anna_wing

A friend asked me once why no-one in the Fellowship of the Ring ever caught a cold while slogging over half of Middle-earth in very sub-optimal conditions. I thought about it and told her that it was because the Fellowship consisted of several different mostly non-interbreeding species, (though obviously of the same genus). And a pony. None of them was likely to have had any diseases in common, except the Hobbits, who had by then been isolated from any other Hobbits for a substantial time, and the two Men, who were from canonically genetically superior stock (superior longevity, physical strength and endurance, and some degree of psychic power) and presumably immune to the common cold.

Working out their names was fun:

Elf Homo stellatus;
Dwarf (Homo aulii);
A Numenorean Man (Homo sapiens var numenorensis);
Aragorn, a hybrid of Numenorean-Elf-and-goddess (Homo sapiens var. numenorensisXcaelestis, 'Melian' strain;
Hobbits (Homo hobbitus); and
Gandalf, a minor god in a meat suit (Homo divinus, I suppose, given that there was more than one).

In case it's not obvious, my only acquaintance with Latin is the botanical sort, which would probably make a classicist cry.


Then I realised why I had never liked the term 'races' as used in fantasy. The ones in Middle-earth are clearly different enough to be interpretable as taxonomically separate species. I know that Tolkien did it because that was the vocabulary of his era, and then everyone followed lemming-like, but it really doesn't make a lot of sense, especially in fantasies where characters are completely non-humanoid.

Hobbits are canonically related to Men (I suppose they could interbreed if they really had to, though it's not something I care to contemplate, especially if the Hobbit is the mother). And Elves and Men were canonically the same species physically but not spiritually (Middle-earth being also a dualist universe), and they could in fact produce fertile hybrids. But the difference between a species that lives at the very most (in a relatively very small number of cases) a couple of hundred years and one that could in theory hang around until the sun dies is in my view a big enough quantitative difference to be a qualitative difference. And Dwarves were an entirely separate creation. We'll leave out Orcs for the time being (products of genetic experimentation in the labs of Utumno, obviously).

Using the term "races" makes even less sense when you are in a science fiction universe, or even a space opera one like Star Wars, unless you're using it in the regular intra-species way.