Why Andy Serkis Is Wrong: The Shire, Middle-earth, and the Myth of Whiteness in Tolkien's World

Andy Serkis said, when asked by the BBC why the announced cast of The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum is, so far, entirely white, that the cast so far is Jamie Dornan, Anya Taylor-Joy, Kate Winslet, Lee Pace and Leo Woodall, alongside Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen returning, to the question, the film’s director gave this answer:

"Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology; there's a lot of that feeling. The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know…"

The BBC noted that he tails off there, pauses, and then continues with greater certainty:

“They’re not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of The Shire, but they know they don’t want people coming in.”

Serkis accepted that “there have been criticisms,” said the film would be “somewhat acknowledging that,” and insisted he would not be making a “politically correct” version by casting to “tick boxes.” In his phrase: diversity “where relevant.”

Favourably, maybe he misspoke. But his invoking of ‘political correctness’ moments later means we must look at this most unfavourably. Andy Serkis spoke in a moment unguarded; the pause and the rephrasing read into how he views the Shire, and probably all of Middle-earth, as a construction of white characters and whiteness.

Does he believe this explicitly? We are less sure. But honestly, holding this view, consciously or unconsciously, is pernicious, and its influence on the next instalment of The Lord of the Rings is a betrayal of the author’s belief. The claim itself is wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that matters

Firstly, who could imagine a Norse god not being white? We don’t have to imagine. Idris Elba played Heimdall, the whitest of all the Norse gods, the literal “whitest of the Æsir” in the Eddas, and he was magnificent. When he was cast in 2011, racists organised a boycott of Thor over it.

The racists lost. Heimdall became one of the best-loved characters in Marvel’s Asgard across four films, including arguably the best film outside of an Avengers movie in Thor: Ragnarok. Heimdall was so loved by fans that his character’s loss was an emotionally devastating start to Avengers: Infinity War, the seventh-highest-grossing film of all time.

Are you telling me Elba doesn’t feel like a Norse god in those movies? Of course he does. The “Norse mythology” argument was tested in public, at scale, and it lost. Norse influence is an undisputed fact about Tolkien’s source material. However, it is not a casting mandate. Treating a mythological inheritance, which was Tolkien's inspiration, as an enforcement of ethnic and racial casting is, frankly, an absurd leap.

Serkis invokes Tolkien, so let’s consult the man himself. In his famous letter to the publisher Milton Waldman, Tolkien laid out his ambition to create a body of legend he could dedicate to England: a mythology for a country he felt had none of its own. The Silmarillion creates that mythology, and is a masterpiece of epic proportions. The Lord of the Rings is one story within Tolkien’s much wider literary invention, the most important story in the Legendarium, but the basis for that mythology, England, is not a basis to say Tolkien intended a body of work to be exclusionary to those in England at that time forever; that is not how mythology works nor does it align with what Tolkien himself stated at the time.

Tolkien despised racism with unusual venom for his era. When a German publisher in 1938 asked whether he was “Aryan” before translating The Hobbit, Tolkien drafted a contemptuous reply, pointing out that the term properly refers to Indo-Iranian peoples, and adding that he regretted that he could claim no ancestors among the Jewish people, whom he called gifted. He raged at Hitler for perverting “that noble northern spirit” he loved. The twisting of the Norse inheritance into race politics is not an application of Tolkien’s vision. It is the exact corruption he named and hated in his own lifetime.

If Tolkien were alive today, the Shire would represent the England of the home counties, where I was born. Modern England is home to people of many races, and the colour of your skin has nothing to do with how English you are. It should therefore have no basis for who should inhabit the Shire. I find any assertion otherwise wholly wrong.

Tolkien, I believe, would see his mythology flow into the present, and that mythology would reflect the world and England as it stands, today. The Legendarium is a gorgeous assembly of story it crafts a world, a universe, but if it is static to its period, it loses all life. It is the exact opposite of what Tolkien wanted. He wanted a mythology for England, and that mythology flows to the present. Never would he command the skin of all characters within a region of Middle-earth to be set in stone. When Oromë rides to the newly awakened Elves at Cuiviénen, it is not whiteness that one feels or thinks, but awe and wonder.

The Shire is similarly not about ‘whiteness’; it is about a feeling. It is a passion for food, hearth and home, a hearty meal, and perhaps an interest in the brewing of fresh amber ale (uncarbonated, often just below room temperature, my personal favourite, and frustratingly unavailable in Sydney, Australia, where I write this).

