Yikes.....I did not know this about Tolkien

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

[Karadeniz]

1. Not good.

[Aristus]

2. Yeah. Not his finest hour.

He did redeem himself somewhat in his reply to the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, by whom he was accused of being Jewish.

Tokien replied that he was not a member of "that gifted race", and then excoriated the Nazi's twisting of the archetype of the Northern pastoral hero (Siegfried, for example) into an icon of white supremacy.

Best to say Tolkien was......complex...I guess...

[AmyStrange]

10. +100000000000000000000000000000000 x 2

[aidbo]

21. Attributing 'good' traits to a race is still racism.

Like when people say ‘all Asians are good at math and science.’

[Aristus]

22. I know.

Like I said, complex.

It's not meant as a rationalization. I truly believe Tolkien was good-hearted. He seems to have been conservative in the old mold, liking the old ways, disliking change, annoyed by noise, chaos, hubbub, and so on.

His environmental views would not be out of place here at DU.

[Hekate]

49. In other words, a hobbit at heart

He always knew that, I think.

[Mike 03]

24. This article in the Forward discusses this too. Very interesting.

Tolkien, a devout Catholic who engaged in vigorous theological discussion with C.S. Lewis, a Christian apologist with a Jewish wife, did more than simply rebuff a publisher who overreached. He rejected an invitation to visit Germany in 1938 and was vocally opposed to the Nazi regime, writing in a 1941 letter to his son Michael, “I have in this war a burning private grudge… against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler.” As a professor of Anglo Saxon studies, he loathed the Führer for “ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”

https://forward.com/culture/428414/the-secret-jewish-history-of-lord-of-the-rings/

[BannonsLiver]

31. Everyone we admire is complex

I think those who attempt to judge long dead people like Tolkien by today’s standards are on a fools errand bound for disappointment. Mandela, Lincoln, FDR and on and on have some things in their past that we might frown upon today. And years from now our leaders and public figures will be judged as lacking in some areas by future standards. That’s just the way it is, and always has been.

[Aristus]

33. I agree.

n/t

[ananda]

3. It appears JK Rowling did the same thing.

Not a fine hour for her either.

[AmyStrange]

18. I kind I have the same problem she has...

-

I'm not making excuses, but growing up with each sex having it's own specific identify, it was hard to adjust to this new reality.

I'm not against any of it in the least, and that helped, but it's still been difficult, especially as a writer.

ETA: Although, replying to post here (where sex isn't immediately apparent) has helped to fine tune that skill a little.
==========

[Withywindle]

41. Aside from her transphobia, which is awful

The goblins in the Harry Potter books match up with a lot of anti-Semitic stereotypes. Tolkien, ok, product of his time, but JKR is contemporary and should know better.

[oioioi]

4. Possibly the most over-rated writer ever. Volumes of dreck.

[Tommymac]

27. Your opinion. Mine is Tolkien was a brilliant writer and student of language.

[LastDemocratInSC]

35. The Harvard Lampoon parody "Bored of the Rings" is funny

With characters named Pepsi, Moxie and Dildo.

[ornotna]

38. I read that in the early/mid 70's

Very funny, too short though.

[LastDemocratInSC]

44. It may have been too short or too long or just right.

Mostly I remember a haze of smoke, coughing, and laughing.

[live love laugh]

5. Damn 😳

[electric_blue68]

6. Woah... Not good at all!

[torius]

7. Roald Dahl too

made some anti-Semitic comments, and Ezra Pound even moreso....

[sweetloukillbot]

11. Watched the new version of "Witches" recently and it got me thinking how anti-semitic the original

The new version tones it down significantly, but the original had the witches with long noses, controlling all the world's money, and eating children.

[Mike 03]

17. I remember how mortified and heartbroken I was to find out

Ernest Hemingway had made anti semitic comments and even written anti semitic poems. Back then, just out of college, he was one of my idols.

And then, a totally different generation, just around that time doubts were being raised about Roger Waters.

[Mike 03]

26. H.L. Mencken too apparently

When his "Diaries" were released there was renewed interest in him and many articles appeared raising the specter of his antisemitism, some passages of which were excised from (later) printings of his books.

Now there's more about it in his Wikipedia entry.

[fishwax]

32. I mean Ezra Pound was on a bit of a different level--he was on the wrong side in WWII and wound up

charged with treason ...

