A question about class in Middle Earth

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Dragging this back to Tolkien . . .

A good idea.

I think - and all you cognoscenti should teach me about this if I'm wrong - that Tolkien was an aristocrat. And there being a possibility of being an aristocracy requires a class society to begin with...

One may say that he wrote the legendarium of the old world which was not his contemporary world and the society he portrays can be explained from that angle.

But yet I feel it was a world not totally unattractive to him. Like the ideas Plato brings forwards with Socrates as his mouthpiece in his dialogues: they were not things he thought were the final truth but nevertheless they were not totally against his own position...