by deeply felt religious
and conservative ideals. Lord David Cecil, an occasional member of the
group, defined the Inklings—who were to be so central to Tolkien’s liter-
ary, spiritual, and ideological formation—as

a latter-day phase of Pre-Raphaelite Romanticism and its parentage as by

G.K. Chesterton out of William Morris. From Morris it derived a taste for
sagas and the Middle Ages and a suspicion of science and machinery, from
Chesterton a militant colourful Christianity and an instinctive antipathy to
‘modern’ movements in thought. (Cecil 1979, 10)
 2 TOLKIEN, RACE, AND THE CRITICS: DEBATING RACISM IN MIDDLE-EARTH 21

Throughout the dark days of World War II (WWII), the perfectionist

Tolkien polished chapter after chapter of his great work in the company of
his Inklings confrères while, across the North Sea, Nazi Germany commit-
ted that most appalling of racist atrocities: the Holocaust, with its six mil-
lion murders. The enormous book’s eventual publication in 1954–55 and
its astonishing publishing triumph in the mid-1960s made Tolkien’s name
and fortune, while virtually creating the novel genre of ‘High Fantasy’.
Struggling during the last decades of his life to complete the Silmarillion
stories that he had begun during World War I (WWI), Tolkien witnessed
the end of the White-Supremacist British Empire that he had long
detested—detestation angrily allegorised in those very stories (e.g. Tolkien
1979, 329–330). Decolonisation may have triumphed during Tolkien’s
lifetime, but publication of a Silmarillion failed, endlessly deferred by end-
less rewriting. With his death in 1973, it became his son Christopher’s
devoted purpose to finally publish the impressive array of tales that Tolkien
himself had never perfected, thereby further burnishing his father’s repu-
tation as our time’s greatest fantasy writer. It’s impossible to fully under-
stand Tolkien’s creative achievement without situating it among the
national, racial, and imperial conflicts that tortured his time—from his
birth in a southern Africa about to lapse bloodily into the Boer War, to his
death in a Britain supposedly teetering on the racist brink of Enoch
Powell’s rhetorical ‘rivers of blood’. The dark shade of racial conflict hov-
ered over Tolkien’s warring world throughout his life, just as the Dark
Lord Sauron’s shadow loured over Frodo’s menaced Middle-earth.
Tolkien may have been dead for half a century, but he continues to be
one of our time’s most contested literary figures. Fortunately, many of the
bitter battles fought over his much-debated presence in the modern men-
tality have today been pacified. If nothing else, only distressingly old-­
fashioned critics would now deny Tolkien’s enormous cultural significance.
At least as far as popular culture is concerned, most of us have finally rec-
ognised that he was indeed the ‘author of the century’ (as well as an
‘author of the century’), to appropriate Tom Shippey’s clever characterisa-
tion of the great twentieth-century fantasy writer (Shippey 2000).2 Yet
this well-warranted recognition has embittered other debates. What does
Tolkien’s vast popularity, his centrality in the contemporary collective
mind, actually mean? Here reigns utter confusion. As Verlyn Flieger tells
us, he has been called
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 The Crane Family.

