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 …