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"Huns" in William Morris's The Roots of the Mountains as forerunners of Tolkien orcs
I did finish The Roots of the Mountains and The House of the Wolfings, and I did get quite interested in the romantic plots and depictions of women fighting in war therein, which certainly do seem to have inspired LOTR. But another issue fascinated me alongside it, namely the orcs.
For context, my opinion, prior to my recent reading of and about these two Morris books, of the whole issue of orcs and goblins in LOTR was that they are essentially racist. I think any attempt to portray a humanoid fantasy species that are inherently evil would be inevitably (with the possible exception of a hypothetical situation where exploring and deconstructing that exact issue was the whole point). I had garnered the impression that the dehumanification of orcs was done with the intention of making it less agonizing/harrowing/tragic, to allow the Good characters to be fighting and killing a depersonalized Evil, but that Tolkien himself (eventually?) even was aware of (? or uncomfortable with?) the implications. (I set aside the film portrayal, which made it worse, but I'm just discussing the books here.) But I haven't investigated that issue or the scholarship about it that I recall, just read posts and essays in fandom and online about it. (I know there is scholarship about it, but I haven't looked.)
Recently I did a websearch about William Morris's HOTW/ROTM and discovered (as mentioned in a couple of previous posts) some indications that these books, specifically, had inspired bits of LOTR, and my curiosity determined me to finish wading through the boringness/rhyming poetry of HOTW in order to finally read ROTM. And I read it! Part of what I found in that websearch was the Wikipedia article called William Morris's influence on Tolkien, which is a bit of a grab bag but included this:
And then also, in Graham Seaman's 2003 Introduction to The Roots of the Mountains (also mentioned in a previous post), this:
Therefore, I started reading the book after these two passages with the impression that the "Huns" or Dusky Men of Morris's ROTM were going to be a fantasy race: definitely not human - acting like zombies, incapable of breeding with people (and also inherently evil). Please note: I do not unquestioningly accept that quote from Jordanes and what it is apparently arguing, but I wanted to investigate the matter further myself. But even if I didn't swallow the argument whole, I did still expect this passage to be factual - that is, for the Dusky Men to actually be unambiguously, in the text, a fantasy race, not just human beings, who are inherently evil and all that jazz.
But they aren't.
Surprise!
So now I have to deal with what they actually ARE in the text before I come back to whether Jordanes, et. al. absolves Morris and Tolkien, or to what it could mean.
Are the Huns unambiguously inhuman fantasy monsters? No. Are they like orcs, goblins, or zombies? No. They are described as ugly, short-necked, small-eyed, etc., but none of the physical descriptions go beyond the standard anti-Asian racism discussed so extensively in Said's Orientalism. They are guys who are not as smart or good at fighting as the heroic germanic tribesmen - that's why they formed a stumbling, jostling throng in that quote: because they weren't all drilled and prepared to take up orderly formations and obey the orders of their commanders. They were just panicking. Can they interbreed with humans? Yes. And they do. Are there half-breeds to deal with? Yes. They are either raised as Dusky Men or murdered as infants by them. So, then, is it possible that they are actually human? Again, not really, if you take the testimony of the various characters who relate exposition about them as true (and it is true within the story, I would say), but I don't think that's intentional. Here is a small selection of the most relevant quotations about them:
So to sum up: ROTM's Dusky Men are an all-male, all-warrior parasitical society. All its citizens are warriors who do no other labor, and they keep a proportionally massive enslaved population, whom they abuse egregiously. Their natural children by their captives usually resemble their fathers but not always, and are not infrequently born with severe cognitive disabilities; of the apparently healthy offspring, the male ones are raised as Dusky Men and the female ones murdered. They travel in groups, but they are not nomadic: they look for a comfortable place they can exploit and move in there to stay. Further groups of Dusky Men arrive over time, but this seems to be the result of having exhausted natural resources or grown too numerous for their previous residences, or from being driven out in war.