I am not going to talk of Ichabod Crane, or Jeremiah Crane, or of

their wives or families. I shall leave these respectable people for the
present, and say a few words about certain long-legged birds which
are very interesting, though not very familiarly known to most of us.
The storks and cranes are so nearly alike that they might seem to be
cousins. They have both enormously long legs and bills, and seem
particularly well fitted to wading in the water—a thing they can do
without rolling up their pantaloons. Look at this tall fellow at the head
of this article, and tell me if he need be afraid of wetting his clothes
by taking a ramble in a brook.
The engraving represents a crane. Let me first say a few words of
his cousin stork. This bird, that is spoken of in the Bible as one that
“knoweth her appointed time,” is not found among us, but it is well
known in some parts of Europe. In Holland, it arrives in small bands
or flocks, about the first of April, and universally meets with a kind
and welcome reception from the inhabitants. Returning year after
year to the same town, and the same chimney-top, it reoccupies its
deserted nest; and the gladness these birds manifest in again taking
possession of their dwelling, and the attachment they testify towards
their benevolent hosts, are familiar in the mouths of every one. Nor is
the stork less remarkable for its affection towards its young; and the
story is well known of a female bird, which, during the conflagration
at Delft, chose rather to perish with her young than abandon them to
their fate. Incubation and the rearing of the young being over by
August, the stork, in the early part of that month, prepares for its
departure. The north of Africa, and especially Egypt, are the places
of its winter sojourning, for there the marshes are unfrozen, its food
is in abundance, and the climate is congenial. Previous to setting out
on their airy journey, multitudes assemble from the surrounding
districts, chattering with their bills as if in consultation. On the
appointed night, a period which appears to be universally chosen by
the migratory tribes, they mount into the higher regions of the air,
and sail away southwards to their destined haven.
The nest of the stork is formed of twigs and sticks, and the eggs,
from three to five in number, and nearly as large as those of a goose,
are of a yellowish white. Of the countless multitudes in which the
stork assembles in order to perform its periodical migrations, some
idea may be entertained from Dr. Shaw’s account of the flocks which
he witnessed leaving Egypt and passing over Mount Carmel, each of
which was half a mile in breadth, and occupied a space of three
hours in passing. When reposing, the stork stands upon one leg,
with the neck bent backwards, and the head resting between the
shoulders. Such also is its attitude when watching for its prey. Its
motions are stately, and it stalks along with slow and measured
steps. Its plumage is pure white.
The cranes bear a close resemblance to the white stork, which we
have been describing, but become even more familiar in some of the
countries they inhabit, and, in consequence of their larger size,
render more essential service in the removal of carrion, offal, and
other nuisances. This important office they share with the vultures,
and, like those birds, are universally privileged from all annoyance, in
return for so meritorious an exertion of their natural propensities.
They seem to be constantly attracted by the heaps of offensive
substances collected in the villages and towns, which they devour
without scruple, and in immense quantities.
The adjutant arrives in Bengal, in India, before the rainy season.
Its gape is enormous, and its voracity astonishing; not that it is
ferocious towards man; quite the contrary, for it is peaceable, and
even timid; but small quadrupeds are swallowed without any scruple.
In the stomach of one, as Latham states, were found a land tortoise
ten inches long, and a large black cat entire.
Of the African Marabou Crane, the voracious and omniverous
propensities are attested by Major Denham; carrion, reptiles, and
small quadrupeds are swallowed at a bolt, with indiscriminate
voracity. Smeatham, who resided at Sierra Leone, has given an
interesting account of this bird. He observes that the adult bird will
often measure seven feet; and that the head, covered with white
down thinly dispersed, is not unlike that of a gray-headed man. It
associates in flocks, which, when seen at a distance, near the
mouths of rivers, coming towards an observer, with their wings
extended, as they often do, may readily be mistaken for canoes on a
smooth sea. “One of these, a young bird, about five feet high, was
brought up tame, and presented to the chief of the Bananas, where
Mr. Smeatham lived; and being accustomed to be fed in the great
hall, soon became familiar; duly attending that place at dinner-time,
and placing itself behind its master’s chair, frequently before the
guests entered. The servants were obliged to watch narrowly and to
defend the provisions with switches, but, notwithstanding, it would
frequently snatch something or other, and once purloined a whole
boiled fowl, which it swallowed in an instant. Its courage is not equal
to its voracity; for a child of ten years soon puts it to flight with a
switch, though it seems at first to stand on its defence, by
threatening with its enormous bill widely extended, and roaring with a
loud voice, like a bear or tiger. It is an enemy to small quadrupeds,
as well as birds and reptiles, and slyly destroys fowls and chickens.
Everything is swallowed whole, and so accommodating is its throat,
that not only an animal as big as a cat is gulped down, but a shin of
beef broken asunder serves it but for two morsels. It has been
known to swallow a leg of mutton of five or six pounds, a hare, and
also a small fox.”
 Sketches of the Manners, Customs, and History
of the Indians of America.
(Continued from page 144.)

CHAPTER III.
The West Indies continued.—​Columbus discovers the Antilles.—​
Cannibalism reported.—​Appearance of the people.—​Their
origin.—​Arts.—​Customs.—​Character.—​Their extermination.

