J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy writings have been said to embody outmoded attitudes to race. He was exposed as a child to Victorian attitudes to race, and to a literary tradition of monsters, In his personal life, he was anti-racist both in peacetime and during the two World Wars.
With the late 19th-century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline, Robin Anne Reid and others have suggested that the mention of race mixing in The Lord of the Rings embodies scientific racism. David Ibata has stated that Tolkien's description of the orcs was modelled on racist wartime propaganda caricatures of the Japanese.[1] Tolkien said that his Dwarves were reminiscent of the Jews, raising questions of possible antisemitism. John Magoun has said that the work embodies what he calls a moral geography, namely that the West of Middle-earth is good and the East is evil.
In his personal life, Tolkien strongly opposed Nazi racial theories, as seen in a 1938 letter he wrote to his publisher. In the Second World War he vigorously opposed anti-German propaganda. Sandra Ballif Straubhaar has described Middle-earth as definitely polycultural and polylingual. Scholars including Patrick Curry and Christine Chism have noted that assertions that Tolkien is a racist based on The Lord of the Rings often omit relevant evidence from the text.