In regard to this idiotic screed that the Lord of the Rings is racist, I recommend this MISTing by Vegard Valberg. He does a lovely job proving that the writer for the Guardian is, well, a fool. I particularly like his noting that the Southrons are not inherently evil, but simply deluded by Sauron and are in fact valiant fighters.

Let me just add a few bits. First, Tolkien in the 1930's made it very clear that absolutely hated the German race laws and wanted nothing to do with them. He said that Hitler was guilty of "ruining" and "perverting" the noble Northern spirit with his "Nordic nonsense." He also stated publicly that he hated apartheid in 1959.

The "good is white / black is evil" thing may be traditional, but it's not really completely true in the Lord of the Rings. The livery of Gondor is black (they are good guys, you know). Saruman is "the white" and his symbol is the white hand (duh!).

Finally, the evilness of orcs does not come from "genetic engineering," Mr. Guardian writer doofus, but from their original torture and enslavement by Morgoth (and anyway, the origins of orcs was a vexed question for Tolkien). Saruman may or may not have crossed orcs with humans to allow the Uruk-hai to travel in daylight (which is not the point that our genius film critic was making), but the evil in the orcs is inherent; it's one of the rules of the world.

"Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain." What kind of pompous ass could even live with himself after writing a sentence like that? Someone who shouldn't try to review work that is so far beyond his crabbed, simplistic, self-righteous understanding.