Columbus discovered the islands of the Caribs during his second

voyage to America, in 1493. The first island he saw he named
Dominico, because he discovered it on Sunday. As the ships gently
moved onward, other islands rose to sight, one after another,
covered with forests, and enlivened with flights of parrots and other
tropical birds, while the whole air was sweetened by the fragrance of
the breezes which passed over them.
This beautiful cluster of islands is called the Antilles. They extend
from the eastern end of Porto Rico to the coast of Paria on the
southern continent, forming a kind of barrier between the main ocean
and the Caribbean sea;—here was the country of the Caribs.
Columbus had heard of the Caribs during his stay at Hayti and Cuba,
at the time of his first voyage. The timid and indolent race of Indians
in those pleasant islands were mortally afraid of the Caribs, and had
repeatedly besought Columbus to assist them in overcoming these
their ferocious enemies. The Caribs were represented as terrible
warriors, and cruel cannibals, who roasted and eat their captives.
This the gentle Haytians thought, truly enough, was a good pretext
for warning the Christians against such foes. Columbus did not at
first imagine the beautiful paradise he saw, as he sailed onward
among these green and spicy islands, could be the residence of
cruel men; but on landing at Guadaloupe he soon became convinced
he was truly in a Golgotha, a place of skulls. He there saw human
limbs hanging in the houses as if curing for provisions, and some
even roasting at the fire for food. He knew then that he was in the
country of the Caribs.
On touching at the island of Montserrat, Columbus was informed
that the Caribs had eaten up all the inhabitants. If that had been true,
it seems strange how he obtained his information.
It is probable many of these stories were exaggerations. The
Caribs were a warlike people, in many respects essentially differing
in character from the natives of the other West India Islands. They
were enterprising as well as ferocious, and frequently made roving
expeditions in their canoes to the distance of one hundred and fifty
leagues, invading the islands, ravaging the villages, making slaves of
the youngest and handsomest females, and carrying off the men to
be killed and eaten.
These things were bad enough, and it is not strange report should
make them more terrible than the reality. The Caribs also gave the
Spaniards more trouble than did the effeminate natives of the other
islands. They fought their invaders desperately. In some cases the
women showed as much bravery as the men. At Santa Cruz the
females plied their bows with such vigor, that one of them sent an
arrow through a Spanish buckler, and wounded the soldier who bore
it.
There have been many speculations respecting the origin of the
Caribs. That they were a different race from the inhabitants of the
other islands, is generally acknowledged. They also differed from the
Indians of Mexico and Peru; though some writers think they were
culprits banished either from the continent or the large islands, and
thus a difference of situation might have produced a difference of
manners. Others think they were descended from some civilized
people of Europe or Africa. There is no difficulty attending the belief
that a Carthaginian or Ph[oe]nician vessel might have been
overtaken by a storm, and blown about by the gales, till it entered the
current of the trade-winds, when it would have been easily carried to
the West Indies. If they had no women with them, they might have
discovered the large islands or the continent, and procured wives
from them. In process of time, their numbers might have increased
so as to form the scanty population of St. Vincent, Martinico,
Guadaloupe, Dominica, and other small islands where the Caribs
were settled.
The Caribs had as many of the arts as were necessary to live at
ease in that luxurious climate. They knew how to build their carbets
or houses; how to make their boats, baskets, arms, hammocks, and
to prepare their provisions.
The hammocks of the Caribs strengthens the supposition that
they were descended from some maritime adventurers. They were
made of coarse cotton cloth, six or seven feet long, and twelve or
fourteen wide; each end was ornamented with cords, which they
called ribands; these were more than two feet long, twisted, and well
made. All the cords at each end were joined together, and formed
loops, through which a long rope was inserted, in order to fasten the
hammocks to the posts at the side of the house, and to support the
persons within them. These hammocks were woven by the women,
entirely by hand labor, as they had no looms, and was a very tedious
process. But when completed, and painted red, as was the usual
fashion, they were very strong, and quite ornamental in their carbets.

