E.

Michael Jones
m(OlS IN Alm kos
Tolkien’s Failed Quest

E. Michael Jones
Fidelity Press
206 Marquette Avenue
South Bend, Indiana 46617
Copyright, 2015, Fidelity Press
 Tolkien’s Failed Quest

Toward the end of September 1931, while on one of his periodic

recuperative cruises on the high seas, Montagu Norman, head of the Bank
of England, received a cable from his American counterpart, George
Harrison, Benjamin Strong’s successor as head of the Federal Reserve
System, asking Norman whether he could shed any light on “the sudden
drop in Sterling.”[1] Norman wrote back that he could not explain the drop,
largely because—although he did not mention this in the cable—he had
been absent from his post at the bank since July 28, when he left the Bank
“feeling queer.”[2] Shortly thereafter, Norman received another more
cryptic note announcing that the “Old Lady goes off on Monday.”[3] The
old lady in question was the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street or the Bank
of England, and it referred to the imminent abandonment of the gold
standard, but Norman mistakenly thought it referred to his mother going on
holiday.
At around the same time that England went off the gold standard, an
Oxford professor began telling his children a bedtime story about a dragon
guarding a hoard of gold. The professor’s name was J. R. R. Tolkien and
the story eventually got published as The Hobbit in 1937. Tolkien wrote
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings against the background of European
politics. According to Tolkien’s official biographer, The Shire was
“Tolkien’s representation of all that he loved best about England.”[4] At
about the time that Tolkien decided the sequel to The Hobbit would be
called The Lord of the Rings, Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement
with Hitler. By the late 1930s, it was clear that England was being drawn
into another war on the continent. Tolkien despised Russia and held the
Russians “more responsible for the present crisis and choice of moment
than Hitler.”
His feelings about Germany were much more ambivalent. Tolkien
came from German stock; he had a German name, and yet he had fought
against the Germans at the Battle of the Somme in 1918, an event which
formed him for the rest of his life. His rendition of the trench warfare
appeared in the Dead Marshes chapter of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien
despised Hitler. “I have in this war,” he wrote in 1941,
 a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler for 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.”[5]
Tolkien’s ambivalence about Germany derived from the fact that he
got the main symbols for his novels from German literature. If Tolkien saw
in Hitler a vulgar caricature of the “noble northern spirit,” his relationship
to Richard Wagner was even more ambivalent. Tolkien got the main
symbols in The Hobbit from Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, but he was
always testy and sensitive whenever Wagner’s name was mentioned.
Humphrey Carpenter tells us that whenever “Tolkien . . . recounted horrific
episodes form the Norse Voelsungsaga,” he would make “a passing jibe at
Wagner whose interpretation of the myths he held in contempt.”[6] When
publisher Stanley Unwin’s ten-year-old son Rayner claimed that “Frodo’s
ring resembled that of the Niebelungs,” Tolkien, who was always annoyed
when anyone compared his writings with Wagner, responded by saying
that “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased.”[7]
The main problem was Wagner’s anti-Semitism. The Hobbit was
published in the year of Kristallnacht, when English sympathy for the
plight of German Jews was at an all time high. The English had a long
history of philo-Semitism which simply did not mesh with Wagner’s views
on the Jews. This led to an artistic conflict which Tolkien could not
resolve.
