Response to Tolkien Society re:

“Race-ing to Gender Arda: A Stylistics Analysis”- proposal

Photo by Deva Darshan on Unsplash

The kyriarchy: it’s all connected!

Some important points to consider before you read my response to the Tolkien Society’s official email concerning the proposal I submitted for their 2025 online Seminar.

The background is that the organizers accepted my proposal, but the CEO and trustees of the Society requested I revise the abstract because the Society publishes the abstracts of the accepted presentations online. In the past, that public transparency (which I find admirable) has led to online harassment on and from social media.

But I want to make it clear that:

• I support the right of scholarly (or fan) organizations and groups to accept or reject proposals (whether for publication or presentations);

• As a reviewer for journals, anthologies, and conferences, I have rejected proposals for reasons that I considered valid (not fitting the theme of the event or publication, or not acknowledging or engaging with relevant scholarship);

• A reviewer/editor/organization may request revision and resubmission of proposals (probably more for publications but it happens, on occasion, for conference presentations). The submitter is free to accept the opportunity or to reject it;

• As a submitter, I have been rejected a number of times over the decades; I have never felt I was being censored, or cancelled, or harmed in any way by the rejection;¹ in fact, I have been grateful for the number of scholars whose advice improved my work immeasurably. In this case, however, I do not believe that the suggested revision would improve the quality of my work. Therefore, I declined to revise and resubmit.

I am taking the unusual step of posting my response to their email (but not their email) here because I think this particular instance is connected to a systemic problem that is larger than this one organization, and much larger than one proposal which I am sure I will be able to present and, eventually, publish at a later date.²

You can see the text of a slightly edited version of the proposal I submitted in the note below: it’s slightly revised because I submitted it to the Northeast Popular Culture Conference recently.³

I have redacted personal names, but the rest of the email is the same as the one I sent the Tolkien Society.

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Dear [Organizers]:

Thank you for your email and your acceptance of my proposal. I appreciate that none of you are responsible for the delay that occurred, or for the request for revision!

However, I must decline the Tolkien Society’s CEO and trustees’ offer to accept my proposal, “Race-ing to Gender Arda: A Stylistics Analysis,” for “Arda’s Entangled Bodies and Environments” Seminar. If I thought the suggested change would improve my work, I would be happy to do so (as I have in the past for other projects). However, I am not willing to remove the element that I consider the most significant, original, and, given the current resurgence of violent racist attacks occurring in the United States and in Europe, necessary component of my argument: specifically removing some (or all?) of the words about “race” and “Whiteness.” The result would be discarding the intersectional analysis which was my intent in crafting the abstract for a project which addresses the gaps in my previous stylistics scholarship.

I presented at the “Tolkien and Diversity Seminar” and encouraged a number of contributors from an anthology on queer approaches on Tolkien to submit as well, so I understand the need for risk analysis. However, based on my previous scholarship on queer, feminist, intersectional and critical race approaches, I think there is a greater and unrealized risk that the Society faces at this moment than the concern they shared with me. I will discuss that further below in my message to them.

I want you all to know that I plan to attend the “Entangled” seminar which I thought sounded fantastic from my first glimpse of the CFP, or at least, to attend as many sessions as I can given my west coast USA time zone! I am absolutely sure, knowing you all as I do, that there will be amazing scholarship. I also plan to buy the Proceedings of the Seminar when they come out. And, finally, I plan to continue to support the Tolkien Society through my membership because I believe that you, and some others I know, are trying to move the culture toward welcoming more diverse and progressive scholars and their scholarship.

Because I hope to contribute to this movement, I am doing two specific things today.

First, I ask you to forward my entire email to the CEO and Trustees of the Society to consider as they lead the organization into the future under their new charity status and with a new, paid, CEO.

Second, I plan to post my response (and only my response; I will not post your email) on my Substack because I know the problems I see here are larger than one organization.

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Dear CEO and Trustees of the Tolkien Society:

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.

I presented my paper on queer atheists, agnostics, and animists at the 2021 Seminar on “Tolkien and Diversity” so I am aware of the nature of the backlash from the far-right extremist blogosphere that event, and many of the group’s members and presenters, suffered. I am also aware that the event attracted over 700 attendees (the highest ever attendance for a Society event at that time); that (as far as I know) none of the presenters suffered further attacks; and that the Proceedings were published (which I immediately bought) and document an important moment in the history of the Tolkien Society, and Tolkien scholarship.

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.

