What does the sixpence = ?

[davem]

Just in case anyone's interested I found this response to accusations of racism in Tolkien's works.

Some very insightful comments, including:

The good guys in the story are not racially segregated, but representative of various types of social structures. In fact, the good guys' race is incidental, because the "bad guys" in the story are not another race. Sauron is an evil wizard, not a foreigner, and the orcs are elves who were tortured out of their minds and souls until nothing but empty husks remain. They're "black" in the story not because torture somehow robbed the elves of their Caucasianess, but because they're burnt by hellfire and have become creatures of the night.....

As for the "slant-eyed" thing, well the eyes are the windows to the soul, and the fact that today we use more PC terms "shifty-eyed" and "beady-eyed" doesn't mean we get to point fingers at a years-dead author for not knowing the term "slant-eyed" would one day become offensive.