Can o' worms...

[davem]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment...er-skin-colour

At 1.5 metres (5ft), Naz Humphreys has the essential requirement to be a hobbit extra, but the British Pakistani has been told she's not white enough.

"It's 2010 and I still can't believe I'm being discriminated against because I have brown skin," Ms Humphreys said.

She travelled from Auckland to Hamilton last Tuesday to an extras audition for The Hobbit. "The casting manager basically said they weren't having anybody who wasn't pale-skinned."

So - and we all know that the Harfoots were brown skinned - which Mrs Humphreys points out herself:

The social policy researcher, here on a working holiday with her husband, said it was a Christmas ritual for the couple to watch The Lord of the Rings films. "It was the opportunity of a lifetime. I would love to be an extra. But it just seemed like a shame because obviously hobbits are not brown or black or any other colour. They all look kind of homogenised beige and all derived from the Caucasian gene pool."

Writer JRR Tolkien had not specified that all hobbits were pale-skinned. According to The Complete Guide to Middle-earth "Harfoots" are the most common hobbit and "browner" than other types. "Fallohides", who settled the Shire, which included Hobbiton, had "fairer skin".

I can think of a few problems - not least continuity wise as there were no 'Hobbits of Colour' in the LotR movies - you certainly couldn't easily introduce her into the film as 'Miss Token Proudfoot' (Southpark reference for those not down wiv the kids like me, innit) - you'd need other 'Harfoots' in the movie. And then, what about Asian actors who wanted roles?

Personally, I would have liked to see a wider racial range in the original trilogy - Tolkien compared the Gondorians to Egyptians so I would have been cool with black actors in those roles (someone mentioned James Earl Jones as Denethor & I think he would have been brilliant (& I also think the Musical had a black Boromir). I could even have seen Asian Elves working well.

Of course, you would need to take that kind of approach - I don't think you could really have a complete racial mix of Gondorians or Elves with no explanation.

[Inziladun]

"Can o' worms" indeed.

To play devil's advocate, I don't know that the Harfoots, though "browner" than the Stoors or Fallohides, were as dark as Middle-Easterners or South Americans in our world.

Sam Gamgee was almost certainly a Harfoot, and we have this quote about his skin colour:

In [Sam's] lap lay Frodo's head, drowned deep in sleep; upon his white forehead lay one of Sam's brown hands.

TTT The Stairs of Cirith Ungol

One might be tempted to explain Sam's darker skin as a result of his outdoor gardening work, but by the time of Cirith Ungol he and Frodo had been sharing exactly the same experiences regarding environment for months, and Frodo was "white".

I don't see the Harfoots as being very "darK' or what would be as notably so to another Hobbit as one of the Haradrim, for example, might appear.

Being very pale-complected myself, there are a lot of "Anglo" and European Caucasians who have darker skin than I, even though from a racial standpoint we are similar. So, though the Harfoots were "darker" as a rule than other Hobbits, I think it likely they were not as dark-skinned as someone from South Gondor or the Harad; only "dark" compared to other Hobbits.

As for some more diversity among the Gondorians, I see no reason that couldn't have been shown. I agree that they would have had darker skin than the Dúnedain of Arnor, or the Rohirrim. Also, not being a fan of the movies I don't recall for certain, but wasn't there a scene outside the Morannon in which some of the Haradrim almost caught Frodo, Sam, and Gollum? I seem to remember the Haradrim soldiers in question looking much lighter than they reasonably should have.

[Bêthberry]

Seven (or was it eight?) years ago I saw a production of "Romeo and Juliet" at the Globe in London that had cast a black actress as Juliet. The production didn't use her colour as a way to interject questions of difference or race in the play; the actors who played Juliet's parents weren't black. The production simply followed criteria for "People of Colour Casting" where the colour of the actor's skin is moot.

The Jackson production team apparently aren't really up to date with current hiring policy, criteria and theory in the dramatic arts.

EDIT: See discussion with other examples in Wikipedia: Colour blind casting.

[davem]

All over the papers now - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-race-row.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...=feeds-newsxml

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/...own-the-hobbit

I wonder where this will go? The Globe thing sounds a bit odd to me. I would have noticed & it would have distracted me. Why do it except to show everybody how you're not 'racist' & above such 'trivialities' as skin colour(which comes across as a bit patronising to me.) - because, well, we're all the same, aren't we?

The problem with pretending you're colour blind as far as Tolkien's world is concerned is that race is a pretty important theme (the whole Elves & Dwarves thing, the blood of Numenor, the 'racial' division of Hobbits into Harfoots, Stoors & Fallowhides & Elves into Calaquendi & Moriquendi.

[Bêthberry]

The axe has fallen: Hobbit casting agent fired. This is New Zealand, after all.

Originally Posted by davem

The Globe thing sounds a bit odd to me. I would have noticed & it would have distracted me.

Yet my son, when I queried him about the production, couldn't recall her race at all but did remember the production. As with all theatre, every patron has his and her own responses.

Why do it except to show everybody how you're not 'racist' & above such 'trivialities' as skin colour

The Non-traditional Casting Project is almost 25 years old, so it's really a bit old hat. As the link I give above suggests, it is about ensuring you have the best actor available for the role and not simply the best (pale) actor.

