9. His fiction was loved by the Nazis, but Tolkien described Hitler as ‘that ruddy little ignoramus’
The same Germanic mythology and legend in Tolkien’s work that Kristian Vikernes so loved was equally appealing to the Nazi Party, which similarly drew on a semi-legendary Germanic past to justify their view of Aryans as the superior race. In 1938, the German publisher Rütten & Loening asked permission to produce a German version of The Hobbit, and infuriated Tolkien by asking whether he was of Aryan origin. Tolkien’s response to his English publisher was unequivocal: ‘I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any color to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.’
His reply to the German publisher itself was equally defiant. ‘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’. He eventually consented to the German edition, but not because of any change of heart about Nazi ideology. In a letter to Michael Tolkien on June 9, 1941, Tolkien revealed that he had ‘a burning private grudge… against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler’ for his manipulation of the Germanic mythology and legends so dear to him.
