Tolkien, when he drew on episodes from early medieval history for the plot of The Lord of the Rings, had never meant to equate the Hungarians or the Saracens with the monstrous evil embodied by Mordor. The age of migrations was sufficiently remote, he had assumed, that there was little prospect of his readers believing that. He had never had any intention of demonising entire peoples – ancient or modern. ‘I’m very anti that kind of thing.’4 Sauron’s armies, although they might come from the east, symbolised the capacity for murderousness that Tolkien had seen for himself on the Western Front.
