Whiteness, medievalism, immigration: rethinking Tolkien through Stuart Hall

Abstract

This essay rethinks Tolkien’s scholarship and fiction in light of his rejection at Oxford of Stuart Hall, who approached him regarding graduate work on William Langland. I argue that Tolkien’s white medievalism contains his most deeply felt racist formations, which both shaped his fiction and informed his life in a university town populated by West Indian immigrants. After examining Tolkien’s essentialist approach to medieval study, I examine how Tolkien believed that his innate knowledge about his ancestors’ language and myths enabled him to create a national mythology, and how his fiction depicts its heroes’ inheritance of their ancestral tongue and temperament. I then consider how Tolkien’s supposed memory of an Atlantis-like disaster befalling his ancestors may have intersected with his rejection of immigrants like Hall. I conclude by discussing how, while Tolkien’s epic fantasies may be appropriated successfully for various ends, they present unique challenges for a significant component of Tolkien’s readership, medievalists.