Subtle Racism in Lotro

[Aelfwulf]

This is post isn't intended to be inflammatory, or concern trolling. It is just food for thought for the mature Lotro community.

These are some examples I noticed of insults that the bestowal text from quest-givers directs towards the enemy.

Super, mind if I disect?

In Bree-land, the southern invaders are called "swarthy", as in swarthy southerners. This is intended as an insult. Swarthy means dark-skinned.

Well as Bree-land and its surrounds are essentially a fantasy version of northern Europe those from the south would be 'swarthy'. I honestly don't think this is meant as an insult, more a description. Perhaps a better word could have been used in game, I'm open to suggestions.

Also in Bree-land, the term "half-breed" is used as an insult against Sharkey's half-orc followers. Half-breed is a very old insult against mixed race people. The same term is not used, to my knowledge, to describe the half-elf characters in the game, only the dark "swarthy" skinned ones.

Of course half-orcs are named in a pejorative way, they're an evil people (maybe species would be better) force bred with humans to create an invading army that can operate in sunlight. That it happens to chime with the old insult for those of mixed race is coincidental in this case.

Goblins and other evil non-human characters (e.g. the tribal enemies in Lossoth) are shown as having camps full of animal totems. This appears to be a signifier for "primitiveness". To my knowledge, none of the cultures player characters come from have totems. Especially in North America, having totemic people = primitive = evil is very problematic given the treatment of aboriginals.

As many others have pointed out many of the 'good' peoples of Middle-earth also use totems.

I suspect most of these tropes come from the original books themselves, which, to be fair, were written from the 1930's-1950's. Other stereotypes from that era have been updated for a modern game. For example, female characters can do anything male characters can, though this was very rare in the books. Perhaps outdated racial stereotypes should be removed too.

You are quite correct these books were written in the first half of the twentieth centuary and the language used is of its time. The fact that Turbine also chose to use this language isn't laziness or subtle recism it's an effort on their part to write in a similar manner to Tolkien so that the game is further linked with the books we all love.

To sum up, or as some of our lazier readers would say tl;dr, any racism in the works of Tolkien or this game comes from the reader and not the author.