I ask the reader’s indulgence in the face of my completely irrational enthusiasm, but I’ve spent the last few days half lost in a haze of excitement, knowing that Middle-earth is back on screen. It so happens that the universe created by the British philologist JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) has just become a streaming series, which will show what happened thousands of years before “The Lord of the Rings”.
I did my master’s and doctorate on the author’s work, which I’ve been passionate about for almost a quarter of a century, and I carried out a technical review of the dubbing and Brazilian subtitles, which explains my expectations. But it’s a shame that fetid effluvia from the internet is partly polluting this animation.
There are people out there (generally, those indoctrinated by the extreme right in the English-speaking world and their copies in Brazil and elsewhere) with the fact that black and Latin American actors are playing some of the famous elves and hobbits. of Tolkien’s world.
It’s sad, I know, but it at least gives us the perfect hook to shower “The Lord of the Rings” with generous doses of archeology, genomics, and common sense.
Anyone who’s been messing around with ethnically diverse Elves and Hobbits says, among other things, that Tolkien imagined his Middle-earth as Europe’s mythical past. Therefore, people of color would not fit into this scenario.
Furthermore, this people maliciously adds, in the films of “The Lord of the Rings” (which would take place thousands of years later) only white elves and hobbits appear. Does this not mean that there was genocide on the part of these peoples?
Well, for starters, Middle-earth is not and never was Europe. Tolkien just resurrected an ancient expression from the Germanic languages, used to designate all lands inhabited by humans — in practice, the continents of the Old World, as the word was coined before the Americas and Oceania were known.
But even if the term referred only to Europe, the idea that the region is and always has been a “white” continent is wrong. It’s an illusion created by the last 8,000 years of history — which are just icing on the cake, considering that members of our species have inhabited the European continent for about 40,000 years.
Archaegenomics, a brand new discipline that has managed to decode a good part of the DNA of people who died millennia ago, indicates that Europe, for most of that period, was fertile ground for miscegenation and the meeting of very different peoples.
For starters, several different waves of hunter-gatherers passed through there during the Ice Age, amalgamating and sometimes disappearing (usually for weather reasons).
Virtually all Europeans today are descended from at least three groups: hunter-gatherers, representing this Ice Age heritage; Middle Eastern farmers; and, finally, shepherds of the Black Sea steppes.
Well, archegenomics has shown that hunter-gatherers, up until 8,000 years ago, often had dark skin, combined with light eyes. Lighter skin was brought to the continent, ironically for current racists, from the Middle East. And these groups lived together for millennia until they completely amalgamated.
And that, as any Brazilian should know, is the answer to the question of white supremacists on the web. Our 500 years of miscegenation have produced millions of “white” Brazilians who descend from indigenous and black people. The difference in time scales doesn’t erase the fact that there are no “pure races” anywhere on Earth—and that they wouldn’t exist in Middle-earth either. Fortunately.
