AI Summary
5 min readThis is why they hate Lord of the Rings
The University of Nottingham offers a history module called "Decolonizing Tolkien and Others" that teaches students J.R.R. Tolkien's treatment of evil characters "follows a tradition of anti-African antipathy." The module's core text argues that orcs and other dark-skinned characters in The Lord of the Rings are "victims of ethnic chauvinism." As Asmongold puts it: "The first thing that I think of whenever I see Sauron is like, ah, an African. I guess Tolkien must be racist."
The central argument: cultural demolition, not scholarship
The episode's dominant claim is that modern activists and academics are not engaged in genuine literary criticism but in a project of cultural destruction. Asmongold quotes a post from the account Culture Explorer: "The goal isn't to re-examine the past, it's to poison it, to strip stories of their meaning until they become something you're ashamed to love." The argument is that these attacks follow a pattern: first redefine words, then rewrite history, then tell people what they're allowed to believe. Tolkien is just "one more monument to tear down."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:16) **The Core Thesis: Why Activists Target Tolkien** - Asmongold introduces the central argument: that modern activists and academics hate Tolkien because of his conservative values and the threat his work poses to their ideology.
- 2 (01:34) **The "Racist" Accusation: Orcs as a Racial Metaphor** - Asmongold reacts to a headline from *The Telegraph* about a university course claiming Tolkien's evil characters follow a "tradition of anti-African antipathy."
- 3 (02:49) **The Rings of Power as a Case Study** - Asmongold points to Amazon's *The Rings of Power* as the catalyst that made the attacks on Tolkien "demonstrably worse."
- 4 (05:09) **The "DEI" Indicator and Its Implications** - Asmongold presents his opinion that any hint of DEI in an adaptation is a strong indicator of low quality.
- 5 (07:56) **The "Astroturfed" Problem and the Unimportant Critics** - Asmongold dismisses the entire apparatus of academic and media criticism as a tiny, manufactured minority.
- 6 (10:22) **The University of Nottingham Course: "Decolonizing Tolkien"** - Asmongold attacks a specific history module at the University of Nottingham titled "Decolonizing Tolkien and Others."
- 7 (12:55) **Refuting the Charge with Tolkien's Own Lore** - Asmongold uses the professor's own writing to dismantle the accusations of racism.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
This is why they hate Lord of the Rings.. Asmongold podcast for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more.
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