Tiny rant about Tolkien fans’ racism*

I hate this squirrely argument that Tolkien was writing his world as a mythology for England and that therefore you’re somehow doing it wrong if you include people of colour.

1. There are people of colour who are English, and who therefore deserve to see themselves in any English mythology
2. There were people of colour in England from Roman times onward
3. The first people to have settled in the land that came to be known of as England looked like this:

Cheddar man (so called because his 10,000 year old bones were found in a cave in the Cheddar gorge. His DNA was decoded and carried the markers of dark skin and blue eyes – click on the link to get the full details. Some of his descendants have been found still living there, btw.)

Middle-earth is set before that, so honestly, it’s the people who are claiming that everyone in the series is white who have to explain why.

_{*Probably to be followed soon by several larger rants}