It may also be possible that the future will hold us responsible for something that we are very proud of today. I recently re-read "The Lord of the Rings" and was surprised at the racist / eugenic undertones, which unfortunately date the book to some degree. One person's chief virtue is that he's of unadulterated blood, some nation is declining because of mixing of the races etc. Unbelievable as it may seem today, people once held racism and segregation as noble ideals. What will our time be known as - the age of political correctness, maybe?
Tolkien explicitly denied that anything in the Lord of the Rings was intended to be directly allegorical. As I recall, the books don't talk about mixing races in the sense of subdivisions of humanity; they talk about things like mixing men and orcs, so it's not really the same as miscegenation.
edit: Apparently I didn't recall well enough. Oh well.
Yes they do. Aragorn is of the purest race of Westernesse, and his special abilities are in good part based on this. The subjects of prince Imrahil are sadly mixed in race, although the prince himself is of rather pure breed, etc. It's not about this being an allegory for England or whatever, it's about the general world view and the things that are considered noble and admirable.
Which reminds me that some of the comments in the book are made through the eyes of the characters. Of course enemy foreigners would seem "orcish" to a hobbit, because for him orc means evil and enemy means evil (and for the most part he would be right).
Tolkien isn't racist though in the Aryan sense, for sure - he hated Hitler an thought Jews were the same as everyone else, if not better. In the lore, Aragorn's bloodline was blessed by the Gods, pretty much - like hercules' bloodline. It's not just that he was the right kind of white.
Not exactly. He's pretty clear that dilution of blood happens, and that some races of Men are better then others.
This being said, I don't think it's a bad thing. It may not be a particularly good one, but it's fantasy. You're not supposed to kill orcs, if you really want to be PC. They're highly intelligent and emotional creatures - who happen to have their own seemingly foreign culture.
Well, we still have monarchies and much of the wealth even in modern countries is concentrated in the hands of the heirs of the aristocracy, robber barons and various lineages tracing back to pirates, warlords or other coercive thieves.