My corpus stylistics analysis of the rhetoric of the attacks on the presenters (based on nothing more than our paper titles) and on the Society gave me an in-depth understanding of their discursive and rhetorical patterns (“J. R. R. Tolkien: Culture Warrior”). Because of the work I have done on the topic (including editing a collection of essays which is currently under review at McFarland Books, Race, Racisms, and Racists: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium, Adaptations, and Readers), 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. Here is an excerpt from my paper on the Diversity Seminar where I also point out that the far-right extremists appropriated “woke” from Black communities and literature to use as a slur:

The word woke (and variants of it) was one of the words most frequently used to attack the seminar and its participants: woke appeared 159 times, and variants, forty times (total: 199).

Table 3 summarizes the way the word was used as a modifier 108 times.⁴

Table 3 Woke Used as a Modifier

FREQ STRUCTURE SELECTED EXAMPLES

34 Woke + insult/slur barbarians, crazies woke, garbage, i infiltrators

35 Woke + groups tolkien society, americans, conference, elitists, fans, generation

24 Woke + ideologies or discourses agenda, doctrines, ideology, interpretations, phenomenon, religion, theology

15 Woke + transformative works casting, fantasy, franchises, reimaginings, remakes, rewrite, amazon tolkien show

Woke, which functions as a slur in the corpus, is often used in connection with additional insults or slurs (racist, misogynistic, homo- and transphobic, and ableist) and may be applied to individuals, specific groups, ideologies, discourses, and transformative works. (“Culture Warrior” 6)

My corpus analysis also shows that one of the concepts most often associated (or collocated) with “Tolkien” in their posts against the presenters and the Tolkien society is “racism” (and its variants).The terms racism, racist, racist hippies/orcs/woke appear nine times. The larger context for each usage shows that “the claims being made are that the Tolkien Society or the woke presenters are unjustly calling Tolkien a racist” (“Culture Warrior” 9).

I would like to highlight that, despite the fact that several papers on indigeneity, antiracism, and caste were part of the Seminar, that none of those presentations addressed the topics of race and racisms in the way my intersectional analysis does.

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. This email is already overlong, so I will not provide those details; if the CEO and the trustees would like more information, feel free to email me.

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”). As a result, you may be risking the Society continuing to enable the White-dominated nature of Tolkien scholarship.

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.

I would encourage the CEO and the trustees to read a recently-published essay by Charles W. Mills; his essay on racisms in Tolkien was written in the late 1980s/early 1990s but was not published until after his death. Despite its age, the essay is relevant to the current work on race and racisms in Tolkien scholarship. I curated a group of nine scholars responding to the publication (and its history, as described by Mills’s literary executor). The essay is the first essay on racism in Tolkien by a Black scholar: Mills was an Afro-Jamaican philosopher of race (Jeffers and Gray, Mills, Reid et. al.). Despite his illustrious career analyzing racist systems (including his best-known work, The Racial Contract, published in 1997), Mills never wrote/published on Tolkien’s work again.

One final observation and an organizational concern:

I am surprised that the CEO and trustees of the Tolkien Society, whose entire reason for being is our admiration for the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, a philologist and inventor of created languages, for whom words had great significance, thinks it is possible to argue that I could achieve the “same content” with “different words.”

And, finally, although I do not know anything of what transpired between April, when the Education Secretary and conference organizers reviewed my essay and mid-June when I received the notification email, my experience with other conference organizations leads me to suspect that [the conference organizers’] academic accomplishments and professionalism have been ignored or slighted. If that is the case, I am sorry for what they had to go through, and I want to state for the record how much I appreciate the work they are doing and will do in relation to this conference and the following publication.

I hope the CEO and trustees do as well.

Sincerely yours,

Robin Anne Reid

Works Cited

Jeffers, Chike, and David Miguel Gray, “Introduction to Charles Mills’s “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 60, iss. S1, 2022, pp. 102–104, doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12476.

Mills, Charles W., The Racial Contract. Cornell UP, 1997.

---. “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 60, iss. S1, 2022, pp. 105–135 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sjp.12477.

Reid, Robin Anne. “J.R.R. Tolkien, Culture Warrior: The Alt-Right’s Crusade against the Tolkien Society’s 2021 Summer Seminar on ‘Tolkien and Diversity.’” Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 16, iss. 2, article 4, 2023, scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol16/iss2/4.

---. “The Problem of White Academia.” Mallorn, iss. 64, Winter 2023, Note, pp. 49-51.

---. “Race in Tolkien Studies: A Bibliographic Essay.” in Tolkien and Alterity, edited by Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor. Palgrave, 2017, pp. 33-74.

---. “Scholarship on Racisms and ‘Tolkien: An Ever-Expanding Bibliography.” Writing from Ithilien. Substack, 9 Mar. 2023, robinareid.substack.com/p/scholarship-on-racisms-and-tolkien.

