Ùrnaigh & Obair

But the post misses two important things: 1) white supremacist readings are actually based on misreadings and selective readings of the text - it's a story where nobody is monopoly Good, where the great king is shown to be wrong about several things, where fall remains a real possibility for any character - including of course the main character - where evil wins by spreading distrust of foreigners and nationalist pride (not a surprise that its Boromir, the great patriot, who falls, even though he redeems himself before the end) and good triumphs by trusting the foreigner and breaking the laws that have been placed against them (over and over again, whether in Gondor, or Rohan, or Lothlórien, or even in Fangorn, Tolkien hammers this point home). White supremacists can only see the superficial east vs west and fails to read the rest of it. Tolkien himself, if we count his opinions, was famously opposed to anti-Semitism and spent his valedictorian address to Oxford, the one thing that as far as he knew at the time would get the most attention of anything he would ever say, condemning Apartheid, in the mid-fifties.

Also b) most white supremacist identification with Lord of the Rings comes from occultic black metal adjacent worlds, where they mainly identify with Sauron.

Now, I don't know Willie (he died when I was four at the age of 93), but I'd guess that if you checked - or if he wasn't performing the primitive for visiting ethnographers - he'd express what every other tradition bearer I've encountered has thought, which is that there's a category of tales that everyone agrees is fiction that we're telling for the message or the joy of the telling (this is what I'd consider the traditional fairy tale - a traditional tale that noone seriously claims is real. In Willie's repertoire I'd say that 'the three sons and the feather' among many others - almost all stories in the book are classic fairytales, and really good ones at that) and a category that people believe is real but isn't (most supernatural tales fit this category, and is in my opinion the most interesting type of tale precisely because it reveals the limits of what people thought was possible), and a tale category that might be called 'anecdote' which probably is real, even if they sometimes are of a considerable age. Anecdotes often becomes tales by the addition of a stock set of motifs, characters and dramatic repetitions given by folklore, which is done over time during the telling and as the anecdote travels from carrier to carrier (it's a process us moderns can recognise too).