"The Wretched of Middle-Earth"

Charles Mills and J. R. R. Tolkien

In September, an unpublished and, now, sadly posthumous essay by Charles Mills appeared in the Southern Journal of Philosophy. Titled “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto” (link, paywalled; unpaywalled), it was prepared for publication and introduced by Chike Jeffers, the executor of Mills’s estate.

This essay was previously somewhat legendary among the (unjustly) small group of academics who revered Mills and his work. For example, in the comments to Jeffers’s post announcing the publication of the essay, Catherine Adoyo replied, “Thank you so much! I believe I have been waiting for this piece for the past twenty years and my gratitude in seeing it published has no limit.” And in a September 2021 post on his blog written after Mills’s death, the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff begged his readers to help him find a samizdat copy. “In the early 1990s” he served as an external reviewer on Mills’s tenure case, and the tenure packet he received contained both “a draft of The Racial Contract… [which the committee] did not need me to tell them that it was brilliant and that Charles deserved tenure,” as well as

an unpublished paper that I read with the very greatest delight. It was a racial and ideological reading of The Lord of the Rings, in which Mills demonstrated with great wit that Tolkien’s famous trilogy was built on a racially encoded hierarchy of European peoples in which the highest position was occupied by the tall blonde Scandinavians (the elves), and the lowest was occupied by the swarthy short southern Europeans (the orcs.) I read the paper with delicious pleasure and asked Charles, after I had gotten to know him, why he had never published it. He said he was afraid that if it appeared under his name it would hurt his career.

Wolff had previously sought it among his papers and had even written “to Charles in great distress, telling him that I had somehow misplaced my copy of his paper and asking for a new copy. He told me that he also had mislaid it and that he did not have a copy of it anywhere.”

Mills may have mislaid it, but given what he said earlier to Wolff—that he believed the reception of the paper would be professionally harmful—it is also plausible that he deliberately left it unpublished. In Jeffers’s introduction to the essay (which he tweeted out in a thread), he notes that alongside the essay he found a copy of a letter Mills sent in April 1990 “to a cultural studies journal” in which Mills “complained that it had been ten months since he had submitted [the manuscript] and yet he still had not received a decision on its publication.” Jeffers also points out that “At the time he was seeking to publish ‘The Wretched of Middle-Earth,’ he had published very little about race. His now-classic The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997) was still many years off.”

A map of Middle-Earth emphasizing the lands to the south and east of Mordor, courtesy of The Encyclopedia of Arda

If Mills concluded from his experience trying to publish this essay that a direct and unsparing critique of the racist underpinnings of a popular fantasy series was likely to engender a bilious resistance among his fellow academics, then it is even more impressive that he chose to go after a still more sacred icon of Western culture—the social contract tradition—and that he persevered in forcing the issue amongst philosophers and political theorists.

Relatedly, I think we can also recognize and better appreciate the galvanic effect that reading Carole Pateman’s 1988 The Sexual Contract must have had for him. If Mills completed “The Wretched of Middle-Earth” some time in 1989 (possibly 1988), we can see that many elements of the critique contained in The Racial Contract were present, but the direction of that critique was more diffuse. Mills was working out his own version of a structural understanding of racism, but he had yet to lash it onto the framework of a social contract.

Mills’s citations in “Wretched” were eclectic; the materials for a direct confrontation with the Western philosophical tradition on its own grounds were relatively tendentious, or at least they would have been in the eyes of white reviewers. For instance, one of Mills’s more speculative critiques in “Wretched” builds on Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987), a work which was deeply detested by many white academics; another frequent citation is Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983), which is now well-known but was studiously ignored outside of Black Studies circles when it came out. It is not hard to imagine Mills receiving “helpful” feedback that consisted of a warning to stay away from “pseudohistory.” That he instead expanded the ambition of his critique and continued with redoubled purpose says a great deal about Mills’s character.

Although well worth reading simply for the light it sheds on Mills’s own body of work (which I’ve written about previously), the essay also has become embroiled in the toxic backlash to the new Amazon series The Rings of Power, which is an extrapolation of some of Tolkien’s characters and stories. The backlash has come about because some Tolkien fans deeply resent the racially diverse cast that populates Rings of Power, insisting that it violates Tolkien’s intentions regarding what the denizens of Middle-Earth look like. The showrunners and actors have mostly acknowledged that Tolkien’s texts do not offer support for non-white elves or hobbits, but they have argued that Tolkien is dead and thus does not get the last word. (Like the elves, IP is immortal.) Given the fact that Middle-Earth is obviously meaningful to people of color, casting decisions ought to reflect the diversity of Tolkien fans, not the preferences of a minority who is drawn to Tolkieniana not in spite but precisely because of its underlying white supremacist characterology.

Mills’s essay is the most extensive and sophisticated analysis of the racial imaginary and the racist sources that Tolkien drew on, and for many Tolkien fans who see a very different moral universe in Middle-Earth (one that emphasizes the necessity of diverse alliances in times of danger), those arguments are wholly unwelcome. To them, Tolkien’s value system was catholic and Catholic—universalist and redemptive—and Mills’s argument that Tolkien programmed Middle-Earth to include both an intrinsically good race and an intrinsically evil race (the elves and the orcs, respectively) is incompatible with either kind of c/Catholicism.

Defending and extending Mills’s critical analysis of Tolkien’s “legendarium” would take me deeper than I give myself room for here, but I think that one point can be made in a paragraph or two. It will always require some effort to think through the entanglements of whiteness and Christianity: both “Christianity is white” and “whiteness is Christian” are and have always been factually false. But the non-coincidence of these two categories also opens up a space in which it is possible for those who defend the record of historical figures such as Tolkien to rapidly cut away any associations with white supremacy they may have quite amply been demonstrated to have had. “No!” the response is. “If you interpret him as anything other than a Christian devoted to articulating a Christian message, you are reading ideas onto him which are incompatible with what he was at his core: a believing Christian.” Whiteness then has to be laboriously reattached to Christianity itself in order to once more establish the grounds from which one can say, “race is important to the understanding of Tolkien’s works.”

Using Christianity to shield, restrict, or simply delay a genuine reckoning with the ubiquitous legacy of white racism is surely a tactic that Mills experienced in and outside the academy. There are passages in “The Wretched of Middle-Earth” that attempt to forestall such maneuvers, but there is no simple way to counter them. One lesson from the long path to publication of “The Wretched” is that, for those scholars who, like Mills, want to hasten rather than impede this reckoning, there will always be resistance, denial, and impervious dismissal. May we have Mills’s courage to meet this resistance by becoming more ambitious rather than more discouraged.