Reid, Robin Anne; Beronio, Bianca; Tally, Robert T.; Coker, Cait; Agan, Cami; Stuart, Robert; Krausz, Charlotte; Ue, Tom; and Young, Helen. “Nine Tolkien Scholars Respond to Charles W. Mills’s “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto”, Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, article 13, 2023, pp. 183-97, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol42/iss1/13.

1. One of my creative writing professors in college used to tell his classes that they weren’t real writers until they’d accumulated at least 100 rejections! “Wallpaper your room with them,” he declared, dramatically! He reminded me of my grandfather (my mother’s father who died when I was in third grade) telling my brother and me that we would never be real riders until we’d been bucked off our horses 100 times! I don’t know what it is with guys and the “at least 100 times” rule but they both had good points. To see pictures of my brother and me on our horses, scroll down a bit in this post! My horse (named Judy by her first owner) tossed me off ALOT (I did not try to keep track); luckily I was young enough that I tended to bounce rather than break things.

2. I do not know how many proposals were submitted or how many were rejected because no organizer would share that information. Because the Society does single-track programming for the online seminars, I suspect that they must always reject some proposals (they have rejected two of mine in the past, but never for this kind of reason).

3. Race-ing to Gender Arda: A Stylistics Analysis

This presentation uses stylistics (applied linguistics) to develop an intersectional analysis of Tolkien’s constructions of gender and race: I focus on how the grammar of (selected) female bodies is raced and entangled with the material world of Middle-earth. Drawing on previous stylistic scholarship I have done on The Lord of the Rings which focused on the agency of Middle-earth (2007); on female bodies and femininities (2013), and on the complexities of Tolkien’s constructed narrative voices (2009, 2024), I propose using the stylistics methodology of M. A. K. Halliday’s functional grammar to develop a phenomenological stylistics analysis of how Tolkien’s narrative voice(s) entangle female characters and Middle-earth, resulting in a racialized (White) gendered (feminine) world.

I draw on Sara Ahmed’s work on the phenomenology of Whiteness as “an effect of racialization, which in turn shapes what it is that bodies ‘can do’. In this paper, I offer a phenomenology of whiteness as a way of exploring how whiteness is ‘real’, material and lived” (150).

I plan to focus on two characters as a proof of concept: Goldberry and Galadriel, focusing on the narrative description of their first appearances and of the primary descriptions of their power: Goldberry on the hill, saying farewell, and Galadriel at her Mirror.

Working Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory, vol 8, no. 2, 2007, pp. 149–168, DOI: 10.1177/1464700107078139

Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. Revised by Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen. Hodder Arnold, 2024.

Henderson, Dylan L. “‘A Bleak, Barren Land’: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, article 6, 2023, pp. 87-106, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol42/iss1/6/.

Larsen, Kristine. "Medieval Organicism or Modern Feminist Science? Bombadil, Elves, and Mother Nature." Tolkien and Alterity, edited by Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor. Palgrave Press, 95-108, 2017.

Redmond, Sean. “The Whiteness of the Ring,” in The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood, edited by Daniel Bernardi, Routledge, 2008, pp. 91-101.

Reid, Robin Anne. "Light (noun, 1) or Light (adjective, 14b)?: Female Bodies and Femininities in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings," The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality, edited by Christopher Vaccaro, McFarland, 2013, pp. 98-118.

---."Mythology and History: A Stylistic Analysis of The Lord of the Rings," Style, vol. 43, no. 4, Winter 2009, pp. 517-538.

---."'Tree and flower, leaf and grass': The Grammar of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings," Fantasy Fiction into Film, edited by Leslie Stratyner and James R. Keller, McFarland, 2007, pp. 35-54.

---. "'Within Bounds That He Has Set': A Stylistic Analysis of Cities and Strongholds in The Lord of the Rings," Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien's Legendarium, ed. Cami Agan. Mythopoeic Press, 2024, pp. 134-159.

BIO:

Robin Anne Reid is an independent scholar. Two edited anthologies will be published in 2026-7 with McFarland: Queer Approaches to Tolkien: Essays on the Many Paths to Middle-earth (co-edited with Christopher Vaccaro and Stephen Yandell), and Race, Racisms, and Racists: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium, Adaptations, and Readers. Her latest publication is a stylistics essay, “’Within Bounds That He Has Set”: A Stylistic Analysis of Cities and Strongholds in The Lord of the Rings” (Agan, 2024). She posts updates on her work on her Substack, Writing from Ithilien.

4. I suspect this attempt to excerpt information in a table format will really look horrible on phones — I just hope it looks slightly better (with manual formatting) if you click the title and go look in your browser. I imagine there are ways to get tables into Substacks, but I haven’t had the oomph or inspiration to go looking.