I think it would be very interesting to see a stage production where Gandalf is played by a female--a woman told she cannot use all her powers!--and Galadriel by a male. Might not be canonical, but would still be interesting. I saw a superb production of The Hobbit years ago at a children's theatre where, surprisingly, Gollem was played by a human and not a computer generated image. Amazingly fantastic! It's a sage reminder of the power of human skill and talent to reach out to our imaginations.

[Pitchwife]

Well, since PJ already got away with giving us a fair-haired Boromir and Faramir (contrary to Tolkien's descriptions), I really don't see a problem with a brown-skinned Hobbit, even if you don't want to go all the way to colour blind casting - I mean, looking at the photo of Ms Humphreys on the site davem linked to in his first post, I don't see how she would be particularly implausible as an average Hobbit. The original decision really seems a bit ridiculous.

As for colour blind casting, the only problem I have with that is that I'd like the characters to look more or less like Tolkien described them (which is a problem you won't get so much with Shakespeare - Juliet or Hamlet could be any colour you like for all I care; Othello maybe not, but I could see a white Othello in an all-black cast, or any Othello in a mixed-colour cast, if his outsider position is somehow differently marked [/digression]). So no problem at all with levantine Gondorians or Asian Elves (on the contrary, the Elven style of hairdo PJ used in the trilogy would look really cool on Chinese or Japanese actors!), but a black Éomer or Galadriel is just not how I'd picture them.

The problem with this is, of course, that the only people Tolkien explicitely described as dark-skinned, i.e. the Haradrim, are on the bad side, and thus all gates are opened to allegations of racism (which PJ obviously tried to circumvent with his uncanonically pale Haradrim in RotK) - but as this is a problem which Tolkien fandom has laboured with for some decades now (see e.g. here for a previous discussion on these Downs of ours), I don't quite see why movie-goers should be spared it.

Originally Posted by davem

I wonder where this will go? The Globe thing sounds a bit odd to me. I would have noticed & it would have distracted me. Why do it except to show everybody how you're not 'racist' & above such 'trivialities' as skin colour(which comes across as a bit patronising to me.) - because, well, we're all the same, aren't we?

I'm not!
No, seriously: much as I despise political correctness myself, it's sometimes difficult to resist its tyranny without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and relapsing into the old prejudices it legitimately opposes. Or, to put it more concretely - what difference does it make for an actor/actress whether s/he's denied a role because s/he's the wrong colour or because the producer/director doesn't want to appear to be patronizing? "Oh, of course there's no reason why you, as an Afro-American/Asian/Arab/whatsoever, couldn't play this role, but if I'd cast you for it, it would look like I'm only doing so to avoid seeming racially biased, so I'd rather not. I'm sure you'll understand." - "Yes, sir/madam, of course I do, that's a big comfort, thank you very much."

Originally Posted by davem

The problem with pretending you're colour blind as far as Tolkien's world is concerned is that race is a pretty important theme (the whole Elves & Dwarves thing, the blood of Numenor, the 'racial' division of Hobbits into Harfoots, Stoors & Fallowhides & Elves into Calaquendi & Moriquendi.

Ah, but here you're putting worms from a number of different cans into the same stew:

• Elves, Dwarves and Men. - Yes, Tolkien himself used the term 'race' for the three kindreds of the Children of Ilúvatar, and his use is justified insofar as they were capable of producing fertile offspring with each other (although we only ever read about the products of Elf/Man unions - no Dwelves or Dwarf/Men hybrids, which may have to do with the Dwarves' special status as His Children by adoption only); but looking at e.g. their vastly different life-spans, I don't know that the relationship and differences between them are quite compatible with the terms of modern biology - neither 'race' nor 'species' seem really appropriate here.
• The blood of Númenor. - This is a somewhat curious matter, as many of the so-called Lesser Men with whom the Númenóreans interbred in the Third Age probably were descended from close relatives of the Three Houses of the Edain and thus akin to the Númenóreans themselves. The main difference seems to have been the special longevity which the Númenóreans had been granted by the grace of the Valar for the role their ancestors played in the First Age - i.e. for historical, not biological reasons.
• The three 'breeds' of Hobbits. - These are more or less what we today would call 'races' (i.e., to coin an ad hoc definition, a population sharing the same hereditary phenotype; for a more elaborate definition see here).
• Calaquendi/Moriquendi. - This division is purely historical, i.e. depends on whether or not they went on the Big March and saw the light of Aman, and has nothing at all to do with the biological concept of race.

So yes, the concept of races in the widest sense does play a role in Tolkien's Legendarium, but how important is it really, compared with other themes (such as power and being corrupted by it, or mortality and the various ways to deal with it, or humble folk rising to meet huge challenges and being ennobled thereby)? Not in any way central or crucial, I'd think.

[Galadriel]

I agree to an extent with Pitchwife. They didn't seem to have a problem casting a Scottish actor for Pippin, or completely ruining Faramir's character, or turning Frodo into a weakling, or giving Boromir and Faramir fair hair, or making Legolas into a princess instead of a prince...why should they have a problem casting a brown-skinned actress, considering Tolkien explicitly stated that Hobbits in general have brown skin (except Fallohides). In fact, I was a little surprised that the Hobbits in PJ's LotR had such fair skin.

I wouldn't say it's 'racism' but it definitely is 'stupidity'. Ok, rant over