By D.W. Roach – Marauder Books
Every few years, a new wave of critics emerges to accuse J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings of racism. Lately, even some college courses and media pieces claim that Orcs represent “dark-skinned peoples” or that Tolkien’s mythos upholds “colonial attitudes.” These claims are without merit. They reflect not honest scholarship but modern ideological attempts to tear down the very foundations of Western storytelling.
A World Apart
Middle-earth is not our world. It is a fully realized mythic realm, separate in time, geography, and moral law. Tolkien was clear: The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory. It’s a sub-creation—a new mythology intended to stand beside those of Greece, the Norse, and the Celts.
To read Orcs, Elves, and Men as stand-ins for modern racial groups is a category error. It projects 21st-century politics onto a 20th-century philologist who was writing myth, not manifesto.
The Truth About Orcs
Orcs were not “born evil” or designed to resemble any human race. In Tolkien’s legendarium, Orcs were once Elves, twisted and mutilated by Morgoth—symbols of what happens when good is corrupted. They are not “the Other” in a racial sense; they are what we risk becoming if we surrender conscience for convenience.
The Orc represents the darkness within man—the part that follows the mob, that chooses cruelty, that permits evil to flourish. To accuse Tolkien of racism because his monsters are dark in color is to miss the point entirely. Evil in Tolkien is moral, not ethnic.
The Ideological Attack
The recent attempts to brand Tolkien as racist are part of a wider cultural habit: dismantling anything identified with “Western man.” These same voices cry “Nazi” at every turn, flattening history and cheapening real evil in the process. Tolkien, who fought in the trenches of World War I and despised Hitler’s perversion of myth, would have rejected such accusations outright.
The fact that The Lord of the Rings still inspires, decades later, speaks to its moral clarity and timeless human truth—not to any supposed prejudice.
The Orc Within
The genius of Tolkien’s work lies in its universality. Every man can become an Orc if he chooses the path of least resistance—if he follows darkness, if he dehumanizes others, if he turns away from courage and compassion. That is Tolkien’s warning, and it remains as relevant today as ever.
In the End
The Lord of the Rings endures not because it flatters modern sensibilities, but because it speaks to something deeper: the struggle between light and darkness within every soul. It is not racist—it is moral, mythic, and profoundly human. Those who claim otherwise are not reading Tolkien; they are projecting their own ideology onto his world.
— D.W. Roach
D.W. Roach "Marauder" 