British University Class Teaches That J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Lord Of The Rings' Is Part Of "Anti-African Antipathy"
Dr. Onyeka Nubia at the University of Nottingham teaches a class called Decolonising Tolkien that attempts to paint Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as racist.
As originally reported by The Telegraph, the course specifically claims it “examines the myths and legends of the ‘British’ isles as written about by twentieth-century authors such as JRR Tolkien in Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, and the Silmarillion, and by CS Lewis in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe Series. This module will explore the historiography of British myth-making and whether Tolkien and Lewis were retelling, reinventing or fabricating British mythology.”
It adds, “Students will be encouraged to decolonise these myths, re-interpreting some as fantasies and others as an exoticisation of indigenous and foreign ethnic groups, gendered politics, cultural and religious otherness and ancient, medieval and early modern notions of chromatics.”
As The Telegraph reports the class’ professor Dr. Onyeka Nubia “argues that eastern races in the fictional realm of Middle Earth are depicted as evil while fairer-skinned peoples of the west are shown as virtuous.”
Additionally, the report claims that “Tolkien’s treatment of the fictional races shares in a tradition of ‘anti-African antipathy’, in which people from Africa were painted as ‘the natural enemy of the white man’.”
As noted above it’s not just Tolkien that the course takes aim at. It also targets C.S. Lewis with the Telegraph reporting, “The module also examines racial issues in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Calormen in CS Lewis’s fantasy novel have long been seen by some as exhibiting oriental stereotypes. They are described as ‘cruel’ people with ‘long beards’ and ‘orange-coloured turbans’.”
This course is clearly attempting to indoctrinate students into critical race theory, a branch of woke ideology as defined by Bishop Robert Barron. He explained to Angelus News back in 2021:
The advocates of the so-called “woke” ideology today have not been shy about articulating the philosophical underpinnings of their perspective. They do indeed find inspiration in Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Derrida, and Foucault, among others.
From these modern and postmodern thinkers, they derive a number of principles.
First, they advocate a deeply antagonistic social theory, whereby the world is divided sharply into the two classes of oppressors and oppressed.
Second, they relativize moral value and see classical morality as an attempt by the ruling class to maintain itself in power.
Third, they focus, not so much on the individual, as on racial and ethnic categories and hence they endorse the idea of collective guilt and recommend a sort of reverse discrimination to address the injustices of the past.
Fourth, they tend to demonize the market economy and the institutions of democracy as part of a superstructure defending the privileged.
Fifth, they push toward equity of outcome throughout the society, rather than equality of opportunity.
And finally, “wokeism” employs divisive and aggressive strategies of accusation that are contrary to the Gospel demand to love our enemies.
Suffice it to say that Catholic Social Teaching stands athwart all of this. It wants social justice, of course, but not on “woke” terms. Its heroes are not Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault, but rather Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah, Jesus the Lord, Ambrose, Aquinas, and Teresa of Calcutta.
This ideology stands in contrast to the ideas of Tolkien and Lewis, both Christians who defended the faith.
Additionally, the class appears to be a direct attack on what Tolkien described as the Eucatastrophe, which he calls “the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.”
He explains that this Eucatastrophe provides readers with “a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.”
Instead, the class attempts to tear down his work using this woke racial lens. The class should be rejected and the University of Nottingham should shut it down. It has no place in a just and righteous society.
A litteral who panning the masters work
I have my hard copies.
Why can't we have some meat?