Jag har alltid gillat Sagan om ringen (Boken), och tyckt det var rätt fånigt att anklaga den för rasism, med motiveringar som att hjältarna är ljushylta västerlänningar och de onda mörka folkslag från öster ... jag menar, det är en saga, vad kan man vänta sig?

Men på Language Log sätter Mark Liberman fingret på en annan aspekt, mer grundläggande och inte lika klart uttalad: sambandet mellan yttre kännetecken och inre egenskaper (min fetstil):

"In Tolkien's fantasy world, different languages generally belong to different races - elves, dwarves, men, hobbits, orcs and others - who are very different from one another in every other way as well. They look different, they live in different habitats, they do different kinds of work, they are interested in different things, they have different life-spans (elves in particular are immortal), they have different preferred weapons, they live in different kinds of houses and wear different sorts of clothes (...)

Thus Tolkien's races are radically different from one another in biology, language and culture; and across these races,biology, language and culture are well correlated. This was the predominant 19th-century view.

However, even 19th-century scholars in fact knew that biology and language correlate badly if at all. (...) Scientific examination of human physical, linguistic and cultural variation generally does not produce well-defined and well-separated bundles of characteristics corresponding to the categories of "race" and "language", but rather complex geographical and social patterns of graded variation in statistical frequencies of traits.

Nevertheless, people find it very hard to avoid thinking like Tolkien did."
(This is not Middle Earth)

Och detta är naturligtvis precis vad Steiner lärde (Blind Höna: "Reaktionär mysticism är inget alternativ).

Jag gillar fortfarande Midgårds värld. Men Libermans poäng är värd att tänka på.

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