They very definitely aren't the historical Huns, because they don't fight on horseback, and don't even seem to move their people on horseback, and they don't arrive with herds of livestock. (Also we know the Huns didn't practice universal female infanticide.) (If Wikipedia is to be believed, Jordanes wrote about the Hunnic Altziagiri tribe's summer and winter pasturage in Crimea, so this lack of herding is a deliberate departure on Morris's part: he puts quite a lot into emphasizing the Dusky Men's refusal to do any labor at all, which is certainly his socialism showing. More on this later.) They also very definitely aren't a possible depiction of any other real civilization in history, because of
But given that the Victorian English reader would not find these circumstances implausible, I think they are still compatible with intent to portray a race of people, not a race of orcs or monsters. The Dusky Men do not have any supernatural abilities on the page. The closest to a supernatural origin story is a suggestion raised a couple of times by various characters (in words not too different from the words of Jordanes, quoted in the introduction by Seaward above) that they are the offspring of evil spirits that live in the forest, but there is no real support for this idea except their foreign appearance and extreme evil. And in fact, there is no real reason to suppose that their cruelty is a matter of inherent evil as opposed to cultural values - it doesn't exceed the awfulness of historical enslaver societies.
I'm quite sure Seaward is right that Morris is inspired by Jordanes here, though: I just don't think that Morris is necessarily endorsing the view of the characters who advance this theory. It is not taken up and debated, nor accepted as truth necessarily, by the other characters. I think that Morris, envisioning the society that produced Jordanes' account, simply thought that this explanation was not the sort of explanation that would have been universally accepted within that society.
When you consider that ROTM is a novel from the point of view of the Goths, it is easier to accept that some parts - like the accusations of ugliness - might represent racism on the part of the characters, and not necessarily the author. In other words, the Dusky Men might be intended as a portrayal of a plausible human society of total assholes, whose assholery is in their behavior - enslaving and oppressing other people so that they can be the idle rich, and also sadism and cruelty - and whose appearances are described in all the classic racist cliches from Said's Orientalism because that is, realistically, how medieval central European societies repeatedly described people from Asia. The descriptions are xenophobic and reflective of the worst traditions of Orientalist racism, but they are completely in character for his text, which is essentially a fictional medieval history - it poses as the kind of history composed on the basis of oral folklore, with many appeals to what the fictional oral tradition says, with levels of detail comparable to epic poetry. (Morris was a huge fan of epic poetry and translated a lot of the prose Edda, some of the poetic Edda, Beowulf, and various medieval French romances into English.) Roughly, this book seems to be answering the question, "What if there existed a bundle of orally-transmitted song and poetry about the length of the Iliad about this bit of the history of the Goths (that particular racist one from Jordanes up above, I mean) and the bits around it, and somebody had translated it into graceful and beautiful prose, what might that look like?"
This has accounted for sources and motivations behind a lot of choices here, but it hasn't really settled why his Dusky Men differ in the ways they do from what you might expect of the, you know, horrible enslaving Asian conquering horde in the middle ages. And the answer to all of those whys is probably ultimately "Morris's passionate socialist beliefs", although the connection between those beliefs and the outcome on the page is open to multiple interpretations.
The enslaving Dusky Men's monstrous refusal of labour - which isn't just about becoming social parasites, but is a choice which was inherently destructive of one's moral character and happiness, according to Morris's worldview - is clearly related to socialism. We can detect reflections of growing capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, the oppression of the English working classes, etc. But it's harder to diagnose the universal female infanticide. Is this a choice driven by titillation, essentially - an attempt merely to make them more alien, more horrible? ...No. Spoiler: it's probably because for Morris, socialism includes and implies female equality.
Morris is not a perfect feminist, but his novels, his nonfiction, and his actions as a business owner and political activist were all strongly in support of what we would today call feminism. He believed that women were men's moral and intellectual equals, and his vision of a future socialist utopia is one of full gender equality. In his socialist fantasies women and men share equally in the joyful, physically and morally edifying physical labor of agriculture and figure equally as masters of all the arts and crafts; in his medieval pastiche novels women figure as heroes, warriors and decision-makers, though not always to the same degree. So. That's probably why. Maybe I'll have figured out a theory to explain the connection better by the time I've written the other essay I need to write about the women warriors and politicians in this book.