Carib Carbet.
The carbet is thus described by a French missionary: “The Carib
dwelling I entered was about sixty feet long and twenty-four wide.
The posts on which it was erected were rough and forked, and the
shortest of them about nine feet above the ground; the others were
proportioned to the height of the roof. The windward end was
enclosed with a kind of wicker-work of split flags; the roof was
covered with the leaves of the wild plantain, which here grows very
large; the laths were made of reeds. The end of the carbet which
was covered had a doorway for a passage to the kitchen; the other
end was nearly all open. Ten paces from the great carbet was
another building, about half the size of the large one, which was
divided by a reed partition. The first room was the kitchen; here six
or eight females were employed in making cassada. The second
room was for a sleeping apartment for such of the women and
children as were not accommodated in the great carbet.
“All the rooms were furnished with hammocks and baskets. The
men had their weapons in the great carbet. Some of the men were
making baskets—two women were making a hammock. There were
many bows, arrows, and clubs attached to the rafters. The floor was
smooth and clean; it was made of well-beaten earth, and sloped
towards the side. There was a good fire, about one third the length of
the carbet, round which a number of Caribs were squatted on their
haunches. They were smoking and waiting till some fish were
roasted, and made their salutations to me without rising.”
The Caribs were hunters and fishermen. Their food was much
better cooked than that of the Indians of the northern continent, who
lived by the chase and fishing, though to us it would not appear very
refined. Their meat and small birds they stuck on a kind of wooden
spit, which was fixed in the ground before the fire, and they turned it,
till all the slices of meat or the birds were roasted.
This was quite a civilized method of management compared with
their treatment of the large birds, such as parrots, pigeons, &c.
These they threw on the fire, without picking or dressing them, and
when the feathers were burnt, they raked the bird up in the cinders
till it was done. On taking it from the ashes, the crust formed by the
burnt feathers peeled off, and the bird was perfectly clean and
delicate. It is said this manner of roasting was much approved by the
Europeans who had an opportunity of trying it.
 The Caribs usually spread two tables at their meals; on one was
placed their bread, (cassada,) on the other the fish, fowls, crabs and
pimentado. This pimentado was made of the juice of manioc, boiled,
a quantity of pimento, and the juice of lemon or some other acid. It
was their favorite sauce; they used it with all their meats, but they
made it so hot that nobody but themselves could eat it. A favorite
dish with them was stewed crabs. None of their food was eaten raw;
in general their taste seemed inclined to overdone and high-
seasoned dishes.
The manioc, from which the cassada is made, was a great article
of food among the Caribs. The ordinary size of the roots is equal to
that of the beet; they are of the consistency of parsnips, and
commonly ripen in about eight months.
The manioc was planted in trenches, about two feet and a half
apart, and six inches deep. It was necessary to keep the plant free
from weeds. When ripe, the shrub and roots were all dug up
together, like potatoes. When the roots were taken up, the bark or
skin was scraped off, just as parsnips are scraped; then they were
washed clean and grated fine, something like horseradish. Then the
grated mass was put into a strainer of split flags, or the bark of a
tree.
The strainer was six or seven feet long, and four or five inches in
diameter. It was woven something like a cotton stocking, in order that
it might be expanded to receive the manioc, and contract for the
purpose of expressing the juice. When filled, it was hung on the limb
of a tree, with a basket of stones fastened to the bottom, which
gradually forced out the juice of the manioc, which is of a poisonous
quality unless it is boiled.
 Caribs preparing Manioc.
When the manioc was sufficiently dry, they took daily what they
wanted, and having passed the flour through a sieve made of reeds,
they then made it into paste, and baked it upon flat stones. It is a
very nourishing kind of bread, and is to this day used in many parts
of tropical America.
The Caribs had discovered the art of making intoxicating
beverages, so that they really needed a temperance society,—not
quite so much, perhaps, as their civilized invaders. In this respect the
Caribs had far outstripped the inventions of the northern barbarians.

