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Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli
I don't know if Tolkien in the 50s really had the Nazis especially in mind, any more than he did when writing Lord of the Rings (when they were still around)- and of course the basic lineaments of the story go back to the old Kaiser.
I do think however that Tolkien was more-or-less consciously creating an anti-Siegfried, a counter to the Wagnerian portrait which JRRT I'm sure found repulsive. Wagner's hero was indeed an Ubermensch, at least in the Nietzchean if not quite the Nazi sense, an embodiment of Might Makes Right and Triumph of the Will. For Tolkien, both notions were not only wrong but extremely dangerous- as Turin's story shows.
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Up to a point - I can almost accept - at a stretch - that the story of Numenor owes something to what was happening in Germany in the 30's/40's, but was the ubermensch in his mind to such an extent during the writing of CoH? After all, by the time of writing CoH the world had already seen the failure of the Nazi 'ideal'?
I did start a thread some time back on Tolkien & the Nazis - asking whether his desire to create a 'mythology for England' (& his subsequent statement that in that his 'crest had long since fallen') had been shattered by the use to which the Nazis had put Northern myth. It seems at least possible. National myth suddenly seemed to carry a very dangerous potential. Yet, as I say, by the time he turned to write CoH its clear that if all he was doing was attempting to show the flaw in the Nazi ideal he was pretty much preaching to the converted.