Fairy Glade's Fairy wrote: ↑Sun Jun 03, 2018 6:56 pm
I remember one book... there's a city, a republic, where the people have civil rights & political rights & everything... then the people topple the government and replace it with an absolute monarchy, an almighty king... and give up all their rights... and they live happily ever after...
That's the sort of thing he liked to write, yeah.
The guy was a typical upper-middle-class, ultraconservative Oxford professor who loved tradition and the ruling British oligarchy and hated dark-skinned races, the working class, women's liberation, socialism, democracy, and, in general, anything that could bring power to the people. This was a perfectly normal outlook, at the time, for a man of his upbringing and academic rank. Tolkien heartily supported the fascist regimes that took power in the 20s and 30s in most of Europe; like the bulk of British intellectuals of similar status, he felt that these fascist states acted as a military belt against what they feared most: a commie onslaught from the USSR. Of course, he also supported Hitler in the first years. He only changed his mind (again, like most British academics) when Hitler and other fascist leaders started threatening British interests. As for those fascists dictators who were never hostile to Britain, like Franco in Spain, he supported them for as long as he lived. Fritz Heinrich in his book on Nazism calls him a British Nazi, pure and simple. The term British Nazi, in this context, is used for upper-class or upper-middle-class individuals who were fascists and racists but were different from German Nazis in their brand of racism. German Nazis disliked Jews because they thought Jews were Semitic, while they were ok with people from India because they saw them as Indo-Aryans, just as good as European Aryans. British Nazis were ok with Jews because they had white skin, while they despised people from India because they had brown skin. For British Nazis, racial superiority was all in the skin - all whiteys were cool, all darkies were inferior - and they laughed at German Nazis who opposed Aryan whiteys to Semitic whiteys. Tolkien famously wrote a snobbish letter mocking Germans on that subject.
All these ideas, fears and tenets are reflected in his books. Tolkien in his late years tried to deny this, probably worried that it would affect sales, but it's impossible to take him seriously. The racism is there, the misogyny is there, the belief in the rule of a warrior elite is there. The superior men of purest blood are taller and stronger, with fair skin, brown or blond hair and blue or gray eyes. The corrupt men are wogs and darkies. Mordor is at the East, a vast land of slaves who work in state-owned farms, governed by a villain who wants to conquer the West; from there comes the onslaught of the Haradrim flying red flags. Oh, and the evil leader has a six-letter name starting with S and ending with N. And don't get me started on Tolkien's ladies; his far-right social views of a woman's place in the world completely permeate his stories.
You see, these are the things you don't find in Wikipedia - because those who write the Wiki articles on Tolkien and Tolkien's books are his legion of fans. This is why someone who has no knowledge of anything except what he reads in Wiki is going the wrong way; this is why proper study of a subject before claiming that you understand it is so very important.