J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heartfelt Loathing” for Walt Disney and Refused to Let Disney Studios Adapt His Work

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I’ve just start­ed read­ing J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit to my daugh­ter. While much of the nuance and the ref­er­ences to Tolkien­ian deep time are lost on her, she eas­i­ly grasps the dis­tinc­tive charms of the char­ac­ters, the nature of their jour­ney, and the per­ils, won­ders, and Elven friends they have met along the way so far. She is famil­iar with fairy tale dwarfs and myth­ic wiz­ards, though not with the typol­o­gy of insu­lar, mid­dle-class, adven­ture-averse coun­try gen­try, thus Hob­bits them­selves took a bit of explain­ing.

While read­ing and dis­cussing the book with her, I’ve won­dered to myself about a pos­si­ble his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship between Tolkien’s fairy tale fig­ures and those of the Walt Dis­ney com­pa­ny which appeared around the same time. The troupe of dwarves in The Hob­bit might pos­si­bly share a com­mon ances­tor with Snow White’s dwarfs—in the Ger­man fairy tale the Broth­ers Grimm first pub­lished in 1812. But here is where any sim­i­lar­i­ty between Tolkien and Dis­ney begins and ends.

In fact, Tolkien most­ly hat­ed Disney’s cre­ations, and he made these feel­ings very clear. Snow White debuted only months after The Hob­bit’s pub­li­ca­tion in 1937. As it hap­pened, Tolkien went to see the film with lit­er­ary friend and some­time rival C.S. Lewis. Nei­ther liked it very much. In a 1939 let­ter, Lewis grant­ed that “the ter­ri­fy­ing bits were good, and the ani­mals real­ly most mov­ing.” But he also called Dis­ney a “poor boob” and lament­ed “What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent soci­ety?”

Tolkien, notes Atlas Obscu­ra, “found Snow White love­ly, but oth­er­wise wasn’t pleased with the dwarves. To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of a con­cept they held as precious”—the con­cept, that is, of fairy sto­ries. Some might brush away their opin­ions as two Oxford dons gaz­ing down their noses at Amer­i­can mass enter­tain­ment. As Tolkien schol­ar Trish Lam­bert puts it, “I think it grat­ed on them that he [Dis­ney] was com­mer­cial­iz­ing some­thing that they con­sid­ered almost sacro­sanct.”

“Indeed,” writes Steven D. Grey­danus at the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter, “it would be impos­si­ble to imag­ine” these two authors “being any­thing but appalled by Disney’s sil­ly dwarfs, with their slap­stick humor, nurs­ery-moniker names, and singsong musi­cal num­bers.” One might counter that Tolkien’s dwarves (as he insists on plu­ral­iz­ing the word), also have fun­ny names (derived, how­ev­er, from Old Norse) and also break into song. But he takes pains to sep­a­rate his dwarves from the com­mon run of children’s sto­ry dwarfs.

Tolkien would lat­er express his rev­er­ence for fairy tales in a schol­ar­ly 1947 essay titled “On Fairy Sto­ries,” in which he attempts to define the genre, pars­ing its dif­fer­ences from oth­er types of mar­velous fic­tion, and writ­ing with awe, “the realm of fairy sto­ry is wide and deep and high.” These are sto­ries to be tak­en seri­ous­ly, not dumb­ed-down and infan­tilized as he believed they had been. “The asso­ci­a­tion of chil­dren and fairy-sto­ries,” he writes, “is an acci­dent of our domes­tic his­to­ry.”

Tolkien wrote The Hob­bit for young peo­ple, but he did not write it as a “children’s book.” Noth­ing in the book pan­ders, not the lan­guage, nor the com­plex char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, nor the grown-up themes. Disney’s works, on the oth­er hand, rep­re­sent­ed to Tolkien a cheap­en­ing of ancient cul­tur­al arti­facts, and he seemed to think that Disney’s approach to films for chil­dren was espe­cial­ly con­de­scend­ing and cyn­i­cal.

He described Disney’s work on the whole as “vul­gar” and the man him­self, in a 1964 let­ter, as “sim­ply a cheat,” who is “hope­less­ly cor­rupt­ed” by prof­it-seek­ing (though he admits he is “not inno­cent of the prof­it-motive” him­self).

…I rec­og­nize his tal­ent, but it has always seemed to me hope­less­ly cor­rupt­ed. Though in most of the ‘pic­tures’ pro­ceed­ing from his stu­dios there are admirable or charm­ing pas­sages, the effect of all of them is to me dis­gust­ing. Some have giv­en me nau­sea…

This expli­ca­tion of Tolkien’s dis­like for Dis­ney goes beyond mere gos­sip to an impor­tant prac­ti­cal upshot: Tolkien would not allow any of his works to be giv­en the Walt Dis­ney treat­ment. While his pub­lish­er approached the stu­dios about a Lord of the Rings adap­ta­tion (they were turned down at the time), most schol­ars think this hap­pened with­out the author’s knowl­edge, which seems a safe assump­tion to say the least.

Tolkien’s long his­to­ry of express­ing neg­a­tive opin­ions about Dis­ney led to his lat­er for­bid­ding, “as long as it was pos­si­ble,” any of his works to be pro­duced “by the Dis­ney stu­dios (for all whose works I have a heart­felt loathing).” Astute read­ers of Tolkien know his seri­ous intent in even the most com­ic of his char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions. Or as Vin­tage News’ Mar­tin Cha­lakos­ki writes, “there is not a speck of Dis­ney in any of those pages.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

J.R.R. Tolkien Snubs a Ger­man Pub­lish­er Ask­ing for Proof of His “Aryan Descent” (1938)

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

J. R. R. Tolkien Writes & Speaks in Elvish, a Lan­guage He Invent­ed for The Lord of the Rings

When J.R.R. Tolkien Worked for the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary and “Learned More … Than Any Oth­er Equal Peri­od of My Life” (1919–1920)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.