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TOLKIEN THE FASCIST?
Tolkienists browsing the Web may come across quotations from or references to an article on the Spearhead website by one Stephen Goodson, who states that he owns a twenty-year run of A.K. Chesterton’s magazine Candour, purchased from the Tolkien Estate in 1973 for £10.00, - although Goodson only acquired it in 1997, apparently from Chesterton’s secretary. In these magazines certain passages are underlined in red ink, including passages about monetary policy from an apparently Distributist, but also by implication anti-Jewish, viewpoint, together also with statements about race, for example the following:
‘Africa is not peopled by Black Europeans, but it is a continent full of tribes mentally and morally at the dawn of history…. Self-government does not mean democracy - Liberia and Abyssinia are two warning lights. African hegemony would lead to the suicide of the White community in East and Central Africa and to the ruin of African hopes of sustained progress.’ (3/10 August 1956, page 44)
The underlining is presumed to have been done by Tolkien, who is assumed to agree with the sentiments expressed. The article appears to have been in place since 2003. An Irish nationalism website quotes this article, and additionally claims that in a letter to A.K. Chesterton Tolkien stated that the character of Gollum was “based on a miserly South African Jew Tolkien encountered during his youth”.
The Goodson article has been widely quoted on the Web, not only by right-wing groups – at one stage it appeared on the Wikipedia page on Orcs (Middle-earth) – sometimes, with the attention to detail and concern for accuracy typical of the Web, attributing actual authorship of the pieces from Candour to Tolkien himself, all to prove that what ever he may have said elsewhere, Tolkien was actually a white supremacist.
Needless to say, the Tolkien Estate is not pleased. The Estate has no record or recollection of Tolkien’s possession of the magazine Candour or anything similar, still less of anything of this nature being sold out of the Estate, least of all in 1973; moreover, the Estate considers that the views attributed to him, including those about finance, are “intrinsically incredible”. Incredible is the word. The bit about Gollum and the South African Jew would show a remarkable political precocity in the toddler Tolkien, who left South Africa at the age of three, if there were any evidence of correspondence between Tolkien and A.K. Chesterton (there isn’t).
So who are the people that make these assertions, and what is the magazine at the root of them?
Spearhead is the magazine of the National Front, a British racist organisation. Candour is the successor of Truth, a far-right paper edited by A.K. Chesterton (a cousin of G.K. Chesterton), who was awarded the Military Cross in the First World War, and then became involved with British fascism. In 1954 he founded the League of Empire Loyalists, which at the time attracted attention mainly because of publicity-winning stunts designed to embarrass the Conservative Party. In 1967 the League merged with other racist organisations to form the National Front, of which Chesterton was the first Chairman. Stephen Goodson lives in South Africa, where he has been leader of the Abolition of Income Tax and Usury Party since 1994; he has attended at least one gathering promoting the works of Ernst Zündel, a notorious Holocaust-denier.
So what is the actual truth about Tolkien? Can he be said to have had fascist leanings? It’s interesting that the sites trying to claim Tolkien for fascism ignore the one genuine piece of evidence that might be thought to support their case, namely, the occasion when he defended Franco against C.S. Lewis (Letters no. 83). However, it should also be noted that this was a normal position for an ordinary Catholic to take as late as the 1960s; the Catholic paper the Universe tended to treat Franco as a great Christian gentleman, and indeed Franco was regarded not without justification as the saviour of the Spanish church - it is frequently forgotten that in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War something like 7,000 priests, monks and nuns were killed by anarchists and other left-wing groups. The fact that especially after his victory Franco treated Republicans even worse tended to be glossed over by Catholics, much as at the same time Stalin’s brutalities were justified or even denied by many on the non-Communist left. And of course Spain did keep out of World War 2 ….Defending Franco may now seem reprehensible, but it is understandable, and a lot of people (like Winston Churchill) were doing it.
And that’s about as far as it goes for Tolkien’s pro-fascism. Unlike many fellow-Catholics, for example G.K.Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, he never appears to have supported Mussolini. On the other hand, explicitly antiracist statements by Tolkien are easy to find, and are generally well-known. Here are just a few:
his refusal to provide a statement of Aryan race for the German publishers of the Hobbit (Letters nos. 29, 30)
“The treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain, and not only in South Africa. Unfort[unately] not many retain that generous sentiment for long.” (Letters no. 61)
“I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones.” (Valedictory address in The Monsters and the Critics p.238)
Tolkien was a long way from being a socialist, but if anything he was even further from the fascist mentality, especially where race was concerned.
So whenever you come across any reference to Candour magazine, or see any of Goodson’s assertions quoted, please rebut them strongly. In this, as in other ways, fascists are trying to claim Tolkien for their own. We should resist their attempt.
David Doughan
August 2007
Some Web sources:
http://www.spearhead.com/0208-sg.html (the Goodson article)
http://irish-nationalism.net/forum/showthread.php?t=505 (Jewish Gollum)
http://www.tolkiengesellschaft.de/v4/alleszutolkien/news/news20030103.shtml (A German comment)
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/z/zundel-ernst/ (information on Zündel)
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