Carib Vessels.
No people in the world were more expert than the Caribs in the
management of a boat. They had two sorts of vessels—becassas,
with three masts and square sails, and piroques, with only two
masts. The last were about thirty feet long by four and a half feet
wide in the middle. The becassa was about forty-two feet long and
seven feet wide in the middle. They had sometimes figures of
monkeys painted red at the stern of their vessels. These vessels
were built of the West India cedar tree, which there grows to a
prodigious size. One tree made the keel of the vessel. It was felled
with immense labor, hewed to a proper degree of thickness, made
very smooth, and if any addition to the height was necessary, planks
were added to the sides. This work was all performed with sharp
hatchets made of flint.
Some of these vessels had topmasts, and the Caribs could rig out
fleets of thirty sail at a time. After the French had been some years
settled at Martinico, they were surprised one foggy morning by the
appearance of a fleet on their coast. The whole island was instantly
in alarm and commotion; every man seized his arms, thinking a large
squadron from Europe was come to attack the island. But the fog
cleared away, and there, close-hauled in shore, were twenty sail of
becassas and piroques, filled with Caribs, who had come for a
friendly trading visit.
The Caribs were usually rather above the middle stature, well
proportioned, and their countenances were rather agreeable. Their
foreheads had an extraordinary appearance, as they were flattened
by having a board bound tight on the forehead when they were
infants, and kept there till the head had taken the fashionable form.
The forehead then continued flat, so that they could see
perpendicularly when standing erect, and over their heads when
lying down. These were the objects aimed at, and so they, at least,
had a reason for their ridiculous custom; which is more than can be
said of all the customs of modern refined society.
They had small black eyes, beautiful teeth, white and even, and
long, glossy, black hair. The hair was always kept well anointed with
oil of palmachristi. It was difficult to judge of the color of their skin,
because they were always painted with rouco, which gave them the
appearance of boiled lobsters. The coat of paint preserved their
skins from the hot rays of the sun, and from the stings of the
musquito and gnat. It was thus far a useful invention, but they also
considered it highly ornamental. When they wished to appear
exceedingly grand, they added black mustaches, and other black
strokes on their red-painted faces, with the juice of the geripa apple.
The men wore ornaments, called caracolis, in their ears, noses,
and the under lip. The metal of which these ornaments were formed
came from the South American continent, but no one but an Indian
could ever find it. It is exceedingly brilliant, and does not tarnish. A
full-dressed Carib wore a caracolis in each ear. The ornament was in
the form of a crescent, suspended by chains about two and a half
inches long, which were fastened in the ear by a hook. Another
caracoli of the same size was attached to the gristle which separates
the nostrils, and hung over the mouth. The under part of the lower lip
was pierced, and thence hung another caracoli, which reached to the
neck; and in the last place, they had one six or seven inches long,
enchased in a small board of black wood, and suspended from the
neck by a small cord.
When they did not wear the caracolis, they inserted little pieces of
wood in their ears, &c., that the holes might not grow up; sometimes
they stuck the feathers of parrots in these holes, and thus looked
very queerly. They had a habit of sticking the hair of their children full
of feathers of different colors, which was done very prettily, and
looked quite appropriate with their round, red faces, and bright,
laughing eyes.
The women were smaller than the men, but equally well-formed.
They had black hair and eyes, round faces, their mouths were small,
and teeth beautiful. They had a gay and lively air, and their
countenances were smiling and very agreeable; but they were in
their behaviour perfectly modest.
Their hair was tied at the back of their heads, with a cotton fillet.
They wore belts and a little apron called a camisa. It was made of
cotton cloth, embroidered with beads, and had a bead fringe. They
wore scarfs of cotton cloth, about half a yard wide, called a pagn. It
was wrapped twice round the body under the armpits, and then was
tied, and the ends hung down to the knee. They wore necklaces,
composed of several strings of beads, and bracelets of the same.
They had buskins also, which were ornaments for the legs, very
tasteful, and in high fashion. The females performed most of the
cooking, and made the hammocks; and they had likewise to carry all
the burdens which were borne in baskets. A man would have been
dishonored forever if he had spun or woven cotton, or painted a
hammock, or carried a market-basket. But all the hard labor was
performed by the men, and they were very kind to their wives and