Barbara Tuchman claims that the English became notoriously philo-
Semitic as a result of the Reformation, when the Bible was translated into
English:
With the translation of the bible into English and its adoption as the highest authority for an
autonomous English church, the history traditions and moral law of the Hebrew nation became
part of the English culture, became for a period of three centuries the most powerful single
influence on that culture. It linked, to repeat Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “the genius and history
of us English to the genius and history of the Hebrew people.” This is far from saying that it
made England a Judeaophile nation, but without the background of the English bible it is
doubtful that the Balfour Declaration would ever have been issued in the name of the British
government or the Mandate for Palestine undertaken, even given the strategic factors that late
came into play.[8]
When it comes to assigning responsibility for the creation of
England as Judeaophile nation, Capitalism is a more likely candidate than
the Bible. After a brief phase of Hebraic lunacy under Puritans like
Praisegod Barebones and Rabbis like Menasseh ben Israel, “Locke
supplanted Habakkuk,”[9] as Karl Marx put in his postmortem on the
revolution of 1848, and Whig Capitalism became the de facto religion of
the English elites. Lord Palmerston, deeply in debt to the Jews, used the
British navy to collect the Jew Don Pacifico’s debts in Greece. Gradually,
the idea of a Jewish homeland in the heart of the Ottoman Empire began to
form in the minds of the British mercantile and banking elites. On August
11, 1840, Palmerston wrote a letter to the Times, claiming that a plan to use
“the Jews as a British wedge within the Ottoman empire”[10] was now
under “serious political consideration.”[11]
By the end of the 19th century British philo-Semitism merged with
Jewish Zionism to bring about the Balfour Declaration and the first Jewish
colony in Palestine. Lord Shaftesbury made the connection between the
Jews, the English and Capitalism explicit when he wrote that “England is
the great trading and maritime power of the world. To England then,
naturally belongs the role of favouring the settlement of the Jews in
Palestine.”[12] Theodor Herzl, the Father of Zionism, agreed: “England the
great, England the free, England with her eyes fixed on the seven seas, will
understand us.”[13] On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur
James Balfour declared that “His Majesty’s government view with favour
the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and
will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this
object.”[14]
Moved by events in Germany during the 1930s, Tolkien sided with
the Jews when he wrote The Hobbit. In 1971 Tolkien told the BBC that the
dwarves are “quite obviously” Jews: “Their words are Semitic, obviously,
constructed to be Semitic. The hobbits are just rustic English people,” he
said.[15] Bilbo, Tolkien’s representative of “rustic English people” tells
Smaug that the dwarves have come, not so much for gold, as for revenge:
“We came over hill and under hill by wave and win [sic] for Revenge”[16]
[his emphasis].When Tolkien received a request to do a translation of The
Hobbit into German, he had to assure the publisher that he had no Jewish
ancestors, an inquiry which he dismissed as “impertinent and
irrelevant.”[17] Tolkien’s philo-Semitism followed close upon the heels of
his annoyance. “But,” Tolkien continued to the publisher who wanted to
know if he was “of Aryan extraction,” “if I am to understand that you are
enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that
I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people … .”[18] Inquiries of this
sort, Tolkien continued, will lead to a time “not far distant when a German
name will no longer be a source of pride.”[19]
In the film version of The Hobbit, Peter Jackson takes Tolkien’s
philo-Semitism and turns it into full-blown Zionism. The destruction of
Erebor which begins the movie is a conflation of the destruction of the
Temple in 70 A.D. and the Holocaust. Since “No help came from the elves
[i.e., the European aristocracy] that day, or any day since,” Thror “never
forgave and he never forgot.” The dwarves were “a once mighty people
brought low” by Smaug’s attack. After they were “robbed of their
homeland the dwarves of Erebor wandered the wilderness,” where they
had to endure the biggest insult of all, they had to work for a living,
something alien to the Jewish race.
The text of The Hobbit is more ambivalent than his statement to the
BBC. Dwarves, Tolkien writes:
are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky
and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin
and Company, if you don’t expect too much.[20]
Tolkien, like Shakespeare in his portrayal of Shylock in The
Merchant of Venice, draws on the intellectual patrimony of the West in
describing Jewish aversion to work, something which St. Thomas Aquinas
stated explicitly some eight centuries before Tolkien wrote The Hobbit. In
1271 Aquinas wrote to Margaret of Flanders advising her that:
it would be better if they [the state] compelled Jews to work for their own living, as they do in
parts of Italy, than that, living without occupation, they grow rich by usury, and thus their
rulers be defrauded of revenue. In the same way, and through their own fault, princes are
defrauded of their proper revenues if they permit their subjects to enrich themselves by theft
and robbery alone; for they would be bound to restore [to the real owner] whatever they had
exacted from them [the thieves].[21]
In the good old days before Smaug arrived on the scene, the dwarves
didn’t need to work at raising their own food because they had money
which they could lend out at interest. Erebor was the carnal, earthly
kingdom of the Jews, where gold and usury abounded. Or as Tolkien put it:
Fathers would beg us to take their sons as apprentices, and pay us handsomely, especially in
food supplies, which we never bothered to grow or to find for ourselves. Altogether those
were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to
make beautiful things just for the fun of it. . . . So my grandfather’s halls became full of
 armor and jewels and carvings and cups, and the toy-market of Dale was the wonder of the
North (my emphasis).[22]
Deprived of usury, the Jews were forced to work in exile from their
holy mountain:
The few of us that were well outside sat and wept [by the Rivers of Babylon] in hiding and
cursed Smaug; and there we were unexpectedly joined by my father and my grandfather with
singed beards. They looked very grim but they said very little. When I asked how they had got
away, they told me to hold my tongue, and said that one day in the proper time I should know.
