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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34935 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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As did Tolkien, who intentionally loosely modeled the dwarfs off of Jews and even had their language be Semitic. A people pushed out of their homelands. It was notably not a thing done with animus as he was fond of Jewish people.

I was always struck by the very sympathetic racial criticism from the narrator when Bilbo was caught by the trolls. Let me see if I can find it.

Edit: it was from chapter 12 and only referenced the troll incident

"The most that can be said for the dwarves is this: they intended to pay Bilbo really handsomely for his services; they had brought him to do a nasty job for them, and they did not mind the poor little fellow doing it if he would; but they would all have done their best to get him out of trouble, if he got into it, as they did in the case of the trolls at the beginning of their adventures before they had any particular reasons for being grateful to him. There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much.”

It's a little more backhanded than I remember lol

I just looked this up because I find this hard to believe. The mountain-dwelling, hairy, clannish, greedy dwarves check off more Scottish stereotypes than Jewish ones.

I found this link: https://www.timesofisrael.com/are-tolkiens-dwarves-an-allegory-for-the-jews/ saying that Tolkien didn't intend the Jewish-Dwarf analogue

In that article it does say

According to Tolkien scholar John Rateliff, author of a two-volume “Hobbit” history published in 2007, Tolkien drew inspiration from Hebrew texts and Jewish history when developing the dwarves. As craftsmen exiled from a bountiful homeland, the dwarves spoke both the language of their adopted nations and – among themselves – a Hebrew-influenced tongue developed by Tolkien.

I think it's just a bit of a disagreement over words, he didn't mean them as allegorically representing the Jews, he just was inspired by the Jews while writing them. In fact I think this is the article that I was remembering.

Tolkien in general spoke numerous times agains explicit ham-fisted allegories. He preferred to work in much more subtle manner and let the reader derive conclusions from the whole story in it's full richness rather than do primitive pattern-matching. E.g.:

"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author."

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