For context, my opinion, prior to my recent reading of and about these two Morris books, of the whole issue of orcs and goblins in LOTR was that they are essentially racist. I think any attempt to portray a humanoid fantasy species that are inherently evil would be inevitably (with the possible exception of a hypothetical situation where exploring and deconstructing that exact issue was the whole point). I had garnered the impression that the dehumanification of orcs was done with the intention of making it less agonizing/harrowing/tragic, to allow the Good characters to be fighting and killing a depersonalized Evil, but that Tolkien himself (eventually?) even was aware of (? or uncomfortable with?) the implications. (I set aside the film portrayal, which made it worse, but I'm just discussing the books here.) But I haven't investigated that issue or the scholarship about it that I recall, just read posts and essays in fandom and online about it. (I know there is scholarship about it, but I haven't looked.)
Recently I did a websearch about William Morris's HOTW/ROTM and discovered (as mentioned in a couple of previous posts) some indications that these books, specifically, had inspired bits of LOTR, and my curiosity determined me to finish wading through the boringness/rhyming poetry of HOTW in order to finally read ROTM. And I read it! Part of what I found in that websearch was the Wikipedia article called William Morris's influence on Tolkien, which is a bit of a grab bag but included this:
Morris describes the Dusky Men as "long-armed like apes", "as foul as swine", fighting with crooked swords, and forming "a stumbling jostling throng".[24] Massey comments that their nature is dehumanised, so they can be slaughtered "with impunity", and that Tolkien modelled the Orcs on them.[24]
[24] Massey 2007, pp. 130–132.
Massey, Kelvin Lee (2007). The Roots of Middle-Earth: William Morris's Influence upon J. R. R. Tolkien. University of Tennessee (PhD thesis).
And then also, in Graham Seaman's 2003 Introduction to The Roots of the Mountains (also mentioned in a previous post), this:
In Tolkien's case the Orcs are, literally, both inhuman and instruments of evil; they are also ugly, malformed, and killed in large numbers without compassion. The description has led to accusations of racism (against whom is not clear). Morris describes his Huns as "[s]hort of stature, crooked legged, long armed, very strong for their size: with small blue eyes, snubbed-nosed, wide-mouthed, thin-lipped, very swarthy of skin, exceeding foul of favour[...]" [and] makes them unable to breed with the Goths, and similarly has them killed in large numbers without compassion. He has as a result also been accused of racism:There are, in short, no "half-breeds" to complicate the issue. In this convenient thesis one may well see a reflection of theories during the spread of the British Empire to prevent infiltration of the rulers by the ruled [1]
[1] Goths and Huns: the rediscovery of the Northern Cultures in the nineteenth century, T.A.Shippey, 6th International Symposium on the Mediaeval Legacy, Odense 1981.
Quite apart from the improbability of this thesis applied to a man a large proportion of whose life at the time consisted of speeches and writings against the iniquities of the British Empire, both Tolkien and Morris's descriptions are clearly derived from a nearly contemporary Gothic historian:Filimer, king of the Goths ... found among his people certain witches ... he expelled them from the midst of his race and compelled them to wander in solitary exile afar from his army. There the unclean spirits, who beheld them as they wandered through the wilderness, bestowed their embraces upon them and begat this savage race, which dwelt at first in the swamps -- a stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human, and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance to human speech. Such was the descent of the Huns who came to the country of the Goths... They made their foes flee in horror because their swarthy aspect was fearful, and they had, if I may call it so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes.
Jordanes, Origins and Deeds of the Goths [2]
[2] See also Ammianus Marcellinus, History of Rome
But it is also clear that with the Huns Morris is beginning to move away from detailed historical reconstruction towards a more abstract symbolism. The Huns have "[n]o delight in life, no sweet days do they have for themselves, and they begrudge the delights of others therein. Therefore their thralls know no rest or solace; their reward of toil is many stripes, and the healing of their stripes grievous toil."
