Magic the Gathering is releasing a new Lord of the Rings deck, and one of the cards will be Aragorn. But when card art revealed that this Aragorn would be portrayed as black, the usual arguments erupted.
Magic the Gathering recently unveiled a new deck called The Lord of the Rings: The Tales of Middle Earth. Fans were ecstatic about the collab, until the Aragorn card was revealed, portraying him as black. At this point, civil war broke out.
Most LotR fans don't care, but there will always be those who are infuriated by such a change (we should expect these arguments to pop up again with the new spinoff movies, sadly).
So, we've done a quick deep dive into the lore for you. Spoiler alert: Aragorn could be black, and Tolkien wouldn't have cared either way.
- If you can accept a multi-racial cast in a Tolkien show, check out the Rings of Power on Prime with a 30-day free trial .
Is Aragorn Black In The Source Material?
Not really, but it's never clearly stated, and it's certainly possible. In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien only vaguely describes Aragorn's physical appearance:
...a shaggy head of dark hair flecked with grey, and in a pale stern face a pair of keen grey eyes.
But we know that Aragorn is one of the Dúnedain, and they are described in this way in the Silmarillion:
...and they were tall, taller than the tallest of the sons of Middle Earth; and the light of their eyes was like bright stars. But their numbers increased only slowly in the land, for their daughters and sons were born to them, fairer than their fathers, yet their children were few.
Based on both descriptions all we can deduce is that Aragorn is tall, fair, and has beautiful eyes.
However, if we're willing to accept the works of the author's son, Christopher Tolkien, as lore-compliant, then we do have sources that suggest black people existed in Middle Earth for a very long time. As Christopher writes in The Peoples of Middle Earth, one of the tribes of the Edain (prehistoric men) was racially diverse:
There were fair-haired men and women among the Folk of Bëor, but most of them had brown hair (going usually with brown eyes), and many were less fair in skin, some indeed being swarthy.
It could therefore be possible that one or more of Aragorn's ancestors could have come from the House of Bëor and through them, he inherited a darker skin tone. Which would be uncommon for one of the Dúnedain, but not impossible based on the source material.
This is a bit more tenuous than black hobbits, which do explicitly exist in Tolkien's own writing, but never let someone tell you that black Aragorn goes completely against the lore as written. There's nothing in the text that rules out this possibility.
- We highly recommend The Peoples of Middle Earth . It's not as expensive as it once was thanks to a new Kindle edition, and it's an essential companion for anyone venturing deeper into the Legendarium.
Does This Even Matter?
On the balance of probability, and given his explicit aim of making a "truly English epic", Tolkien probably was imagining a white character. But ultimately the races of men are unimportant in LotR. The most interesting comparisons within Tolkien are always made between races, not within them. And as we know from his 1938 letter to Berlin publishing house Rütten & Loening, Tolkien found racial theories to be "pernicious and unscientific".
So if you respect the works and the author, don't waste your time worrying about the color of Aragorn's skin. Tolkien never did. Instead, remember Aragorn in the way the author intended, as immortalized in the Appendix to the Return of the King:
Then a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him in wonder; for they saw that the grace of his youth, and the valour of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.
Youth, valour, wisdom, and majesty.
Our condolences to those of you who were waiting for Gollum, but there are other games this year that might scratch your fantasy itch: