Beyond Dragons and Spells: The Ethics of Fantasy World-Building

by Skye Davis

A staple component of fantasy world-building is the creation of magical creatures and their cultures. Authors like J.R.R. Tolkien made fantastical racial groups like elves, dwarves, and orcs irremovable pillars in the genre. We receive an almost unspoken standard: elves are clean, intelligent, and powerful; orcs and goblins are dirty, thoughtless, and dangerous. Through this, the readers receive their “good” and “evil” characters—those that protect and those that destroy. The former are human; the latter, sub-human. While these novels’ readers and authors might not consciously recognize and acknowledge the presence of these distinctions, which are difficult to apply to reality because of the comforting distance from it that the fantasy genre provides, they heavily mimic real-world racial prejudices. The effect remains: there are superior and inferior races whose irrefutable, wholly unalterable qualities assist in the degradation of people, both real and fantastical.

Stereotypes take the diversity of groups of people and combine them all into one, denying and simplifying the differences of each individual. An element of this oversimplification is a psychological bias known as essentialism—a cognitive framework that allows propagators to categorize members of a specific group into distinct boxes, assuming they all share fundamental qualities (Mandalaywala, 2020). Fantasy novels are fraught with these oversimplifications. It is much simpler to code large groups with widely applicable and easy-to-understand characteristics. Even simpler is to write that these characteristics are a result of their genetic makeup—a form of categorization known as genetic determinism. With genetic determinism, a character’s behavior is a part of their genetic makeup (Gericke et al., 2017). Tolkien’s racial distinctions now permeate the fantasy genre as his work has become the model. These descriptions of appearance and behavior have now become tropes.

The antagonists of Tolkien’s novels bear a resemblance to racist caricatures. A frequently discussed passage is his description of the soldiers of Harad: “...black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues” (Tolkien, 1955). It is not explicitly stated that their similarity to trolls is predicated on their “blackness”; this color and their bestial nature could be separate characteristics. Yet, the combination of these characteristics, and the fact that these soldiers were written to be antagonists, is intended to strike aversion in the reader, and perpetuates the harmful racial stereotype of dark-skinned people being violent and frightening.

In a letter written to Forrest J. Ackerman, Tolkien describes the orcs in his novel as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types” (Tolkien & Carpenter, 1958). He depicts this race as sub-human with his descriptors, seemingly monolithically applicable to the species.

A frequent criticism of this more critical reading is its anachronism. Current readers have a different understanding and sensitivity towards race than writers like Tolkien, who lived in Britain in the 20th century. The question then becomes, was Tolkien racist or expressing the evidence of institutionalized racism that was commonplace during his time? This blog post does not seek to reconcile with this. The argument at hand is that Tolkien’s work, having become the birthplace of most fantastical literature, has implications for modern derivatives.

A modern example of this insensitivity lies in an excerpt from the novel A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. As a short world-building detail, Novik included a line that described “dreadlocks” as “not a great idea thanks to lockleeches… [that] [poke] an ovipositor into any big clumps of hair, [lay] an egg inside, and [creep] away” (Novik, 2020). Lockleeches, Mana-sucking creatures, prefer dirty, notably long, hair, so the specific mention of locs acts as a continuation of a racist claim of their uncleanliness. People with locs have to see themselves reflected in this magical system that deems their hair dirty by nature. The author sought to establish a simple world-building element, but its implications have real-world effects on its readers. Through descriptors like these, an attempt at diverse world-building becomes a mirror for racist rhetoric.

Naomi Novik announced on her website that this passage will be removed from future editions, but this incident serves as an example of why white authors should be mindful of the presence of unconscious or unnoticed racial prejudices that might seep into their writing. This is a much smaller detail with fewer implications across the fantasy world than Tolkien’s racial distinctions, but it is a questionable element nonetheless. The onus is on the author to be critical of any caricatures they might summon in their work.

This discussion of race in fantasy world-building is certainly predicated on modern understandings and attitudes towards race, so the purpose is not to make accusations against the author or to degrade the work. It is possible to enjoy and appreciate a piece insensitive to issues that a modern reader might recoil from. Works like Lord of the Rings reveal the prejudices of their day. This post’s intention is not to make a judgment on that score. Regardless of authorial intent, these characteristics bear the same trappings as prejudicial perceptions of real-world people. These prejudices, cemented further by these fantasy novels, have become the building blocks of world-building. Elves—tall, lithe, and lily-white, are a powerful and graceful race. Ogres, however, are associated with destruction. Newer authors might not think twice about these characterizations or their impact on readers, because they may seem to be natural descriptors confirmed by a long line of fantasy novels. Current-day authors can scrub their work of past insensitivities with an open-minded awareness of these tropes and a desire to expand their creativity beyond the racial prejudice that other fantasy authors have displayed in their genre-defining work in the past.