After that we went away, and we have had to earn our livings as best we could up and down the
lands, often sinking as low as blacksmith work or even coal mining. But we have never
forgotten our stolen treasure. And even now, when I will allow we have a good bit laid by and
are not so badly off”—here Thorin stroked the gold chain around his neck—“we still mean to
get it back and to bring our curses home to Smaug—if we can.”[23]
The lonely mountain is Mount Zion. The Jewish dwarves who have
been exiled from their earthly paradise now want it back. “With or without
our help,” Gandalf tells the Elves, “the dwarves will march on the
mountain. They are determined to reclaim their homeland.”[24] The king of
the elves is worried: “The presence of this dwarvish company concerns
me. I do not feel that I can condone such a quest.” But even if he, like
much of the English aristocracy, couldn’t support Zionism, Lady Galadriel
settles the matter when she tells Gandalf: “You are right to help Thorin
Oakenshield.” But even the Zionist Galadriel has misgivings, fearing “that
this quest has set in motion forces which we do not understand.”
The geopolitical ramifications of driving an Anglo-Jewish wedge
into the Ottoman Empire are lost on Bilbo, but the representative of Little
England has misgivings of his own. He has a home; they don’t. He misses
his home. He simply doesn’t fit in with the Jews.
“You’re one of us,” one of the dwarves reassures him.
Bilbo: “No, I’m not. Thorin said I should never have come and he
was right.
Dwarf: “You’re homesick. I understand.”
Bilbo: “No, you don’t. None of you understand. You’re dwarves.
You’re used to this life, on the road, not belonging anywhere. I’m sorry.”
Dwarf: “No, you’re right. We don’t belong anywhere. I wish you all
the luck in the world. I really do.”
The Troll of the mountain only reinforces the nationalism of the
Jewish Dwarves when he tells Thror: “You don’t have a mountain.
You’re
not a king, which makes you nobody really.”
At the end of The Hobbit, Part I, Peter Jackson has Bilbo give what
might be termed the Middle Earth version of the Balfour Declaration:
“Look, I know you doubt me. I know you always have. And you’re right, I often think of Bag
End. I miss my books and my armchair and my garden. See, that’s where I belong. That’s
home. And that’s why I came back. You don’t have one. A home. It was taken from you. But I
will help you take it back if I can.”[25]
The legacy of Tolkien’s philo-Semitism is unsolvable artistic
problems, leading to an ultimately incoherent book. Tolkien was caught
between his Germanic roots, both biological and cultural, and his need to
make the Hobbits, i.e., “rustic English people,” the heroes of his narrative.
The Times of Israel claims that The Hobbit was a “corrective re-write” of
Wagner’s anti-Semitic Ring cycle:
According to some Tolkien scholars, the author’s heroic dwarves are a conscious inversion of
Wagner’s negatively “Jewish” dwarves, meant to flip the switch on damaging stereotypes. As a
lover of Norse mythology, Tolkien despised the Nazis’ distortion of ancient tales to incite
hatred. . . . In a letter he drafted in response to the request, he replied, “I regret that I am not
clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far
as I am aware noone (sic) of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy or any related
dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can
only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” And to a friend,
he wrote, “Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do
their lunatic laws require a certificate of arisch origin from all persons of all countries? …
Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestatigung [sic, confirmation] (although it
happens that I can), and let a German translation go hang. In any case I should object strongly
to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish
blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any
colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-
doctrine.”[26]
In purging Wagner’s symbols of their anti-Semitism, Tolkien purged
them of their meaning as well. No matter what the Jews say, the real issue
in Das Rheingold is Capitalism, not anti-Semitism. Wagner’s Rheingold is
a mythic representation of the origins of Capitalism in theft.