[Hav]

8. If one is very charitable,

one could argue that he might have had some prejudices about jews in his mind while creating the dwarfs but not all of those mentioned negative attributes were based on that, he might have just created certain character traits for the story. But it does sound bad.

[Nitram]

40. The way Tolkien is quoted above, it seems clear he viewed his Dwarves to be inaccurate portrayal

of Jewish character. What is particularly telling is that he pulls a Trump when he says that some of them they are decent enough - if you don't expect too much.

[Binkie The Clown]

9. That makes him no different from almost all his contemporaries.

I understand that this would not be acceptable today, but I hardly see any point in condemning somebody from the past for conforming to the social norms of his time.

Suppose that 50 years from now, perhaps due to global shortages of agricultural land, everyone has become vegans. Does this give those future vegans license to condemn us carnivores of today?

Suppose that 25 years from now nearly everyone drives electric vehicles, and it becomes considered socially irresponsible to drive a fossil fuel powered vehicle. Those in the future are right to condemn their contemporaries in the future. But they do not have license to condemn we who live in their past and who still drive internal combustion vehicles.

Today you may judge me by today's standards. In a hundred years you have no right look back and judge me by the standards of 100 years from now. It's just not right.

[uponit7771]

16. Do you have any proof HIS view of Jews was normal then? Any data? thx in advance

[Binkie The Clown]

19. I was there. Read books from the era. Watch movies from the era. Educate yourself. nt

[uponit7771]

34. I have, I know people I didn't live in that era in the US but the people I know who did ...

... live in that era had few to no views of Jewish people like that and are still to this day blown away with the comparisons.

This view of Jews must have been mostly cultural in the US and the UK, this is interesting.

That's why Jonny Chocran was able to say Hitler to black jurors and win his cases ... he knew what he was doing.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

20. It is never okay to embody racist stereotypes in one's fiction.

[Laelth]

28. +1 n/t

-Laelth

[Behind the Aegis]

12. Note the year. 1964.

Anything interesting about it? Likely not, other than the fact it was after the events of the Holocaust and when even more gruesome details were finally emerging, and yet, this is how Jews were portrayed and thought of by people. An entire culture of people almost wiped out and still the hate and stereotypes persisted. They are making a comeback now, in the 21st century. From apes and pigs, to trolls, to vampires, to all manners of various vermin, the anti-Semitism once so prevalent in peoples' homes, outside of "polite society" are now marching in the streets and the halls of Congress.

Jews are a minority, treated as if they are a majority. Think about it. Of course, there are those who minimize or make excuses for such anti-Semitism and even participate in "microaggressive" ways, such as not capatalizing the words "Jews" and "Judaism".

[aidbo]

13. Yep, Tolkien was a product of his (racist) times.

[Mike 03]

14. FWIW, here's an interesting article from "The Forward", a Jewish-American organization

The Secret Jewish History Of ‘Lord Of The Rings’

Tolkien, a devout Catholic who engaged in vigorous theological discussion with C.S. Lewis, a Christian apologist with a Jewish wife, did more than simply rebuff a publisher who overreached. He rejected an invitation to visit Germany in 1938 and was vocally opposed to the Nazi regime, writing in a 1941 letter to his son Michael, “I have in this war a burning private grudge… against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler.” As a professor of Anglo Saxon studies, he loathed the Führer for “ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”

The author’s books, intended as a kind of English national myth, have a surprising Jewish element in one of their more central races. In a rare instance of admitting allegory, Tolkien told the BBC in 1971 that his Dwarves serve as a stand-in for the chosen people.

“The Dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews?” Tolkien said in a radio interview. “Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic.”

(While having a “race” of stocky, hirsute men devoted to us may not put us in the most flattering light, we should note that Tolkien also decried Nazi racial policies as “wholly pernicious and unscientific.”)

Though Tolkien said he “didn’t intend” to make the Dwarves Jewish initially, the evidence proves otherwise. As a linguist, the author took great care in creating the languages of Middle Earth and, as Tolkien scholar John Rateliff wrote in his book “The History of the Hobbit,” he deliberately modeled Khuzdûl, the Dwarvish dialect, after Hebrew phonology.

https://forward.com/culture/428414/the-secret-jewish-history-of-lord-of-the-rings/

[GumboYaYa]

15. My great aunt worked as Tolkein's writing assistant when she studied at Oxford.

He was apparently very sexist also. She told horror stories about him.

