Oxonmoot 2024

Does the masculine colonizer transfer its madness to its feminine colonized victim? To answer this, I go beyond the approach of analyzing individualistic decisions of characters in Tolkien’s legendarium. Instead, I view their choices as a symptom of past and current colonization by applying the postcolonial concept of the ‘mad woman’ to collective races and their history in Arda rather than the individual. This study is an attempt to further Tolkien postcolonialism scholarship, specifically regarding Orientalism, while simultaneously moving past the separation of the colonizer and colonized in Tolkien’s legendarium.