Mythical races

Today I was screwing around on Facebook and took a "what kind of dog are you?" quiz. I was pretty disappointed to get Welsh Corgie, but then my wife, trying to best me, got the same. Whatever breed I would have picked for her, my first pick would have been "not the same as me," because our attitudes appear to both of us to be pretty dissimilar. Apparently not.

Unrelatedly, if that is a legitimate adverb, I was thinking about Lord of the Rings while doing the dishes and what nonhuman race I would be. And then I was struck by how the idea of "race" is so powerfully represented as a real category in LotR. Different "races" share a cognitive spectrum, like all humans do, but have exaggeratedly different phenotypes and, probably because Middle Earth has pre-modern technologies, are essentially monocultures. (I don't know if elves, humans, dwarves, hobbits, etc. can interbreed--I am applying my D&D knowledge to surmise it is possible but for sociohistorical reasons infrequent).

Now, asking what breed of dog I am most like is a fairly innocent question. True, it reifies "breeds" that are historically constructed and which contain individuals of widely varying personalities and temperaments, but since there is almost certailny going to be a gap between the subject's self-image and his/her projected breed, I think the experiment tends to challenge those borders as much as it uses them.

Asking what mythic race one would be strikes me as a little less innocent. Not only do I think race is a more vicious myth than breed, I would go so far as to say that racialist discourse has done more harm to animals than breed. Middle Earth presents race as it appears in the racialist imaginary. But the question might then be a way to move around racialist thinking: to imagine oneself in formally different positions vis-a-vis anthronormativity without the sticky history of stereotypes bogging down the imagination. I don't know. If anyone reading this is nerdy enough to talk Tolkien racialism I'd love some feedback.