children.
They had some singular customs respecting deceased persons.
When a Carib died, he was immediately painted all over with the red
paint, and had his mustaches, and the black streaks on his face,
made very deep and shining. He was next put into a hole surrounded
with mats, and kept till all his relations could see and examine the
body. No matter how distant they lived, if on another island, they
must be summoned and appear, before the dead body could be
buried. But the thick coat of paint preserved it from decay for a long
time.
In their wars, I have told you, the Caribs were murderous and
cruel. They often poisoned their arrows, and probably often eat their
captives. They fought with bows and arrows, and clubs. But when
their angry passions became cool, they treated their prisoners with
humanity, and never tortured them like the northern savages.
In some instances these islanders were faithless and treacherous.
In 1708 the English entered into an agreement with the Caribs in St.
Vincents, to attack the French colonies in Martinico. The French
governor heard of the treaty, and sent Major Coullet, who was a
great favorite with the savages, to persuade them to break the treaty.
Coullet took with him a number of officers and servants, and a good
store of provisions and liquors. He reached St. Vincents, gave a
grand entertainment to the principal Caribs, and after circulating the
brandy freely, he got himself painted red, and made them a flaming
speech. He urged them to break their connection with the English.
How could they refuse a man who gave them brandy, and who was
red as themselves? They abandoned their English friends, and burnt
all the timber the English had cut on the island, and butchered the
first Englishman who arrived. But their crimes were no worse than
those of their christian advisers, who, on either side, were inciting
these savages to war.
But the Caribs are all gone, perished from the earth. Their race is
no more, and their name is only a remembrance. The English and
the French, chiefly the latter, have destroyed them.
There is, however, one pleasant reflection attending their fate.
Though destroyed, they were never enslaved. None of their
conquerers could compel them to labor. Even those who have
attempted to hire Caribs for servants, have found it impossible to
derive any benefit or profit from them; they would not be commanded
or reprimanded.
This independence was called pride, indolence, and stubbornness
by their conquerors;—if the Caribs had had historians to record their
wrongs, and their resistance to an overwhelming tyranny, they would
have set the matter in a very different light. They would have
expressed the sentiment which the conduct of their countrymen so
steadily exemplified—that it was better to die free than to live slaves.
So determined was their resistance to all kinds of authority, that it
became a proverb among the Europeans, that to show displeasure
to a Carib was the same as beating him, and to beat him was the
same as to kill him. If they did anything it was only what they chose,
how they chose, and when they chose; and when they were most
wanted, it often happened that they would not do what was required,
nor anything else.
The French missionaries made many attempts to convert the
Caribs to Christianity, but without success. It is true that some were
apparently converted; they learned the catechism, and prayers, and
were baptized; but they always returned to their old habits.
A man of family and fortune, named Chateau Dubois, settled in
Guadaloupe, and devoted great part of his life to the conversion of
the Caribs, particularly those of Dominica. He constantly entertained
a number of them, and taught them himself. He died in the exercise
of these pious and charitable offices, without the consolation of
having made one single convert.
 As we have said, several had been baptized, and, as he hoped,
they were well instructed, and apparently well grounded in the
christian religion; but after they returned to their own people, they
soon resumed all the Indian customs, and their natural indifference
to all religion.
Some years after the death of Dubois, one of these Carib
apostates was at Martinico. He spoke French correctly, could read
and write; he had been baptized, and was then upwards of fifty years
old. When reminded of the truths he had been taught, and
reproached for his apostasy, he replied, “that if he had been born of
christian parents, or if he had continued to live among the French, he
would still have professed Christianity—but that, having returned to
his own country and his own people, he could not resolve to live in a
manner differing from their way of life, and by so doing expose
himself to the hatred and contempt of his relations.” Alas, it is small
matter of wonder that the Carib thought the christian religion was
only a profession. Had those who bore that name always been
Christians in reality, and treated the poor ignorant savages with the
justice, truth and mercy which the Gospel enjoins, what a different
tale the settlement of the New World would have furnished!