Therefore, I started reading the book after these two passages with the impression that the "Huns" or Dusky Men of Morris's ROTM were going to be a fantasy race: definitely not human - acting like zombies, incapable of breeding with people (and also inherently evil). Please note: I do not unquestioningly accept that quote from Jordanes and what it is apparently arguing, but I wanted to investigate the matter further myself. But even if I didn't swallow the argument whole, I did still expect this passage to be factual - that is, for the Dusky Men to actually be unambiguously, in the text, a fantasy race, not just human beings, who are inherently evil and all that jazz.
But they aren't.
Surprise!
So now I have to deal with what they actually ARE in the text before I come back to whether Jordanes, et. al. absolves Morris and Tolkien, or to what it could mean.
Are the Huns unambiguously inhuman fantasy monsters? No. Are they like orcs, goblins, or zombies? No. They are described as ugly, short-necked, small-eyed, etc., but none of the physical descriptions go beyond the standard anti-Asian racism discussed so extensively in Said's Orientalism. They are guys who are not as smart or good at fighting as the heroic germanic tribesmen - that's why they formed a stumbling, jostling throng in that quote: because they weren't all drilled and prepared to take up orderly formations and obey the orders of their commanders. They were just panicking. Can they interbreed with humans? Yes. And they do. Are there half-breeds to deal with? Yes. They are either raised as Dusky Men or murdered as infants by them. So, then, is it possible that they are actually human? Again, not really, if you take the testimony of the various characters who relate exposition about them as true (and it is true within the story, I would say), but I don't think that's intentional. Here is a small selection of the most relevant quotations about them:
- a host of aliens, short of stature, crooked of limb, foul of aspect, but fierce warriors and armed full well: they were men having no country to go back to, though they had no women or children with them, as we had when we were young in these lands, but used all women whom they took as their beastly lust bade them, making them their thralls if they slew them not.
- when a Dusky Carle mingles with a woman of the Dale, the child which she beareth shall oftenest favour his race and not hers; or else shall it be witless, a fool natural.
- As to women, they had none of their own race, but lay with the Daleswomen at their will, and begat children of them; and all or most of the said children favoured the race of their begetters. Of the men-children they reared most, but the women-children they slew at once; for they valued not women of their own blood: but besides the women of the Dale, they would go at whiles in bands to the edges of the Plain and beguile wayfarers, and bring back with them thence women to be their bed-thralls [...]
So to sum up: ROTM's Dusky Men are an all-male, all-warrior parasitical society. All its citizens are warriors who do no other labor, and they keep a proportionally massive enslaved population, whom they abuse egregiously. Their natural children by their captives usually resemble their fathers but not always, and are not infrequently born with severe cognitive disabilities; of the apparently healthy offspring, the male ones are raised as Dusky Men and the female ones murdered. They travel in groups, but they are not nomadic: they look for a comfortable place they can exploit and move in there to stay. Further groups of Dusky Men arrive over time, but this seems to be the result of having exhausted natural resources or grown too numerous for their previous residences, or from being driven out in war.
They very definitely aren't the historical Huns, because they don't fight on horseback, and don't even seem to move their people on horseback, and they don't arrive with herds of livestock. (Also we know the Huns didn't practice universal female infanticide.) (If Wikipedia is to be believed, Jordanes wrote about the Hunnic Altziagiri tribe's summer and winter pasturage in Crimea, so this lack of herding is a deliberate departure on Morris's part: he puts quite a lot into emphasizing the Dusky Men's refusal to do any labor at all, which is certainly his socialism showing. More on this later.) They also very definitely aren't a possible depiction of any other real civilization in history, because of
- the physically impossible idea that there could be "races" whose children together would very frequently be born with severe cognitive (or other) disabilities (this part is certainly an artefact of eugenics, which was so dominant in the science of Morris's era: he probably wasn't even aware that this was impossible OR that it was racist, so widely accepted was eugenics in Victorian England)
- the highly implausible idea of a large society built on a long-term pattern of universal female infanticide (as far as I can tell, there is no record of a human society with a practice of universal female infanticide - it's been widespread, but that's not the same as universal; but it was very common in China and parts of India in the 19th century, an issue which was known in England and may have provided Morris's inspiration).