In Wagner the correspondence between symbol and moral causality
is clear. The drama begins with the theft of the Rheingold by the Jew
Alberich, who could be a stand in for Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who
spirited the gold of the prince of Hesse-Cassel off to England. Alberich
then forges the ring of Capitalism (or the Gold Standard) out of the stolen
gold. When he gets tricked out of the ring, Alberich puts a curse on it,
which passes to each new owner, including Fafnir, who murders his
brother (just as Smeagol murders Deagol) to get the ring and then turns
himself into a dragon to guard the gold hoard. The dragon is greed grown
monstrous. The meaning of the symbolism in Wagner’s Rheingold
becomes apparent in a matter of minutes. Decades after the publication of
the Lord of the Rings in 1954, its symbolism remains opaque, and no
amount of post-hoc theorizing in books like The Silmarillion can rectify
this incoherence. Tolkien denied his intellectual debt to Wagner because
familiarity with Wagner exposed the incoherence of his own writings.
Tolkien is being disingenuous when he denies Wagner’s influence.
Tolkien:
studied or listened to Wagner and his music frequently. One student of Lewis's, Derek Brewer
claimed rumors circulated that Lewis and Tolkien annually attended the full ring opera in
London. Tolkien's daughter Priscilla remembers one such visit to the opera where her father and
Lewis had failed to wear formal evening attire. . . . By 1934, Warnie Lewis reported in his
diary, that he, his brother, and Tolkien were translating the text of Wagner's second Ring Opera,
the Valkyries, from the original German. “Arising out of the complexities of Wotan,” Warnie
recorded, “we had a long and interesting discussion on religion which lasted until about half
past eleven when the car called for us.” Agreeing with or disagreeing with Wagner's
interpretations, it provided much food for thought.[27]
Tolkien fans “have long maintained a certain conspiracy of silence
concerning Wagner.”[28] They like to claim that Tolkien got the Ring
symbol from the original sagas, like the Volsunga and the Niebelungenlied,
but the symbols which drive the plot of Das Rheingold didn’t exist until
Wagner created them:
The idea of the omnipotent ring must have come directly from Wagner; nothing quite like it
appears in the old sagas. True, the Volsunga Saga features a ring from a cursed hoard, but it
possesses no executive powers. In the “Nibelungenlied” saga, there is a magic rod that could
be used to rule all, but it just sits around. Wagner combined these two objects into the awful
amulet that is forged by Alberich from the gold of the Rhine. When Wotan steals the ring for
his own godly purposes, Alberich places a curse upon it, and in so doing he speaks of “the lord
of the ring as the slave of the ring.” Such details make it hard to believe Tolkien’s disavowals.
[29]
Deprived of their Wagnerian context Tolkien’s symbols become
incoherent. Instead of becoming the English Iliad, The Lord of the Rings
becomes:
a kind of rescue operation, saving the Nordic myths from misuse—perhaps even saving Wagner
from himself. Tolkien tried, it seems, to create a kinder, gentler “Ring,” a mythology without
malice. The “world-redeeming deed,” in Wagner’s phrase, is done by the little hobbits, who
have no territorial demands to make in Middle-Earth and wish simply to resume their
gardening. In the end, the elves give up their dominion, just as, in Wagner, the gods
 surrender theirs. Yet it is a peaceful transfer of power, not an apocalyptic one. The story ends
not with the collapse of Valhalla but with the restoration of a wasted world.[30]
The New Yorker critique points out how the sexual meaning of the
Ring is missing in Tolkien’s writings: “When Tolkien stole Wagner’s
ring, he discarded its most significant property—that it can be forged only
by one who has forsworn love.”[31] But the problem is more economic
than sexual. If Das Rheingold is about Capitalism, then England must be
the villain. This is obviously unacceptable to Tolkien, the English patriot,
and so Wagner’s symbols get rearranged to suit English patriotic
sensibilities and lose their power, meaning, and coherence in the process.
After Bismarck unified Germany Wagner’s appropriation of Das
Niebelungenlied became the German Iliad. Tolkien aspired to write the
English Iliad:
In a letter to a prospective publisher of the Silmarillion he wrote: “I was from the early days
grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with
its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of
other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish
(which greatly affected me) but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.” Tolkien
shared with Wagner the desire of providing a mythology for his own people. Where Wagner
found medieval sources for his myths, Tolkien had to invent his.[32]
Unfortunately, Tolkien’s English aspirations clashed with the
German myths he chose to embody them. It wasn’t just his English
patriotism the drove Tolkien to strip Wagner’s symbols of their economic
meaning, Tolkien was a casualty of the Catholic Anti-Communist Crusade.
