Britain has experienced more immigration, more demographic change, in the past fifty years than in the previous 1,000 years—since the Norman Conquest in 1066. Ah. So when does the reaction set in? There’s got to be a reaction, the English will push back—got to, eventually; stands to reason. So goes the refrain, quite a Newtonian refrain; and it is customary to then quote that old fraud Kipling, “When the Saxon began to hate…”. The Saxon is never going to hate, for the Saxon is really a Hobbit—and Hobbits are not hateful (“No, sir, Mr. Frodo, sir, if we can just see our way back to the Shire I reckon it will all work out well in the end.” [Frodo, weakly] “Yes, Sam, I know, I know.”).
It is not my intention to turn this into “The Lord of the Rings blog”, even if I seem to reference LotR every two posts or so; and I am not a fan—you know what a LotR fan looks like; he looks like Peter Jackson, the film director who translated LotR onto the screen so well two decades ago—Jackson is a Hobbit personified; he was made to create those films, no doubt. I have hardly read the books properly—read them relatively late in life as a cynical teenager—and really rely on the films for my sense of LotR. As previously noted, if you gave me a choice between escapist films—science fiction or fantasy—I would choose science fiction every time. I am not a natural denizen of Hobbiton—I prefer things to be a bit cooler and clinical; really, I prefer a black hole.
I return to LotR because it provides a robust guide mythological thought and also, in this case, to British sociology—genuine sociology, not the stuff taught at universities and FE Colleges. At heart, Britain is a tri-racial country composed from Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Normans. This situation has become obscured as we shifted to a non-European multiracial society, increasingly there is just the Americanised category “white”—“white British” on the census—which could eventually prospectively encompass Poles, Ukrainians, and anyone who fits this rather vague category which is definitely-not-biological-totally-cultural-but-we-know-what-you-mean-really nudge, wink, wink (“Sorry, what are you on about?”).
For the racial connoisseur, Britain was always “multi-racial”—the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Normans all constituted recognised groups; for the American or American-trained administrator they are just “white people”, like what we have back in the States—people who eat bland food, or something; and in a multiracial, democratised, and Americanised society where people take their educational and media lead from America those categories begin to operate in Britain. After all, how does a London-born Somali orient himself with his Nike trainers and American rap on Spotify?…A PoC, no doubt—if he makes it to university.
Yet if there had never been a mass immigration policy, the tri-racial division—its ethnic divisions between English, Gaelic, and Welsh—would be more visible and more widely discussed, as always was. LotR neatly sums it up: the Hobbits are the English—the Anglo-Saxons who want to live in their little Shire, cosy people who like to smoke their pipes and drink beer; not great adventurers, not great lookers—sort of sandal-wearers with hair growing out of their ear holes, but sociable and with well-stocked larders. Really, men who very much resemble…the director Peter Jackson.
Hang on, didn’t the English conquer ¼ of the world? What’s all this about amiable country folk wandering about their Hobbit holes in their socks? Did “the English” conquer the world, though—or was it, in fact, “the French”? Sorry, wat they’re white; it’s totally the same thing, right? Look at Boris Johnson, though. Look at Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson—who is he, really? A Frenchman—or, to be precise, a Norman; a Nord, a Northman, who speaks French. Who conquered the world again? The Nordics, the Aryans—the British Empire was described as “a vast outdoor relief system for the children of the upper classes”. Spare son at a loose end? Not an heir, not vicar material? Off he goes to be a District Commissioner up the Zambezi. The English really had nothing to do with the Empire, most never left the country and to be a “Little Englander” used to be a Liberal anti-imperialist slogan against Tory imperial ambitions—in the 1990s it was reversed to be an insult, not unlike “gammon” today, against people who wanted out of the EU. When the English say “we hate the French”, they mean the Normans.
Now Johnson is a clever guy, so he is always sure—in keeping with the democratic times—to mention that his grandmama or some distant relative was a Turk (though if you break out the old callipers I am sure this ancienne Johnson would prove to be more racially refined than the average Englishman). The “Turk card” was a good wheeze when Johnson bashed the Muslims during the 2000s, during the War on Terror’s hottest points. He knew he would be called racist, but he always had the old Turkish bloodline as an ace in the hole. Also, the professional class and upper class get off on these antics: “Really, Boris—you are a scream, simply too much. A Turk. Very good. Haw. Haw.”
In LotR, the Normans are the Elves: these very tall pale-skinned white-haired ultra-warriors who are skilled in magic and warfare and look down on all the other races in Middle Earth for being a bit pathetic, selfish, and weak. In other words, the Elves are Aryans—the Normans; just as Geoffrey Fitzsimmons St. Claire Woodclyffe-Brown would say “You belong in my regiment, what?” to John Brown, an Anglo-Saxon locksmith, as the Great War opened, so too the Elves put together the Fellowship of the Ring to save Middle Earth—though they basically despair that any of the participants, especially the treacherous and weak race of Men, will achieve the objective. As with the Normans, they have a certain affection for their Saxon charges—their batsmen, Frodo and Sam, are like smarter-than-average Cocker Spaniels sent by their masters on an errand (drop ring in Mount Doom).
