One of Tolkien's letters describes orcs as“squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”
And I was thinking about, 1.) Look at the legs on these Mongolian wrestlers all decked out for a major national wrestling festival, and also 2.) how Tolkien's racist description wasn't enough, and orcs have been depicted as more and more grotesque over time. Canonically orcs more or less just look like humans, but that's not "other" enough so they keep getting turned in to more and more bizarre looking monsters.
Either way, this is what i'm thinking about when i'm laid up with the 'rona. If y'all like wrestling or buff men in tiny pants check out Mongolian wrestling. From what I understand it's a hugely popular sport there and has been for like a thousand years.
This got me thinking about the depiction of Germans as "Huns" by the Brits in WWI. The Brits racializing Germans as asiatic "Huns" is certainly a head scratcher. It's got me wondering what Tolkien thought Mongolians looked like in the context of the ignorance and racism of the 40s-70s. I can't imagine he knew very many Mongolians, so I imagine he was mostly familiar with contemporary racist yellow-peril propaganda. but then it's Tolkien so who knows, guy read a lot. *shrug*
It hadn't occurred to me prior to try to unpack this within the context of then contemporary stereotypes and ignorance. Like it's one thing to know it's racist, but what does that actually mean? Like, what was the racial stereotype he was mired in? What was his exposure to Mongols?
Like, John Wayne kind of notoriously portrayed Chingis Khan in '56, which is as ridiculous as it sounds CW: John Wayne in, I don't even know, yellow-face? The put him in makeup to play Chingis Khan and he looks ridiculous.
Fun fact: he was dying to play that role and he really, literally died because of it, they made that movie in heavy nuclear fallout from bomb test and most of the team including Wayne died from cancer later.
John Wayne also smoked 6 packs of cigarettes a day so that may have been a factor in causing his cancer.
Definitely, since it was lung cancer, but the fallout probably sped things up greatly. And again, a lot of other people died too.