A good Reply.—A countryman drove up his cart to a grocer’s

door, and asked him what he gave for eggs. “Only seventeen cents,”
he replied, “for the grocers have had a meeting and voted not to give
any more.” Again the countryman came to market, and asked the
grocer what he gave for eggs. “Only twelve cents,” said the grocer,
“for the grocers have had another meeting and voted not to give any
more.” A third time the countryman came and made the same
inquiry, and the grocer replied, that “the grocers had held a meeting
and voted to give only ten cents. Have you any for sale?” continued
the grocer. “No,” says the countryman; “the hens have had a meeting
too, and voted not to trouble themselves to lay eggs for ten cents a
dozen.”
 Pet Oyster.—There is a gentleman at Christ Church, Salisbury,
England, who keeps a pet oyster of the largest and finest breed. It is
fed on oatmeal, for which it regularly opens its shell, and is
occasionally treated with a dip in its native element; but the most
extraordinary trait in the history of this amphibious pet is, that it has
proved itself an excellent mouser, having already killed five mice, by
crushing the heads of such as, tempted by odoriferous meal, had the
temerity to intrude their noses within its bivalvular clutches. Twice
have two of these little intruders suffered together.—Eng. Journal,
1840.
 The Shetland Pony.

This diminutive breed of horses, many of which are not larger

than a Newfoundland dog, is common in Shetland, and all the
islands on the north and west of Scotland; also in the mountainous
districts of the mainland along the coast. They are beautifully formed,
and possess prodigious strength in proportion to their size. The
heads are small, with a flowing mane and long tail, reaching to the
ground.
They are high-spirited and courageous little animals, but
extremely tractable in their nature. Some of them run wild about the
mountains, and there are various methods of catching them,
according to the local situation of the district which they inhabit.
The shelties, as they are called, are generally so small, that a
middling-sized man must ride with his knees raised to the animal’s
shoulders, to prevent his toes from touching the ground. It is
surprising to see with what speed they will carry a heavy man over
broken and zigzag roads in their native mountains.
When grazing, they will clamber up steep ascents, and to the
extreme edge of precipices which overhang the most frightful
abysses, and there they will gaze round with as much complacency
as if on a plain.
These horses, small as they may be, are not to be considered a
degenerate breed, for they are possessed of much greater physical
strength in proportion to their size than larger horses. They are
called garrons in the highlands of Scotland.
Many years ago, when turnpikes were first established in
Scotland, a countryman was employed by the laird of Coll to go to
Glasgow and Edinburgh on certain business, and furnished with a
small shelty to ride upon. Being stopped at the gate near Dunbarton,
the messenger good-humoredly asked the keeper if he would be
required to pay toll, should he pass through carrying a burthen; and
upon the man answering “Certainly not,” he took up the horse in his
arms, and carried him through the toll-bar, to the great amusement of
the gate-keeper.
A gentleman, some time ago, was presented with one of these
handsome little animals, which was no less docile than elegant, and
measured only seven hands or twenty-eight inches in height. He was
anxious to convey his present home as speedily as possible, but,
being at a considerable distance, was at a loss how to do so most
easily. The friend said, “Can you not carry him in your chaise?” He
made the experiment, and the shelty was lifted into it, covered up
with the apron, and some bits of bread given him to keep him quiet.
He lay quite peaceable till he reached his destination; thus exhibiting
the novel spectacle of a horse riding in a gig.
A little girl, the daughter of a gentleman in Warwickshire, England,
playing on the banks of a canal which runs through his grounds, had
the misfortune to fall in, and would in all probability have been
drowned, had not a little pony, which had long been kept in the
family, plunged into the stream and brought the child safely ashore,
without the slightest injury. The engraving at the head of this article
exhibits this interesting scene.
A gentleman had a white pony, which became extremely attached
to a little dog that lived with him in the stable, and whenever the
horse was rode out, the dog always ran by his side. One day, when
the groom took out the pony for exercise, and accompanied as usual
by his canine friend, they met a large dog, who attacked the
diminutive cur, upon which the horse reared, and, to the
astonishment of the bystanders, so effectually fought his friend’s
battle with his fore feet, that the aggressor found it his interest to
scamper off at full speed, and never again ventured to assail the
small dog.
Shelties sometimes attain a great age. There was in the small
village of Haddington, Eng., a very small black pony, not exceeding
eleven hands high, of the Shetland breed, which in the year 1745, at