Tolkien Society Attempts To Hide Its SJW Infiltration Of Tolkien Scholarship And 'The Lord Of The Rings'
The Tolkien Society is attempting to hide its SJW infiltration of Tolkien scholarship and The Lord of the Rings.
Robin Anne Reid, a former professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at Texas A&M University-Commerce, revealed in a Substack post that she had submitted a paper to the Tolkien Society titled “Race-ing to Gender Arda: A Stylistics Analysis” in which she allegedly provides “intersectional analysis” on Tolkien’s work.
While her proposal was accepted, Reid claimed that the Tolkien Society requested that she change her abstract because previous public postings of abstracts led “to online harassment on and from social media.”
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The Tolkien Society received significant backlash for its 2021 seminar and 2022 Oxenmoot event. In 2021, it held a Tolkien and Diversity Seminar that rightfully spurred critics to launch their own seminar as counter programming. The institution described its Tolkien and Diversity Seminar, “Representation is now more important than ever and Tolkien’s efforts to represent (or ignore) particular characteristics requires further examination. Additionally, how a character’s identity shapes and influences its place within Tolkien’s secondary-world still requires greater attention. This seminar aims to explore the many possible applications of “diversity” within Tolkien’s works, his adaptations, and his readership.”
In response to this The Society of Tolkien launched a counter program and explained its purpose, “When J.R.R. Tolkien created Middle Earth, he filled it with characters, themes, and dangers that leapt from the pages to intrigue, excite, and give hope to his readers. In these sessions, we’ll explore these concepts to celebrate all that makes his works stand the test of time and what we should take from them today.”
In 2022, the Tolkien Society faced backlash after revealing it was featuring a paper by Reid titled “J.R.R. Tolkien, Culture Warrior: The Alt-Right Religious Crusade’s appropriation of ‘Tolkien.'”
It’s unclear exactly what Reid’s abstract for her paper is or what the paper is about, but in her Substack post she included a letter she had written to the Tolkien Society declining its request to have her alter the abstract. In that letter, Reid wrote, “Your concern is that my proposal to ‘develop a phenomenological and stylistics analysis of how Tolkien’s narrative voices entangle female characters and Middle-earth, resulting in a racialized (White) gendered (feminine) world’ could lead far-right extremists to assume that I and the Tolkien Society are fellow-travelers in their authoritarian desire to build their fantasy of a White Christian Patriarchal world ruled by their strongman leaders.”
After citing the backlash from the Tolkien and Diversity Seminar, Reid then pointed to the assassination of Minnesota Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and her husband, “While I understand your fear of drawing their attention again, especially given the increase in alt-right attacks occurring offline as the recent assassinations of Democrat representatives in Minnesota show, I think I have a more informed idea than you do about the likely nature of an online attack on proposals relating to race and racism in Tolkien’s legendarium. I think the nature of the attack would be different and that there is another risk I believe your organization faces that you have apparently not considered.”
Of note, authorities have not determined a motive for the assassination, but did discover flyers promoting the left-wing “No Kings” rallies in the suspect’s vehicle.
Nevertheless, Reid continued, “I am fairly sure any authoritarian attacks would be rhetorically similar to the first, specifically, calling any scholars discussing race ‘woke’ and accusing us of accusing Tolkien of being a racist. White members of far-right extremist groups (and a growing percentage of White people in the U.S.) consider themselves the victims of racism rather than being racists themselves.”
“My level of surety on this issue is related to them having already fielded those accusations in the earlier backlash,” she added.
She then chided the Tolkien Society for requesting that her abstract be changed, “While I do not deny that the presenters and the Society may become targets again with this Seminar, I think there is another, greater risk, you are facing: specifically, an escalation of a pattern I see developing in recent Seminars online that I interpret as showing a retreat from the commitment to greater diversity in the online seminars. As I understand it, this commitment became a goal of the Society after a scholar of color described the racist attacks she experienced at Tolkien 2019 in Birmingham, UK.”
“I see this latest request for revision by the trustees and the CEO as fearing to engage with a project that names Whiteness as a part of systemic racism, a topic I identified as one of the gaps in Tolkien scholarship that needs to be addressed in my 2017 essay (“Race in Tolkien Studies: A Bibliographic Essay”),” she wrote. “As a result, you may be risking the Society continuing to enable the White-dominated nature of Tolkien scholarship.”
As SJWs are wont to do she then projected, “Tolkien’s work, and his religious identity, have been appropriated by far-right extremists for decades. Unfortunately, for nearly the same decades, scholars have ignored this phenomenon as I discuss in my Note, ‘The Problem of White Academia,’ recently published in Mallorn. One requirement to maintain systemic White/Black racism is that ‘Whiteness,’ which is the default, is never named as a raced/racialized category because that naming undercuts its status as the default and natural state of being.”
Finally, she recommended the Tolkien Society CEO and Trustees read an essay Charles W. Mills, which she describes as “the first essay on racism in Tolkien by a Black scholar: Mills was an Afro-Jamaican philosopher of race.”
What do you make of Reid revealing that the Tolkien Society is attempting to hide its SJW infiltration?
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Why do we have to bring intersectionality into everything?
JRR Tolkien was a white man who fought in a war. He wrote parts of his book during that war.
Stop trying to destroy western civilization.
I am so damned tired of this creeping communism that devours everything good and leaves nothing but shit on the sidewalk behind it.
Leave Tolkien out of it, leave Lewis out of it.
Just get over it and get a real life.
"Put down and stand far from Durthagil, one of the lesser Rings, lest it torment your mortal dreams with fabulous visions which lead unto waking nightmares."
-- any of Celebrimor's greater Smiths in Eregion, SA