3. Tolkein Took Dwarves Seriously
J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937, just a few months before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in America. He, along with C.S. Lewis, took fairy tales and dwarves seriously. As in they had world views and philosophies and doctrines based on a reverence for fairy tales and their folk roots. They thought that Walt Disney had grossly oversimplified and cheapened something they deemed sacrosanct. While Tolkien’s dwarves were grim mythical creatures rooted in Nordic mythology, Disney’s dwarves were comic buffoons.
Lewis eventually mellowed out, but Tolkien just got more and more upset about Disney and his take on fairy tales. For the rest of his life, he complained that Disney had commercialized and infantilized once-serious folklore fables, with adaptions that “hopelessly corrupted” them. In other words, Disney had made folk stories accessible to the general public, as opposed to the scholars and nerds whom Tolkien thought were the only ones who could truly appreciate such tales. The grudge lasted for the rest of Tolkien’s life, but it seems to have been one-sided: there is no evidence that Walt Disney knew or cared what Tolkien thought of him and his creations.
