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Originally Posted by Anguirel
Aryan in the sense that the Great Kings of Persia (with more ethnic accuracy than that upstart Fuhrer) imagined themselves as Lords of an Aryan master race, who had naturally been ordained to subdue the natives of Iran, and form there, the world. Jadis has that air of absolute, terrifying Eastern grandeur, despotic and compelling even when at the point of death.
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If my memory serves me right, the Aryans came to be known by the civilised world when they conquered the northern parts of India first - from there they spreaded to Persia (nowadays Iran / Iraq). They were the ones to introduce the caste-system to india, but ethnically very far from Hitler or his compatriots. I remember one of my former student, of Iranian origin, laughing at it, saying, that he was the most Aryan of the whole class (here in Scandinavia!). And I do think he was right in that. The Aryan myth by the
Third Reich is not the same thing as the question of the real Aryans in history. So being an Aryan does not mean - in the history - of being yellow-haired, pale-skinned, blue-eyed or having high cheek-bones. That's the popular image, but as the popular images generally go, so wrong!
So the white witch / wizard (Narnia's baddie or Gandalf) being a blonde is just a North European (nazi-idea or simultaneous with it - going with the same current of thought anyway) preoccupation - that Tolkien seemed to share. So hard as it is to admit this one for a Scandinavian...
I think this has been discussed in other threads already, but surely there is something very interesting in the fact that a story told by "a racist and a chauvinist" (to put it bluntly) still arouses this much of interest and admiration all over the world. I can relate to it fully as it is part of my own cultural inheritage and we might discuss the general standards of Heroism, the battle between the good and the evil and so on. But still, I see the the points of my tradition to prevail in his stories, not to my liking in all the cases (womens subordination, the east being the bad - as well as dark people of the south, the individualistic ethos with a catholic writer, the most common symbolism - bearing a strict relation to real symbolic world of the "people of the north" etc.).
I love Tolkien's stories and the world he has created, but at the same time I can see, that he could be blamed to forestate a lot of things that are wrong in this world right now (you just take the right-wing populistic movements around Europe and think whether Tolkien could be taken up with their campaigns - well, surely he could).
Conservatism, when it talks of the ties between people and the communal feeling, is the most wealthiest of ideologies. But it is also the most dangerous one: giving birth to hate, disgust and the overall distaste for differences. I hope and believe Tolkien was fighting for the first ones, but am afraid, that many people choose to think good of him because of the latter ones (not in this Forum, I believe, but sadly in the RL).