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

[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/