Gringotts Goblins and Middle-Earth Dwarves

I find it interesting that these are two of the biggest fantasy series in society and their similarities are quite similar, it's not something that's typically thought about but as soon as it's pointed out it seems so obvious. With the previous blogs we had some people comparing The Hobbit to the Harry Potter series and the similarities are shocking, right down to both main characters possessing invisibility. It had me thinking, since we talked about Tolkien resembling Jewish people in the race of the dwarves if there was anything similar in the story of Harry Potter. When Harry goes to the bank to view his inheritance the reader meets the goblin race for the first time. Now in The Hobbit there is a goblin race, the ones who live under the misty mountains, as well but they are presented differently in each tale. As opposed to being violent and blundering the goblins in Harry Potter are in charge of Gringotts Bank, they are the main group responsible for all of the money in the wizarding world, at least in London. This reminds me of the history between the Christians and the Jews that we discussed in class, how they Jew’s were made to be in charge of loans, taxes, money, etc since it didn’t interfere with their beliefs, as opposed to the Christians. In Gringotts there is no other race running the bank it is all goblins, no wizards, giants, centaurs, just goblins. On top of that these goblins contain other characteristics that the stereotypical caricature of the Jewish person has, on top of the money greed caricatures often depicted them with large, hooked noses, elongated ears, beady and drooping eyes. Even their hair, long and curly/wavy, is similar to how orthadox Jews wear their hair. In Harry Potter all goblins we encounter fit this description to a tee and J.K doesn’t have dwarves, the race Tolkien portrays Jewish characteristics, but instead pushes these traits onto her modified race goblins, subconscious or not.

Raiders of the Lost Arkenstone

The history of the Jews in their homeland is a long historical one and controversial in the Middle East. The exile of the Jews from their homeland is called the Jewish diaspora and it began in the 8th century B.C. when the Judahites were exiled from the Kingdom of Israel. Over the next centuries many other exiles of the remaining Jews, the Israelites, occurred at the hands of the Assyrians in 733 B.C., the Babylonian exile in 597 B.C., and finally the Jews were dispersed around a large area ,but not their homeland, when the Romans conquered Jerusalem in 6 CE. Over the centuries, as the Jews lost their homeland, one of the holiest objects in their religion, the Ark of the Covenant, became lost. The Jewish people were without a homeland for many centuries and the majority lived in Europe where they had to live with many oppressions such as the Jewish expulsion from England in 1290. The Jewish people endured travesties of the worst nature like the Holocaust until in 1947 when the United Nations began to make plans for a partition of Palestinian land that would be used to create a new Israel for the Jews. The new nation was established in 1948 and was immediately followed by war with other Arabian states who felt that their land was stolen from them. To this day, nations are still fighting over control over the area that is considered to be a holy land in Judaic and Islamic cultures. 

The suffering of the Jews in many ways is paralleled in the dwarves sufferings in The Hobbit. The dwarves had a homeland of their own in which they prospered but eventually it was conquered by another race, a dragon. They also had an object similar to the Ark, the Arkenstone, that was incredibly valued by the dwarves and lost when they lost their mountain. The parallels also extend beyond when Tolkien wrote the novel; when the dwarves finally do regain their holy land, many other nations, come to lay claim to the land and an enormous battle occurs immediately after the dwarves have returned to their holy land. The parallels between the dwarves and the Jews is an allegory for the Jew’s loss of Israel but it also extended to after Tolkien wrote the novel and the aftermath of the creation of a new Israel.