Polygenesis in Fantasy

Tolkien’s explanations of the differences between Good and Evil humanity – that the former descended from those who had greatest contactand affinity with the Elves in ancient times – does not obviously relate to pseudo-scientific explanations of racial difference; it smacks more of religious constructs of a “chosen people.” Turning from Tolkien’s delineation of human groups to his other species, however, reveals the influence of theories of polygenesis, according to which different races were the result of multiple acts of divine creation.51 It developed in the late 1700s, and gained considerable currency, particularly in the US, in the mid-nineteenth century.52 At its basis, this theory allowed non-Europeans – or non-Whites as the connection of skin colour and race was by then entrenched – to be considered non-human, and therefore sub-human. The creation story of Arda, published in The Silmarillion, recounts the making of the Children of Ilúvatar: “Elves and Men, Firstborn and Followers,”53 names which strongly suggest that they have different moments of creation. There is no question that this is the case when it comes to dwarves, who “were made by Aulë in the darkness of Middle-earth.”54 Rebecca Brackman argues that their creation story – they are awakened before the Elves – “steeps itself in the sort of supersessionist dynamic that early Christian writers used to separate Christianity from its origin within Judaism.”55 Their creation story, however, resonates much more strongly with racial than religious thinking; dwarves are other beings entirely than the Children of Ilúvatar and have a completely different origin, unequivocally demonstrating that Middle-earth is a location of polygenesis.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution did much to dispel the notion of polygenesis, but nonetheless was also used to dehumanize nonEuropeans, particularly Africans, through the suggestion that different racial groups were more or less evolved than others. The “Negro-ape” metaphor, for example, invoked evolutionary theory to suggest that Africans were closer to apes, that is, less evolved, than Whites, and were therefore inferior.56 It was used – and still is – as Phillip Atiba Goff et al. argue, “to bolster growing stereotypes that peoples of African descent were innately lazy, aggressive, dim, hypersexual, and in need of benevolent control.”57 According to polygenesists, Whites were the only real humans, but evolution theory was used to construct Whites as the most human. Evolution creeps into The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf’s comment that Gollum’s people “were of hobbit-kind: akin to the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors,” and Frodo’s response: “‘I can’t believe that Gollum was connected with hobbits, however distantly,’ said Frodo with some heat. ‘What an abominable notion.’” Gandalf assures him that it is true, remarking “I know more than hobbits do themselves.”58 It is not hard to read the exchange as one of a country squire hearing the humanity is related to apes for the first time.