Michael McIntyre wrote:
>
> Really? I always read this against the background of Britain in WWII,
> with the Hobbits as British commoners, Wizards the aristocracy (some
> of whom, it turns out, are untrustworthy), the Orcs as Huns, Sauron as
> Hitler. And the men who dither and show up late but decisively . . .
> would probably be murrikans.
Someone, I think one of Tokien's friends, claimed the background was WW 1.
He himself always denied hotly that the work was allegorical. But one passage near the end sort of confuses things. The villains back in Hobbit-land describe their operations as "sharing." That's from some some mid-20thrt of paraphrase of some mid0cebtyry 'do-gooding' tendency confused in the mind of conservatives with social-democracy or even Stalinism.I think one of Wyndham Lewis's books took off on British Labourt in a similar way.
The geography of it is disturbing. Evil is east and south; the good is north and west -- and the run-of-the mill villains all tend to be black.
Carrol