Like many Catholics of his generation, Tolkien failed to see that
Bolshevism was the child of English Liberalism:
Tolkien hated socialism in any form, national or international. . . . As with many conservative
Roman Catholics of the 1930s and 1940s, Tolkien believed that communism represented an
even more dangerous form of tyranny than did fascism. If he hated fascism, he really hated
communism. Many of the so-called fascists, such as Franco in Spain, protected the Roman
Catholic Church, whereas the communists had always assaulted any form of theism,
substituting their own ideology for Christian beliefs. Tolkien was especially taken with the
bullfighting ally of Franco, poet and Roman Catholic convert, Roy Campbell. Meeting with
Tolkien and Lewis in October 1944, Campbell spoke of atrocities against Roman Catholics
committed by the communists and socialists in Spain. By the end of the evening, Campbell had
convinced Tolkien of the rightness of Franco's side in the Spanish Civil War, and Tolkien
concluded that Campbell was a was a modern-day Aragorn, ranging the world and struggling
against the powers that be, defending God's glory.
Catholics had a special dislike of communism because of two important events in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1884, Pope Leo XIII had a vision in which he
saw devils roaming the twentieth century earth, laying much of it to waste. To help combat
this possible future, he composed the "Prayer to St. Michael," asking God to unleash St.
 Michael to fight with the demons and the devil, driving them back to hell. He instituted this as
the concluding prayer at all masses. Most devout twentieth-century Catholics viewed
communism as the satanic eruption Pope Leo had predicted. Certainly Tolkien gave Manwë a
prominent role in the affairs of Middle-earth, naming him the Vice-regent. Manwë represents
St. Michael the Archangel. Second, in 1917, in Fatima, Portugal, the Blessed Virgin Mary
appeared to a number of children, giving them several secrets regarding the twentieth century.
One of the earliest revealed, however, was that communism would become the greatest worldly
enemy of the church in the twentieth century. . . . Tolkien also feared communism because of
its potential to do evil after the end of the second world war.[33]
Tolkien ultimately can’t explain the meaning of the symbols that he
has appropriated from Wagner because Tolkien’s symbols, unlike
Wagner’s, are at war with the moral causality of his tale. Tolkien began the
sequel to The Hobbit in December 1937, three months after its publication.
Tolkien at this point “had no clear idea of what the new story was going to
be about.”[34] Gradually, the ring emerged as the sequel’s central symbol.
“Make return of ring a motive,” Tolkien wrote in his journal.[35] The Ring,
Tolkien continued, was “Not very dangerous when used for good purpose.
But it exacts its penalty. You must either lose it, or yourself.”[36] At the
beginning of February 1938, Tolkien sent a copy of the first chapter to
Stanley Unwin, once again seeking Rayner’s opinion, but it would take
him another 12 years before The Lord of the Rings was finished. The ring
proliferated into a number of rings, but the multiplication of rings didn’t
clear up the incoherence which had become attached to the book’s central
symbol when it got ripped out of its Wagnerian, anti-Capitalist matrix.
The same is true of the dragon. Unlike Das Rheingold, where the
symbol of the dragon has a clear moral and psychological meaning, Smaug
just shows up at the beginning of The Hobbit. Tolkien makes a stab at
moral causality when he claims that “dragons covet gold with a deep dark
desire,” but what does that mean? He then tells us, “Undoubtedly, that was
what brought the dragon.” Tolkien then tells us, “Thror’s love of gold had
grown too fierce. Like a sickness it had begun to grow within him. It was a
sickness of light and where sickness thrives bad things will follow.” But
what is the connection between dwarvish (or Jewish) greed and Smaug?
There is no connection.