The Shire is potatoes pulled from the earth, growing things; Tolkien was inspired by local allotments in the Home Counties, where people grow vegetables in shared spaces. Such an allotment lay across the road to my childhood home, where I grew up; an allotment where many people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds grew carrots, parsnips, and beetroots. Is Master Hamfast, in giving Bilbo advice “in the matter of ‘roots’, especially potatoes,” somehow connected to whiteness? No. The Shire is a homely warmth, like a hug from a loved one, with a splash of green grass outside. Contentment is the Shire. The Shire is, possibly, what the Danes aptly describe as Hygge; the Shire is, as Bilbo says in Peter Jackson’s first entry, the desire for a peaceful life.

England’s national treasures come from everywhere, such as Ian Wright: proud England footballer, universally beloved Englishman, son of Jamaican parents of the Windrush generation; the people who came from Britain’s former colonies and helped rebuild the country after the war. In Tolkien’s own lifetime, millions from those colonies fought in that war; India alone raised the largest volunteer army in history. The people who came to the UK as a consequence of British imperialism, those from former colonies, and the millions who have followed since, whose children have been born and raised as British, who live in the English countryside, who go to school amongst the rolling hills that the Shire transports you to, are as British as a good cup of tea (which, for the record, originally came from China, and then from Indian plantations). Even the most quintessentially English things, like tea, are made in the world, not in an exclusionary boundary.

Those who would extract Tolkien and drip him into the mixture of poisonous exclusionary nationalism that has overtaken the public discourse in the USA, Australia, and the UK, through such odious individuals as Farage, are anti-Tolkien. So are the billionaires like Peter Thiel, who have undergone an act of cultural theft by naming their arms businesses after Tolkien artefacts like the Palantír and Andúril.

Myths survive by adaptation, and Tolkien’s Legendarium is no different. In the book, it is not Arwen who races Bilbo to Rivendale and faces down the Ringwraiths, but the adaptation Jackson makes in his film doesn’t simply work; it is beautiful, iconic, and some may argue an improvement on the source material itself.

It is the success of these films that led me to read Tolkien extensively. Without that adaptation, would I have arrived at Númenor or Gondolin? Would I have read all 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth without Jackson’s adaptation? No. This is how legends live on: each generation finds itself in them, finds new ways to portray them, sees new ways to roam the forest of Fangorn. Mythology lives as an eternal feeling, which is exactly the achievement of Tolkien's work. He created a mythology, and myths move like puffs of pipe weed in the air; they shape those who read and absorb them, and are subsequently reshaped by those who retell them. As our heroes forge ahead, walking atop the path of Caradhras, the colour of their skin has nothing to do with the fight and freeze of the Hobbits in the snow, and if stories do not adapt, they go quiet, and they die. Saying the Shire feels white is like saying Asgard feels white. I suppose it could, if that’s how you choose to imagine it, but how dull.

Tolkien had more imagination than almost anyone who has ever lived. Among contemporary storytellers, perhaps only Hayao Miyazaki matches him, and Miyazaki has drawn on nations and peoples from across the world while despising exclusive nationalism, as Tolkien did.

Serkis says diversity, “where relevant”; some might say that sounds reasonable until you notice it’s circular. Relevance is determined by the world you’re able to imagine. If you imagine the Shire as white, diversity will never be “relevant” to it. The limits of the casting are the limits of the director’s imagination, dressed up as fidelity. Serkis is showing an incredible lack of imagination.

There is a context for all this. When The Rings of Power cast actors of colour across Middle-earth, the abuse became so vicious that the cast issued a joint statement condemning the relentless racism and harassment directed at their colleagues, stating plainly that Middle-earth is not all white.

A loud fringe has spent years trying to appropriate Tolkien for ethnic nationalism, the ideology he explicitly loathed.

When the director of the next Lord of the Rings film says the Shire “feels very white,” he hands those people a gift, whatever his intent.

And Serkis, of all people, should know better. He was cast to great effect in Black Panther, and said himself in 2018 that being one of the few white actors on that set gave him a more personal understanding of what it feels like to be a minority in this industry. He has seen, from the inside, what representation does. Which makes this worse, not better. His performance in that movie was memorable and shows that even limited representation, when done right, can have a great effect. To cut off any chance of that by making such a sad assertion that the Shire feels white is simply not true; it is also hurtful to all those who visit Hobbiton in New Zealand. Should those who work at that tourist attraction also all be white to make sure the feeling of the visit is authentic? A tourist attraction that sits on tribal land and pays homage to Ngāti Hauā.  

The casting isn’t final; more names may yet be announced, and the film’s promise to “somewhat acknowledge” the criticism may prove meaningful. I hope it does. I like Andy Serkis; I liked his acting, and I hope he can use this opportunity to act and change course. I do not want to condemn or cancel Serkis; quite the opposite: I want him to understand why his reasoning is flawed, because the logic he offers cannot stand. If his Shire feels very white, that is, at best, a failure of his imagination, and at worst, a slide into the racist stereotyping that Tolkien himself would have despised.

The Lord of the Rings, the Shire, and Middle-earth are for everyone.