Tolkien is one of the Good Guys, and an anti-Nazi to boot!

This is for Jewish and philo-semitic lovers of Tolkien and all things Middle Earth. It's okay to be a fan, because Tolkien was not only not antisemitic, he was, if anything, a philo-semite. How do we know? Well, The Forward tells us so, so it must be true.

Actually, it's a bit more concrete than that. The article linked to has evidence that Tolkien rejected attempts by the Nazis to recruit him as an "Aryan" (in his own coining, "arisch"), regretting that to the best of his knowledge he didn't have any Jewish ancestry, but at the same time didn't believe himself to be an Aryan.

I'm relieved, because not only did I thoroughly enjoy reading "The Lord of the Rings", I thoroughly enjoyed reading it as a bed-time story to my (then very young) daughters - though I have to confess that doing the voices of the Orcs was painful on the throat: now they're the Nazi types in the books - as, they assure me, they thoroughly enjoyed hearing it read. It also means that you Tolkien fans and readers of "simplyjews" out there can continue viewing your dvds of The Lord of the Rings, go the new film(s) of The Hobbit, and go back to the books! JRR is one of the Good Guys!

Merry Christmas, or a couple of days off, or whatever. Just don't drink and drive. I need all the readers I can get!

By: Brian Goldfarb