But given that the Victorian English reader would not find these circumstances implausible, I think they are still compatible with intent to portray a race of people, not a race of orcs or monsters. The Dusky Men do not have any supernatural abilities on the page. The closest to a supernatural origin story is a suggestion raised a couple of times by various characters (in words not too different from the words of Jordanes, quoted in the introduction by Seaward above) that they are the offspring of evil spirits that live in the forest, but there is no real support for this idea except their foreign appearance and extreme evil. And in fact, there is no real reason to suppose that their cruelty is a matter of inherent evil as opposed to cultural values - it doesn't exceed the awfulness of historical enslaver societies.
I'm quite sure Seaward is right that Morris is inspired by Jordanes here, though: I just don't think that Morris is necessarily endorsing the view of the characters who advance this theory. It is not taken up and debated, nor accepted as truth necessarily, by the other characters. I think that Morris, envisioning the society that produced Jordanes' account, simply thought that this explanation was not the sort of explanation that would have been universally accepted within that society.
When you consider that ROTM is a novel from the point of view of the Goths, it is easier to accept that some parts - like the accusations of ugliness - might represent racism on the part of the characters, and not necessarily the author. In other words, the Dusky Men might be intended as a portrayal of a plausible human society of total assholes, whose assholery is in their behavior - enslaving and oppressing other people so that they can be the idle rich, and also sadism and cruelty - and whose appearances are described in all the classic racist cliches from Said's Orientalism because that is, realistically, how medieval central European societies repeatedly described people from Asia. The descriptions are xenophobic and reflective of the worst traditions of Orientalist racism, but they are completely in character for his text, which is essentially a fictional medieval history - it poses as the kind of history composed on the basis of oral folklore, with many appeals to what the fictional oral tradition says, with levels of detail comparable to epic poetry. (Morris was a huge fan of epic poetry and translated a lot of the prose Edda, some of the poetic Edda, Beowulf, and various medieval French romances into English.) Roughly, this book seems to be answering the question, "What if there existed a bundle of orally-transmitted song and poetry about the length of the Iliad about this bit of the history of the Goths (that particular racist one from Jordanes up above, I mean) and the bits around it, and somebody had translated it into graceful and beautiful prose, what might that look like?"
This has accounted for sources and motivations behind a lot of choices here, but it hasn't really settled why his Dusky Men differ in the ways they do from what you might expect of the, you know, horrible enslaving Asian conquering horde in the middle ages. And the answer to all of those whys is probably ultimately "Morris's passionate socialist beliefs", although the connection between those beliefs and the outcome on the page is open to multiple interpretations.
The enslaving Dusky Men's monstrous refusal of labour - which isn't just about becoming social parasites, but is a choice which was inherently destructive of one's moral character and happiness, according to Morris's worldview - is clearly related to socialism. We can detect reflections of growing capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, the oppression of the English working classes, etc. But it's harder to diagnose the universal female infanticide. Is this a choice driven by titillation, essentially - an attempt merely to make them more alien, more horrible? ...No. Spoiler: it's probably because for Morris, socialism includes and implies female equality.
Morris is not a perfect feminist, but his novels, his nonfiction, and his actions as a business owner and political activist were all strongly in support of what we would today call feminism. He believed that women were men's moral and intellectual equals, and his vision of a future socialist utopia is one of full gender equality. In his socialist fantasies women and men share equally in the joyful, physically and morally edifying physical labor of agriculture and figure equally as masters of all the arts and crafts; in his medieval pastiche novels women figure as heroes, warriors and decision-makers, though not always to the same degree. So. That's probably why. Maybe I'll have figured out a theory to explain the connection better by the time I've written the other essay I need to write about the women warriors and politicians in this book.
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