[AmyStrange]

23. If something is a good read, funny, or fun to sing to...

-

I don't give a shit what the author was like.
============

[haele]

25. When Tolkien was publishing the Lord of the Rings, he was contacted by the Third Reich

As his name was Germanic, the head of the publishing house there asked him if he had any Jewish ancestory. His answer was:

If I am to understand…
…that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.

While the quote from The Hobbit is certainly damning to an extent, pretty much everything in that article that is outside of his direct quotes to the BBC is a supposition based on the writer's personal view of early 20th century British social prejudices.

As a philologist, Tolkien had a greater respect for languages and the development of languages than he did of the cultures that developed those languages. He actually preferred the Semitic languages to the Romance languages. From most actual accounts and his own writings, he had few opinions of differences the "races of men" other than as a cultural construct, basically because he was raised in South Africa as a child and had issues with the way different races were treated - and then, after his father died, he was brought back to England where his mother promptly converted to Catholicism, which meant the family was basically disinherited form both sides.
Not apologizing, but he was far less anti-Semitic or racist than most of his colleagues.

BTW, when reading both The Hobbit and TLOR, the way he described hobbits, they were a mix of Near-Eastern and North African in appearance.

Haele

[Hekate]

48. What you said. All of it.

[Tommymac]

29. Comparing Societal norms of 80 years ago is not fair.

We all know that attitudes towards racism have been evolving for hundreds of years.

Even science has been racist in earlier times.

If Tolkien wrote that today I'd have a major issue with it.

Hell, Mark Twain would be a flaming racist today.

As long as we identify their shortcomings so modern readers can take them into account I have no issues.

[misanthrope]

30. Please don't conflate

his use of the N-word in "Huckleberry Finn" to him sharing those perspectives. The use of the word is a tool that emphasized the overwhelming psychological forces dominating both Jim and Huck. Without all the societal racism displayed in the book, it make Huck's determination to "go to Hell then" on Jim's behalf a milquetoast effort. It shows the full power of what Huck is bucking.

[Nitram]

37. No, Mark Twain would not by any measure be considered racist today. His novels included dialog

that accurately represented the speech of Southerners of the time he was writing about. That does not indicate any sympathy for racist views of the time.

[LanternWaste]

42. Twain wrote satire. Tolkien did not

"Hell, Mark Twain would be a flaming racist today..."

Please review your conclusion in the context of satirists historically using language as a tool against those whom they are mocking (e.g., Chaucer, Swift, Dickens, et. al.).

[Humanist_Activist]

43. Uhm, you should read Mark Twain. N/t

[JI7]

46. Nope, Twain was far ahead of his time. I would bet he would support black lives matter today

far more than would Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR if they were to all come back today.

[Nitram]

36. There has always been a strong strain of anti-semitism on England. I've run into Brits who were

unashamedly full-on "Protocol of Zion" types. There were many in the aristocratic class who sympathized with Hitler until the war started.

[Happy Hoosier]

39. Tolkien in response to his German publisher in the 1930's....

“ But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. ”

He also told his British publisher that he abhorred Nazi “race doctrine” and that it was “wholly unscientific and pernicious.”

So Tolkien had some race and sex issues for sure, like many British men of his generation, but he was not a raging anti-Semite,

[Xolodno]

45. Product of the time...doesn't excuse it, however...

...it doesn't excuse his literature genius either.

For example, during a business meeting concerning accounting issues; "Let me go ask my Jew" - Walt Disney. I'm not going to boycott Disney Parks, Media, etc. because of that...that was the norm at the time. Do we burn and destroy all archeological relics? Blow up the Pyramids in Egypt because of the atrocities they committed? The answer is obviously NO!

It was a flawed time and past and people were subject to it. What we consider disgusting stereotypes today, was considered fact back then. The good news, we've grown and moved on from that.

And this isn't like a confederate statue on the main square of a town, celebrating its horrific past. Instead, recognizing that yes, people are flawed from a flawed past...but we can still appreciated their contributions.

Using absolute values only makes you into the same monster. For example, Hitler was a vegetarian...so should all vegetarians be considered Nazi's? Abraham Lincoln thought all African Americans should be deported back to Africa? So now what do you say about the guy who ended slavery?

[MicaelS]

47. So what?

What is the point of digging this up? Tolkien has been dead for a long time.

I am very suspicious of those who spend their time digging up supposed shit on people long dead.