In line with the Hindu kali-yuga, the Elves in LotR are in the process of leaving Middle Earth for “the far shore” (including Liv Tyler, Sad!); as the world involutes further the higher spiritual powers withdraw to leave it all to Men and their vile machinations—to leave the world to iron and bloody warfare. The Elves are “total bigots” when it comes to mixed marriages—between Elves and Men—and there is a tussle for the Elvish Liv Tyler to give up immortality and be with a man (“Not allow!” calls some Elvish elder from the Crystal City). The general scene: involution, decay.
Hence we are left with Boris Johnson, who is probably the last of his kind—rather decadent, but still with enough spark to quote Homer in the original Greek and undertake Brexit; yet the people with the white hair have substantially withdrawn, only to return with the next Golden Age—the next Conservative PM will be an elite Ghanaian called Gymfay-Marfang, who will have firm opinions about “British values” (whatever they put on the cue screen for him to read).
This situation was noted by Mitchell Heisman, whose epic screed—Suicide Note, 1,905 pages—details the tensions between Anglo-Saxons and Normans (and much else besides). Heisman was the reclusive autistic Jewish son of an engineer; he committed suicide by gunshot (hence, Suicide Note) in the Harvard Yard to “move to the next level”—in other words, he was my kind of people. Heisman was right to highlight the Saxon-Norman divide in Britain—and, indeed, in America; for the tension between Norman Cavaliers and Saxon Puritans is the same all over again.
If you watch Hollywood versions of Robin Hood from the 1930s, you will find much talk about “the Norman yoke” and beastly Normans pillaging decent Saxon yeoman. Heisman perceptively noted that one reason why the Northern Saxons sympathised with blacks so much was that the Saxon perceived himself to be a “nigger” in England—the Normans kept their own language for two hundred years or so, and there were harsher punishments if a Norman was murdered. The Hobbits basically have ressentiment against Norman-Aryan oppression, the Anglo-Saxons think…they’re black.
Well, you know, there he is, Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, still in the saddle 1,000 years later. Perhaps this also explains Anglo feminism and protests about rape culture, ventures Heisman—the Anglos were figuratively raped by the Normans, possibly their women were literally so (prima nocta? #MeToo). Progressive liberalism is a reaction from a quasi-slave class to their impudent masters and their sometime Celtic mercenary allies—Jacobite toughs from the Highlands. Certainly, the Normans are built different—I once dated a Norman with a French middle name, and indeed she was mighty vicious. “Don’t get involved with the aristocracy,” cautioned my mother, they’ll grind you under foot.” Ya-ha.
Indeed, she casually related how a relative owned about all the forest land in South England. The Norman might be in recession, but he still owns the land he conquered 1,000 years ago—and land is real wealth, ultimate wealth. A warrior-aristocracy always has a special relation to where it hunts, shoots, and fishes. “Buy land,” advised my mother—well, not quite achieved yet; however, as noted, it is the substantial wealth. Who owns the land? The Elves, not the Hobbits.
The Saxon is an amiable creature, even in Germany they joke that you can kick the Saxons—the “real” ones—on the leg and they will apologise; ergo, no “revolt of the English”: the English are sheep who have lost—or discarded—their shepherds. The Normans were long ago removed as hereditary peers and administrators. The tri-racial political structure, with a Norman elite in war and politics restrained by an Anglo-Saxon parliament, has vanished.
Gandalf the Wizard is Merlin—and Merlin is the Celtic element in Britain, he predates the Saxons and the Normans. He has few contemporaries, the Celts being thin on the ground—and he speaks to the trees, as did the Druids. In a way, the Celts are to the Anglos as the blacks are to whites America—the wise old spiritual negro and the Celtic bard who knows “the old ways” are the same archetypes, gifted special abilities as subordinate groups. Tolkien’s Dwarves, in a nod to Wagner, are an untrustworthy and money-grubbing race who dwell underground—the Jews.
In recent days, it has been popular among NATOheads to call the Russians “Orcs”—being invaders of the Ukraine. Tolkien’s Orcs and Mordor stand for, as many post-Marxist cultural critics noticed, the USSR—a mechanical society that cuts down trees and grows Orcs in black-magic pits, artificial wombs. “Essentialist racial themes in Lord of the Rings: Tolkien, eurocentrism, and white supremacy” runs a breathless article in European Social Culture (and no strong female characters either—exclusionary heteronormative themes). The Eye of Sauron, clearly representative both of the Kremlin’s single Red Star and the Illuminati’s “evil eye” on the dollar bill, sucks the life force out of the people it touches—it is pure materialism and mechanism, lifeless consumerism and Communism (two sides of the same coin, and both dysgenic).
To call the Russians “Orcs” today is ridiculous: they have toppled Sauron—they even mull a return of the king, of the Royal Oak. Yet NATOheads tell this lie because they serve “the other Sauron”, the other evil tower—the obelisk in Washington. The real “Orc invasion” into Europe—into the realm of Men? The Africans and Arabs who flood through daily thanks to NATO ships. These crafty NATOheads are bewitched by the dark wizard Saruman—his agent Grima Wormtongue whispers lies about “necessary demographic shifts” into the ears of soldiers and kings. (“You mussst cry on camera, Prinsssee Harrry. It will help with the trauma from your mother’s death.”). Be gone, Wormtongue!