Tolkien Part III
I found another great article on Tolkien provided by The Jewish Journal:
http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=7846
The article written by Craig Bird looks at the BBC interview I wrote about before and attempts to examine what the statement made in the interview means in the context of the books themselves. Bird points out that Tolkien went out of his way to strip out any reference to any organized religion from any of his books and relied totally on his imagination and Pagan (mostly Norse) myths to come up with his plots and characters.
So we’ve established that the books are not didactic in nature (as opposed to The Chronicles of Narnia) which suggests an open-mindedness about different religions. Bird also points out that if you were to come up with a stereotype about Dwarves (or Jews) from the trilogy it would be that the pursuit of acquiring and protecting gold came at their detriment.
That being said, the relationship between Legolas the elf and Gimli the dwarf which moves from severe dislike and mistrust to one of respect and authentic friendship is clearly used to teach the reader that racial distrust and bigotry is ridiculous. We also can't forget that Tolkien said
it is the race of men who are most given to evil.
So, the jury is still out on Tolkien - but at least I can tell my friend that she is wrong about Gollum being Jewish!