29. The Snobby Roots of a Feud
J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937, just a few months before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in the US. Both he and his frenemy C.S. Lewis took fairy tales and dwarfs seriously. As in they had entire world views and philosophies and doctrines based on a reverence for the realm of fairy tales and their folk roots. They thought that Walt Disney had grossly oversimplified and cheapened something they deemed sacrosanct. While Tolkien’s dwarfs were grim mythical creatures rooted in Nordic mythology, Disney’s dwarfs were comic goofballs.
Lewis eventually got over it, but Tolkien just got more and more bent out of shape about Disney and his ventures in the world of 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. That was another way of saying that 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 understand and appreciate such tales. The feud lasted until Tolkien’s dying day, 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.