Jackson’s version is even less coherent than Tolkien’s. If Tolkien’s
philo-Semitism distorted his vision of Wagner’s symbols, Jackson’s
Zionism renders him blind to the implications of the central symbols of his
film. The dragon just shows up: “The first they heard was a noise like a
hurricane coming down from the north. . . . It was a fire dragon from the
north. Smaug had come. . . . For dragons covet gold with a dark deep
desire. . . . For a dragon will guard its plunder for as long as he lives.” If
the dwarves’ gold hoard symbolizes Jewish addiction to usury, Tolkien’s
book starts to make sense, but if the Jews are guilty of usury, then they are
no longer the innocent victims that get portrayed in his book and a fortiori
in Jackson’s film. Tolkien half-heartedly indicts the Jews and then lets
them off. Tolkien can’t have it both ways. He can’t be philo-Semitic and
morally coherent. If the destruction of Dale is a symbolic rendition of the
destruction of the Temple, then the Jews deserved their fate.
To make matters even more confusing, Tolkien conflates Wagner’s
Ring and his Tarnhelm. In Wagner, the Ring is fashioned from stolen gold
just as the gold standard and capitalism were created from theft. In
Wagner, the Tarnhelm symbolizes the invisibility of the creditor class in a
capitalist society. In Tolkien’s writings, the ring confers power and makes
its wearer invisible, a conflation which renders the symbol
incomprehensible. According to Tolkien, Gollum wanted the ring:
because it was a ring of power, and if you slipped that ring on your finger, you are invisible;
only in the full sunlight could you be seen, and then only by your shadow, and that would be
shaky and faint. . . . Gollum used to wear it at first, till it tired him; and now usually he hid it in
a hole in the rock on his island and was always going back to look at it. And still sometimes he
put it on, when he could not bear to be parted from it any longer, or when he was very, very
hungry and tired of fish.[37]
At another point, Tolkien gives another account of the Ring’s ability
to make its wearer invisible but we are still no closer to the connection
between the ring and the moral causality at the heart of the tale than we
were before:
It seemed that the ring he had was a magic ring; it made you invisible! He had heard of such
thing, of course, in old old tales; but it was hard to believe that he had really found one, by
accident. Still there it was; Gollum with his bright eyes had passed him by, only a yard to one
side.[38]
The only time Tolkien’s symbols take on meaning is when they
return to their Wagnerian matrix, as when he tells us that the dwarves, i.e.,
the Jews, stole the elves’ gold. “In ancient days,” Tolkien tells us, the
elves, “that is Good People,” i.e., the Aristocracy:
had had wars with some of the dwarves, whom they accused of stealing their treasure [as
Rothschild had stolen the Prince of Hesse-Cassel’s]. It is only fair to say that the dwarves gave
a different account, and said that they only took what was their due, for the elf-king had
bargained with them to shape his raw gold and silver and had afterwards refuse to give them
 their pay. If the elf-king had a weakness, it was for treasure, especially for silver and white
gems; and though his hoard was rich, he was ever eager for more, since he had not yet a great a
treasure as other elf-lords of old. His people neither mined not worked metals or jewels, nor did
they bother much with trade or with tilling the earth. [Spain after the expulsion of the Jews] All
this was well known to every dwarf, though Thorin’s family had nothing to do with the old
quarrel I have spoken of. Consequently Thorin was angry at their treatment of him, when they
took their spell off him and he came to his senses; and also he was determined that no world of
gold or jewels should be dragged out of him.[39]
The Aristocracy, in other words, was corrupted by its addiction to
Jewish usury and gold. In the end, the Old Master, who took over Dale
after Bard had killed Smaug:
had come to a bad end. Bard had given him much gold for the help of the Lake-people, but
being of the kind that easily catches disease he fell under the dragon-sickness, and took most
of the gold and fled with it, and died of starvation in the Waste, deserted by his companions.
[40]
Usury was the Achilles heel of the Christian West. Unlike Islam, the
Church could never solve this problem. In his letter to Margaret of
Flanders, Aquinas says that the solution to the problem of usury is
confiscating the Jews’ ill-gotten usurious gains and restoring them to those
who were defrauded of them:
the Jews of your land seem to have nothing except what they acquired through the depravity of
usury. And, hence, consequently you ask whether it is not licit to require something from them,
and to whom the things thus required are to be restored. On this matter therefore, it seems the
response should be this, since the Jews may not licitly keep those things which they have
extorted from others through usury, the consequence is also that if you receive these things
from them neither may you licitly keep them, unless perhaps they be things that the Jews had
extorted from you or from your ancestors hitherto. If, however, they have things which they
extorted from others, these things, once demanded from them, you should restore to those to
whom the Jews were bound to restore them. Thus, if certain persons are discovered from whom
the Jews extorted usury, it should be restored to them. Otherwise, these usurious monies should
be set aside for pious uses according to the council of the diocesan bishop and of other upright
men, or even for the common utility of your land if a necessity looms and usefulness calls for it;
nor even would it be illicit if you should require such usurious money from the Jews anew,
preserving the custom of your predecessors, with this intention that the monies be expended for
pious purposes.[41]
Aquinas then makes clear that the same rule of restitution applies to
Christian usurers or “Cahorsin,” and “anyone else depending upon the
depravity of usury.”[42]
We still have Catholics who would defend the gold standard.
