[Kalimac]

Finwe - Hey, it's nice to know somebody else thought that too . And I tend to agree about the "mythos" aspect - Tolkien was trying to create a myth for England, so naturally it'll be centered around people who look like the English, and the foes and foreigners (not always the same thing) will look different. If you read myths and old stories from other geographical regions, the central figures always look like the people telling the story. In the book of Dede Korkut, for example, the beautiful heroines inevitably have lovely eyes of perfect almond-shape, because they're Asiatic. The enemies vary in colour. And so forth. In a way such stories transcend offensiveness; they aren't so much "racist" or "not racist" as simply outside of racism altogether. They're just telling their own stories (whose else could they tell?) and in the days when travel was risky and seldom-done, the heroes of your own story were inevitably going to look like you. <P>TolkienGurl - If they're complaining about lack of women in LOTR, I can't wait to see the reaction if "The Hobbit" gets made. Scads of characters, and not one woman with a speaking role from beginning to end. (Come to think of it, not one woman is named who's still even alive when the story begins!) But I'm a girl who's loved "The Hobbit" since she was eight, and never noticed its complete freedom from females until rather recently. Guess I can't have been too traumatized .