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Originally Posted by Aiwendil
Tolkien .... was born into a world that had already seen the work of Marx, a world in which the stirrings of class-revolution were already visible in many places in Europe. The world in which he grew up was a very modern one in many respects; it was certainly one that did not take notions of class-structure for granted
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Tolkien did not portray the class system of Marxist ideology in his works because he set his story in an earlier time and place where there had never been a Marx.
I assume Tolkien was aware of Marxism/Stalinism/Communism but I doubt whether he ever read
Das Capital (he might have done had Marx written in Gothic or Old High German but he doesn't seem to have been interested in modern politics). He was at least inteligent enough to see that all the isms in the world were not doing away with class structure, just replacing old ones with newer ones.
I'm not sure that we should call Tokien a "classist" but he was certainly a hopeless romantic, hankering after a golden age from the past which never existed.
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