According to Harry Vereyser, the 19th century was a century of peace
thanks to the premises of classical liberalism—“simple economic ideas
like the gold standard, free markets, and liberty.”[43] Vereyser forgot to
mention the role that the gold standard played in causing the Revolution of
1848 and the Irish potato famine. When European governments were
forced to use gold, the only recognized international currency at the time,
to buy food, they had to contract the money supply to compensate for
depleted gold reserves. When financial players like the Bank of England
contracted the money supply, they caused the Panic of 1947, and the
recession that followed that panic caused the Revolution of 1848. It also
caused 2 million Irishmen to starve to death. Other than that, the gold
standard was totally benign. Gold, we are told, kills inflationary
expectations. Or as Vereyser puts it: “Instituting the gold standard caused
inflationary expectations to disappear.”[44] Vereyser then cites Austrian
economist Ludwig von Mises, who “explains inflation simply” as “an
increase in the quantity of money [which] reduces the purchasing power of
the monetary unit.”[45]
Unlike Einstein, who said that he tried to make things as simple as
possible but no simpler, Mises comes up with an explanation of inflation
which is too simple. Inflation comes about not when the money supply
increases but when it increases above the amount of goods and services a
national economy produces. This is why quantitative easing has not caused
inflation. The decrease of the total money supply below the amount of
goods and services is worse. It causes deflation, the chronic state of all
economies on the gold standard. In a period of deflation, everyone suffers
except those who own gold. This is why Jews like Austrian School
economist Murray Rothbard favor deflation. It swells Jewish ducats. Why
a Catholic would propose Jewish economics is anyone’s guess. But those
who do this aren’t really proposing a Catholic solution. Jewish economics
and Catholic economics are completely incompatible.
In his introduction to Brian McCall’s book, The Church and the
Usurers: Unprofitable Lending for the Modern Economy, Anthony Santelli
proposes a solution that is more in keeping with the thinking of St. Thomas
Aquinas:
The way out of the current economic crisis is the same path taken to get out of the last
economic crisis: through a wider distribution of the wealth of the nation. A wider distribution
of wealth means a larger demand . . . which in turn means more production and employment.
[46]
The solution to the current economic crisis is the same solution to
every other economic crisis of the past 500 years, namely, the elimination
of usury. Once usury is eliminated from the economy, those who have
profited from it—the Jews and the modern day Cahorsins—must make
restitution. They must return their ill-gotten usurious gains to the people
from whom they stole them. We’re talking here about the transfer of
roughly $15 trillion back into the pockets of American citizens:
We need not start World War III to infuse sufficient amounts of money into the hands of the
masses. Rather, it can be accomplished through the restitution of funds taken from people by
banks and other lenders in the form of excess interest or usury. The magnitude of usury paid
by the federal government alone since 1950 exceeds $6 trillion. If we to ad usury paid by
individuals on their credit cards and home mortgages since 1950 the total would exceed $15
trillion or more than the total personal debt of the nation, which is a little under $14 trillion.
[47]
Unlike the nostalgia for a lost golden age that haunts the Austrian
School, the Catholic solution to the current economic crisis solves a
number of problems at the same time:
Restoring these funds to the people—funds that were unjustly taken from them over the years
by having them pay usurious interest on their loans—would, on average, eliminate personal
debt. It would also provide people with significant savings.[48]
When Norman’s ship, the Duchess of Bedford finally docked at
Liverpool on September 23, England had been off the gold standard for
two days, and Norman’s life work lay in ruins, never to be resurrected.
