Interesting Fact | J. R. R. Tolkien (the author of the Lord of the Rings) and Nazi's

Thanks to Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein for mentioning this in one of his blog postings. Rabbi Adlerstein’s blog can be read here: http://tinyurl.com/CrossCurrentsAdlerstein

J. R. R. Tolkien (the author of the Lord of the Rings) openly opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party prior to the Second World War. In 1938, the German publishing house Rütten & Loening Verlag was preparing to release The Hobbit in Nazi Germany, but to Tolkien's outrage, he was asked beforehand whether he was of Aryan origin. In a letter to his British publisher Stanley Unwin, he condemned Nazi "race-doctrine" and anti-Semitism as "wholly pernicious and unscientific". He added that he was considering giving no response and "letting a German translation go hang!" He provided two letters to Rütten & Loening and instructed Unwin to send whichever he preferred. Only one of these letters, the less tactful of the two, is known to survive. In this letter, Tolkien began by denying any affiliation with the Indo-Aryans.

Tolkien chastised the publishers, and—ever the professor of philology— lectured them on the proper meaning of the term: “As far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.”

“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…..I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.”