If you could have been born in Middle Earth...

[jallanite]

Despite Mumriken’s opinion, Tolkien’s attitude towards what would today be called multiculturalism seems to me to be supportive.

Read letter 53 in which Tolkien supports multiculturalim as opposed to what he calls “Americo-cosmopolitanism”. Tolkien also writes:

Col. Knox says ⅛ of the world’s population speaks ‘English’, and that is the biggest language group. If true, damn shame – say I.

In his lecture English and Welsh Tolkien summarizes what he calls “this legal oppression of the Welsh language″ which he deplores. Tolkien notes:

Governments – or far-seeing civil servants from Thomas Cromwell onwards – understand the matter of language well enough, for their purposes. Uniformity is naturally neater; it is also very much more manageable. A hundred-per-cent Englishman is easier for an English government to handle. It does not matter what he was, or what his fathers were. Such an Englishman is any man who speaks English natively, and has lost any effective tradition of a different and more independent past. For though cultural and other traditions may accompany a difference of language, they are chiefly maintained and preserved by language. Language is the prime differentiator of peoples –not of races–, whatever that much-misused word may mean in the long-blended history of western Europe.

The full paper is available at http://demo.ort.org.il/clickit2/file.../948358249.pdf .