Eight days before Norman’s ship docked at Liverpool, sailors at the
Invergordon naval base had rioted because of lack of pay causing a loss of
confidence in England’s financial position and a run on the pound. “The
reaction of foreign investors was one of instinctive panic. Gold sped from
the Bank of England like lightning. Nearly 40 million pounds Sterling
vanished in a single week.”[49]
Investors had been nervous ever since March 1931 when the
Macmillan Report revealed that London was technically bankrupt, owing
471 million pounds, which were covered by only 153 million pounds of
short money assets, leaving it exposed to a net shortfall of 254 million
pounds Sterling.[50] Given a precarious financial situation like this, the
uprising at Invergordon was the straw that broke the camel’s back. On
Monday, September 21, Philip Snowden suspended convertibility, and
England was taken off the gold standard once and for all. The gold
standard had collapsed, never to return.[51]
 About the Author

E. Michael Jones is the editor of Culture Wars magazine and the

author of numerous books and e-books.
Endnotes
[1] Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, Vol. I, Hope Betrayed 1883-1920 (London: Macmillian,
1983), p. 393.
[2] Andrew Boyle, Montagu Norman: A Biography (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1967), p. 266.
[3] Boyle, p. 268.
[4] Carpenter, p. 213.
[5] Carpenter, p. 218.
[6] Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 52.
[7] Carpenter, p. 228.
[8] Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword (NewYork: New York University Press, 1956), p. 52.
[9] The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
1978), p. 596.
[10] Tuchman, p. 122.
[11] Tuchman, p. 113.
[12] Tuchman, p. 160.
[13] Tuchman, p. 186.
[14] http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-
8&rlz=1T4HPIB_enUS312US312&q=Balfour
[15] http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2013/12/cover-
2.jpghttp://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2013/12/cover-2.jpg
[16] J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit (New York: Ballentine, 1973), p. 215.
[17] http://forward.com/articles/167982/of-hobbits-and-the-golem/?p=all#ixzz2wcLI2Kxd
[18] http://forward.com/articles/167982/of-hobbits-and-the-golem/?p=all#ixzz2wcLI2Kxd
[19] http://forward.com/articles/167982/of-hobbits-and-the-golem/?p=all#ixzz2wcLI2Kxd
[20] Tolkien, The Hobbit, p. 204.
[21] http://thomistica.net/letter-to-margaret-of-flanders/
[22] Tolkien, The Hobbit, p. 35.
[23] Tolkien, The Hobbit, p. 34.
[24] Jackson, The Hobbit, part I, at 1:34.11.
[25] Jackson, The Hobbit, part I, at 2:21:58.
[26] http://forward.com/articles/167982/of-hobbits-and-the-golem/?p=all#ixzz2wcLg7GlP
[27] http://www.isi.org/lectures/text/pdf/birzer.pdf
[28] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/12/22/031222crat_atlarge?currentPage=all
[29] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/12/22/031222crat_atlarge?currentPage=all
[30] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/12/22/031222crat_atlarge?currentPage=all
[31] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/12/22/031222crat_atlarge?currentPage=all
[32] http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/06/how-much-was-tolkiens-rings-influenced.html
[33] http://www.isi.org/lectures/text/pdf/birzer.pdf
[34] Carpenter, p. 209
[35] Carpenter, p. 209.
[36] Carpenter, p. 209.
[37] Tolkien, The Hobbit, p. 87. [38]
Tolkien, The Hobbit, p. 91. [39]
Tolkien, The Hobbit, pp. 165-6. [40]
Tolkien, The Hobbit, p. 286.
[41] http://thomistica.net/letter-to-margaret-of-flanders/
[42] http://thomistica.net/letter-to-margaret-of-flanders/
[43] Harry C. Vereyser, It Didn’t Have To Be This Way: Why Boom and Bust is Unnecessary—and
How the Austrian School of Economics Breaks the Cycle (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2012), p. 34.
[44] Vereyser, p. 128.
[45] Vereyser, p. 207.
[46] Brian M. McCall, The Church and the Usurers: Unprofitable Lending for the Modern Economy
(Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press at Ave Maria University, 2013), p. xiii.
[47] McCall, pp. xiii-xiv.
[48] Brian M. McCall, The Church and the Usurers: Unprofitable Lending for the Modern Economy
(Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press at Ave Maria University, 2013)
[49] Boyle, p. 275. [50]
Skidelsky, p. 393. [51]
Skidelsky, p. 397.