Tolkein describes Hitler as "Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light" in a letter to his son during WW2 (http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_45). This definitely supports my grandma's theory that lotr is about Christians coping with the idea that a Christian country like Germany could do something as evil as the Holocaust. Here is a man who has been raised to believe that white people are superior--due to a supposed intelligence and nobility of character rather than genetics, which also meant Jews were as noble if not more so than gentiles in Tolkein's mind. Watching Hitler besmirch the supposedly untarnished name of Europeans (whitewashed history wouldn't have taught him any differently) forced Tolkein to realize that Europeans are just as capable of cruelty as everyone else and are willing to use their European-ness to justify doing so. It's interesting to think that this would have been a surprise to him. We forget how educated someone could (and still can) be without ever having to consider points of view outside of their own culture. Tolkein doesn't seem to have given thought to the idea that white supremacist ideals had been justifying the colonialism on which his society was built. Except he was born in South Africa and did say he opposed apartheid (http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Valedictory_Address_to_the_University_of_Oxford). I just don't know how much he really tried to wrap his head around the whole thing. He tried, though, and people are still trying to defend lotr's place on the right side of history. I guess what I'm trying to do is explain why that's important and how we can move beyond denying the racism that is actually there to keep the white supremacists at bay and work on actually using the text and its message to teach a new generation of readers.