Tolkien's reply to the Nazis who asked if he was Jewish

The author and Oxford Don J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," died on this day in 1973.

He was once asked, I believe by a prospective German publisher, about his ancestry and whether he was "arisch" and he took this, almost certainly correctly, to mean that they were asking whether he was Jewish.

His response, published in "The letters of J.R.R. Tolkien" and posted on X today, must be one of the most effective squelches in literary history.

  



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