that, at least in our beloved land of England, propaganda defeats itself, and even produces the opposite effect. [Letters, p. 89]
Tolkien recognized that *good and evil are not all on one side, even if he felt that perhaps there was more evil, or more evil men, in the Second World War among the Germans and Japanese. When he read an article in a local paper ‘seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don’t the difference between good and evil!’ he wondered if the writer himself knew the difference, and commented to Christopher: ‘The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done. Of course there is still a difference here. The article was answered, and the answer printed’ (23–5 September 1944, Letters, p. 93). In the same letter he objected to propaganda on the BBC and in newspapers, which he supposed was produced by the Ministry of Information,
that the German troops are a motley collection of sutlers and broken men, while yet recording the bitterest defence against the finest and best equipped armies … that have ever taken the field. The English pride themselves, or used to, on ‘sportsmanship’ (which included ‘giving the devil his due’) …. But it is distressing to see the press grovelling in the gutter as low as [Nazi propagandist Joseph] Goebbels in his prime, shrieking that any German commander who holds out in a desperate situation … is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic. [Letters, p. 93]
It has been alleged that Tolkien was not interested in current affairs, and hardly ever read a newspaper. He told Henry Resnik in an interview in 1966, however, that he and his wife took three newspapers, and ‘I read them when I’m interested. I take a strong interest in what is going on, both in the university and in the country and in the world’ (‘An Interview with Tolkien’, Niekas 18 (Spring 1967), p. 39). The sinister picture of *Númenor under the influence of Sauron in *The Lost Road (written ?1936–?1937), for instance, almost certainly reflects knowledge of the contemporary rise of Nazi Germany. This includes, as Christopher Tolkien comments,
the withdrawal of the besotted and aging king from the public view, the unexplained disappearance of people unpopular with the ‘government’, informers, prisons, torture, secrecy, fear of the night; propaganda in the form of the ‘rewriting of history’…; the multiplication of weapons of war, the purpose of which is concealed but guessed at …. The teaching of Sauron has led to the invention of ships of metal that traverse the seas without sails …; to the building of grim fortresses and unlovely towers; and to missiles that pass with a noise like thunder to strike their targets many miles away. Moreover, Númenor is seen by the young as over-populous, boring, ‘over-known’ … and this cause of discontent is used, it seems, by Sauron to further the policy of ‘imperial’ expansion and ambition that he presses on the king. When at this time my father reached back to the world of the first man to bear the name ‘Elf-friend’ he found there an image of what he most condemned and feared in his own. [*The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 77]
That Tolkien was well aware of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (*Prejudice and racism) is shown by his reaction to a request by the proposed publisher of a German translation of The Hobbit, for a declaration of Tolkien’s ‘arisch’ origin. He pointed out the correct meaning of Aryan and regretted that he had no Jewish blood. In addition, Christopher Tolkien remembers *Father Vincent Reade visiting his father in Oxford not long before the Second World War and describing the maltreatment of Jews in Germany, which he had recently visited (correspondence with the authors).
In the mid-1950s Tolkien made references in letters comparing the disintegration of Frodo’s will under the influence of the Ring in *The Lord of the Rings to brainwashing, and though he did not specify, presumably to the treatment of prisoners of war in North Korea. In a draft letter to Michael Straight at the end of 1955, he said that Frodo did indeed fail at the end of his *quest, and one correspondent had said that Frodo should have been executed as a traitor. ‘Believe me, it was not until I read this that I had myself any idea how “topical” such a situation might appear …. I did not foresee that before the tale was published we should enter a dark age in which the technique of torture and disruption of personality would rival that of Mordor and the Ring and present us with the practical problem of honest men of good will broken down into apostates and traitors’ (Letters, p. 234). In a draft to Miss J. Burn on 26 July 1956 he wrote: ‘In the case of those who now issue from prison “brainwashed”, broken, or insane, praising their torturers, no such immediate deliverance is as a rule to be seen. But we can at least judge them by the will and intentions with which they entered the Sammath Naur; and not demand impossible feats of will, which could only happen in stories unconcerned with real moral and mental probability’ (Letters, p. 252).
He also objected to cultural ‘colonialism’ and the standardization that often follows, regretting the loss of diversity, including diversity of language with the spread of English:
The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. Col. [Collie] Knox says ⅛ of the world’s population speaks ‘English’, and that is the biggest language group. If true, damn shame – say I. May the curse of Babel strike all their tongues till they can only say ‘baa baa’. It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but old Mercian.
But seriously: I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying …. I am not really sure that its victory is going to be so much better for the world as a whole and in the long run than the victory of —— [sic]. [letter to Christopher Tolkien, 9 December 1943, Letters, p. 65]
In yet another letter to Christopher, on 31 July 1944, Tolkien wondered what the end of the war would bring, ‘but I suppose the one certain result of it all is a further growth in the great standardised amalgamations with their massproduced notions and emotions’ (Letters, p. 89).
For comment on politics and government in Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’ fiction (an aspect of his creation he never intended to develop fully), see, for example, William H. Stoddard, ‘Law and Institutions in the Shire’, Mythlore 18, no. 4, whole no. 70 (Autumn 1992), pp. 4–8; Alexander van de Bergh, ‘Democracy in Middle-earth: J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings from a Socio-Political Perspective’, in Tolkien and Modernity 1, ed. Frank Weinreich and Thomas Honegger (2006); and Dominic J. Nardol, ‘Political Institutions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the Lack of Democracy’, Mythlore 33, no. 1, whole no. 125 (Fall/Winter 2014).
Poole (Dorset). Tolkien and his wife *Edith in their later years frequently visited *Bournemouth on the south coast of England. Eventually they decided to move to the area permanently. Tolkien seems to have made up his mind as soon as he saw the property at 19 Lakeside Road in nearby Poole that it was what he and Edith wanted. On 14 May 1968 he wrote to *Rayner Unwin: ‘I have discovered a very admirable and commodious bungalow in the borough of Poole (with of course a correspondingly ample price)’ (George Allen & Unwin archive, University of Reading). Their possessions were removed from *Oxford to Poole in mid-July 1968, but in Tolkien’s absence due to a leg injury in June.
In Poole the Tolkiens ‘lived in greater luxury than they had ever known, for despite the wealth from his writings, they both retained a great simplicity in the way they lived. Now, for the first time they enjoyed the comforts of central heating and a bathroom each; while Edith was as excited as
