Race in REH and Tolkien: A Brief Comparison

Lars Walker has a review of several works by Robert E. Howard related to his character Solomon Kane. It's a review generally pleased with the subject, but he offers a cautionary note about the handling of race:

Something should probably be said about Howard's handling of race. Solomon Kane is not hostile to the black people he encounters. In fact he often acts as their protector, flying into volcanic rage over injustices and violence visited upon them. But he is patronizing in the extreme. The author's view seems to be that Africans are a lower evolutionary form of human being, soon destined for extinction, and that it's the duty of superior whites to look after them.

It might be interesting to compare his handling of the race issue here with the way it is handled in his Conan books, and to contrast how it is handled in Tolkien. Clearly REH was excited by the idea of race as an explanation for cultural differences -- so, it should be said, was almost everyone of a scientific mindset in the early 20th century. The world of Conan reads almost like an attempt to catalog the legitimate races in REH's opinion, and show how their racial characteristics persist over tens of thousands of years.

And so you get (as you do in Tolkien, for reasons he manages to slide out of a race-based concept) a notion of High Men, Middle Men, and Low Men. But whereas Tolkien assumes a kind of basic human nature to which the High Men are always falling, but to which the Low Men might aspire, REH thinks the categories are permanent. Conan is a barbarian but a High Man because his blood is of ancient Atlantis. Tolkien's High Men (also of an island kingdom, Numenor) are High because of their friendship with the elves: only a very few of them have any admixture of actual elvish blood. Their fall -- expressed in terms of a loss of physical height, and length of years, but also in terms of a collapse of knowledge -- is cultural, resulting from a turning away from the elves (who, in turn, are High or Low depending on their friendship with the next highest rank in the Chain of Being, the Ainur, better known as Maiar or, in the case of the higher ones, Valar).

Another way of expressing this would be to say that, in Tolkien, you can rise or fall through friendship: and not just any friendship, but a kind of hierarchical friendship with those who stand in a closer relationship to the divine. When that friendship fails -- and it is friendship, a kind of love, even though one side is meant to guide and the other to be guided in how to actualize the divine order -- the fall occurs. And they have fallen farthest who have fallen under the dominion of Melkor, or later Sauron, powers that utterly reject and defy the divine order. These are sometimes (but far from always, and in fact not usually) black men "from Far Harad." There aren't any counterexamples of "good" black men in Tolkien, but one suspects there might have been: his literary structure is such that they should have improved or fallen on the same terms as others.

That contrasts sharply with REH's vision, but it is worth noticing that REH's vision isn't "evolution," either. There isn't any substantial evolution going on in the races he envisions. The ones that Conan encounters in his analog to sub-Saharan Africa are exactly the same as REH's worst ideas about the blacks down the road in his modern South (who appear in a collection of American stories, in which they are similarly more bestial, and more easily swayed by the darker powers and aspects of human nature than those descended from what REH calls, in his poem about King Kull, "high Atlantis").

Yet friendship is possible, though it brings no benefits to either party. Conan is a great friend to one of the black kings, so much so that they rule for a while together as brother kings of a tribe. In the end, though, the pull of the darker powers of the universe sways the people out from under both of them, so that his brother-king is murdered by his own people and Conan nearly so.

So I don't take REH's view to be that blacks are "a lower evolutionary form of human being," but rather a lower form per se. He believes that race is real, and as immutable by evolution as by any other process.

He still believes that it is possible to be unjust to them, or to befriend them (though it remains perilous to be close to them). It's a permanent condition, a feature of the world that a million years will never change. That's a pessimistic view, neither scientific nor religious, but one he levered for its literary force.