the hobbit - Are the similarities between Tolkien's Dwarves and Jews intentional?

Reading about Khuzdul I found the following information very interesting :

The Dwarvish language sounds much like Hebrew, and indeed Tolkien noted some similarities between Dwarves and Jews: both were "at once natives and aliens in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue" (Letters, 176)

So Khuzdul was based on Hebrew because there were similarities between Dwarves and Jews, but were these similarities intentional?

Did Tolkien write The Hobbit and then after the fact notice these similarities, or did he purposefully mirror the story of the Jews with his Dwarves?

Answer

I believe that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: While Tolkien stated his dislike for allegory many times (as Cearon O'Flynn stated), it is a known fact that he did borrow much from European medieval folklore into the lore of Middle Earth — Elves, Odin (Gandalf), Ring of the Nibelungs, the Arthurian legends, and more. The Jews, while being a real people, are still part of that folklore — in the eyes of an average simple person from those times, the difference between myth and reality wasn't nearly as clear as it is for us today, if at all.

Now, the similarities between Jews and Dwarves are too many to be labeled as coincidental and dismissed as an afterthought of Tolkien: The language, the craftsmanship, the search for a long-lost homeland, greed for gold (again, as depicted by European medieval folklore) and more — many of which appeared in Tolkien's early works.

So while not being a pure allegory, the bottom line is that those similarities were made knowingly from the very beginning. I'll finish with another quote of Tolkien about the subject, from an Interview taken not long before his death, where he hints that the similarity was indeed intentional:

The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic.

Comments

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