That was my second topic. I always found it less interesting
than The East. The South as a place is relatively straightforward. Then there’s
the matter of Race. That practically demands explanation and discussion even if
the Encyclopedia assignment didn’t explicitly mention it.
But if The East is the bad boy of the Tolkienian symbolic compass, The South is
the lost child. There’s not a lot of there there.
Today I’ll play around a bit with the Where and What of The South and its
peoples. Tomorrow we’ll wrap up the week with a quick dance around the Why. My
Notes on The South are here.
They’re not a very compelling read, though I will look at a few interesting
points tomorrow. I didn’t even do an outline, since after writing The East I
had the routine down.
We can pretty much stick to The Lord of the Rings here. The South in
The Silmarillion practically doesn’t exist. In The Hobbit, it’s
very unimportant, being the place where the Necromancer, the wine country of
Dorwinion, and unspecified Men all are, essentially, off stage.
However, in The Lord of the Rings, South is a real and quite important
place, and at the same time a flexible and relative concept, far more so than
the East. Both Gondor and the Harad are south of the original center of the
story, which is the Shire. Once we get to Gondor, however, we still feel in the
center of things, which shows how shiftable the north-south axis is.
(By contrast, the East is pretty much east of Anduin for the entire story.
Rivendell is hundreds of miles east of The Shire, but it is not in The East.
Compare that to Elrond’s introduction of Boromir to the Council as a Man from
‘the South’.)
Gondor developed slowly in Tolkien’s mind as his story drifted south from
Rivendell. It seems clear early on in the writing of LotR that the quest would
head south as well as east to find Mordor, because The Hobbit had already
established what was due east of the Shire. Along with Mordor and the Fiery
Mountain being in the south, the idea of a race of good Men desperately at war
with Mordor first occurs at the time of writing The Council of Elrond, with the
appearance of the mysterious Boromir – and the rest just followed, a bit at a
time.
Much later in the story, when we finally reach Gondor, there are hints of all
kinds of differences from The Shire and Eriador: hints of southern France,
Italy, ancient Rome, the Mediterranean, Byzantium, Greece, and even Egypt. In
short, if The Shire is England, and Eriador is northern Europe, Gondor is
southern Europe, and an entirely new addition to Middle-earth, from a
Hobbit perspective.
A. What do the Mediterranean nations have in common, that an Englishman like
Tolkien feels free to mix and match them up like this?
Yet, are there any real differences between Gondor and the North? In Europe,
anyone could list a dozen significant ways, cultural, social, customary,
linguistic, racial or culinary, in which southern Europe, broadly speaking, is
different from northern Europe. Most of these differences would follow, again
broadly speaking, from a warmer, drier climate: southerners are a little more
easy-going, a little more emotional, a little more hedonistic, a little more
sexy.
B. What significant differences between Gondor and the North would you
attribute specifically to its Southern setting? How does Tolkien
differentiate the culture and the people of the South Kingdom from the North in
his Middle-earth?
In Gondor, of course, they acknowledge that they are in the South, being the
southern half of a dual kingdom. But they also regard themselves as in the
Center, making disparaging remarks about the wild North--while the real South,
to them, is ‘the Harad’, a vast and unlimited expanse to their south, filled
with implacably hostile tribes and kingdoms. Just as Rhûn means “East” in
Sindarin, so Harad simply means “South”. It’s not an empire or a kingdom or
even a race of people: it’s a place in Middle-earth defined by its relative
location to the center of the story.
Here are some quotes from The Lord of the Rings that tell us about the
Harad and the Haradrim:
Hundreds of long ladders were
lifted up. Many were cast down in ruin, but many more replaced them, and Orcs
sprang up them like apes in the dark forests of the South.
“And further still there are more lands, they say, but the Yellow Face is very
hot there, and there are seldom any clouds, and the men are fierce and have
dark faces.”
He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green
arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar. His scarlet robes
were tattered, his corslet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his
black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood. His brown hand
still clutched the hilt of a broken sword.
“ . . . the proud peoples of the North, who often had assailed us, men of
fierce valour, but our kin from afar off, unlike the wild Easterlings or the
cruel Haradrim.”
Southward beyond the road lay the main force of the Haradrim, and there their
horsemen were gathered about the standard of their chieftain. And he looked
out, and in the growing light he saw the banner of the king, and that it was
far ahead of the battle with few men about it. Then he was filled with a red
wrath and shouted aloud, and displaying his standard, black serpent upon
scarlet, he came against the white horse and the green with great press of men;
and the drawing of the scimitars of the Southrons was like a glitter of stars.
There they had been mustered for the sack of the City and the rape of Gondor,
…. Southrons in scarlet, and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with
white eyes and red tongues.
C. Do you find this imagery racist? Or, do you find the idea racist that the
darker or black men in the story are the bad guys: cruel, fierce, red in wrath,
looters and rapers?
D. Why does Tolkien give us the Haradrim up close and in detail, but not the
Easterlings?
E. What is Tolkien doing with his portrayal of the Haradrim in scarlet
colors and gold trim? Why a serpent? Why scimitars?
F. Where is Harad and who are the Haradrim, in terms of the mock-European
geography that we discussed above with regard to Gondor?
What about Far Harad? If the Haradrim are brown-skinned, these men are
black-skinned – and the emphasis on the contrast of their skin with the whites
of their eyes and the red of their mouths evokes the worst kind of blackface
cariacature, as far as I can see. Not to mention the ambiguous term
“half-troll” – aren’t trolls even more inhuman than orcs?
G. Is it permissible just to say Tolkien is telling it like it is, or like
it was in his time or in a further past, or is he (perhaps unconsciously)
drawing on English folklore about “inhuman” negroes?
Tolkien wrote a two-part scholarly paper in 1932-34, called Sigelwara
Land. In it he investigates the meaning of the Old English word
Sigelwaran or Sigelhearwan, which was used in Biblical
translations to render the word Ethiopian. As Tolkien remarks in his
opening, he found it odd that the ancient English should have an actual word
for a people or land so remote – most Biblical or Classical terms in Old
English texts are transcribed straight out rather than translated. At the same
time, while clearly Sigelwara was always used to render
Ethiopian, no one actually knew what Sigelwara actually meant in
Old English.
Tolkien got as far as showing that Sigel- means “sun” but also has a
secondary meaning of “jewel”. But the second part of the word, Hearwan,
he could not identify. Flieger in Splintered Light comments on Sigelwara
Land, and suggests that Hearwan was related to Gothic “hauri”=coal,
Old Norse “hyr-r”=fire, and Old English “heorth” and “hierstan”= roast.
Tolkien’s conclusion is that the word must “as a whole, have meant something
like ‘black people living in a hot region’ – whether as a rumour of the actual
races of Africa, or as a memory of some mythical muspells megir [in
Norse myth the region of fiery sparks] of realms of fire, or both . . . “
Flieger adds her two cents with a translation as “jewelsun-roasted people.”
The upshot seems to be that the English had their own traditions of, and thus
their own word for, dark-skinned people from a hot land, long before
Christianity and Mediterranean/African literature was transmitted to them.
H. If this is the case for the actual Old English, is it permissible for
Tolkien to re-imagine the image of “black men with white eyes” for his
mock-medieval, purportedly ancient, secondary world, without being accused of
indulging in a vulgar if not outright racist minstrel
show?
