The casting of Latino actor Ismael Cruz Córdova as Arondir, like that of Sir Lenny Henry as a harfoot (not seen in the trailer), raises a point that’s bound to stir up more hoo-hah, though. Jackson’s elves and hobbits are all conspicuously white European, and a few loud twitterati clearly prefer it that way.
There are undoubtedly troubling descriptions in The Lord of the Rings. A suspicious migrant at Bree has “a sallow face with sly, slanting eyes”. Such descriptions hark back to Tolkien’s 19th-century literary roots – his orcs sometimes sound like the medieval Huns as depicted in William Morris’s romances. The Battle of the Pelennor Fields features “black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues”. Tolkien may well have intended this to reflect the views of beleaguered Gondorians rather than his own, but still the line understandably sickens the semi-autobiographical hero of Dominican American author Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
But Tolkien’s depiction of race is much more nuanced than these lines suggest. Actually his mythology involves many different elvish ethnicities, with not much guidance on skin colour. And his harfoots are indeed “browner of skin” than other hobbits. Diversity underpins his stories. So does the need to overcome racial and cultural difference in the face of existential threats to all.
Córdova’s casting suggests that Amazon’s actor choices are not colourblind but colour-conscious. White actors play Galadriel, the young Elrond (Robert Aramayo) and King Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker), who is seen here gazing upward contemplatively from beside dark waters. All these characters come from the dominant elvish tribe, who see themselves as naturally superior to their distant silvan kindred.
A race-conscious approach fits Tolkien’s vision most clearly. One of the key signs of Númenor’s decline is its cruel imperialism, including the treatment of native peoples as if they were wild beasts.
A brief aerial shot of an elven conclave, presumably in Gil-galad’s kingdom of Lindon, plunges us into a breathless sequence of shots.
