how about next time we let the elves be Jewish and the dwarves can be, I don’t know, Jamaican.
Dwarves => Japanese, all clan honor and axes folded in 1 million layers.
I keep telling you guys, they’re Texan oilmen. Take a look at Yosemite Sam sometime and give me one important way in which he differs from the average fantasy dwarf.
It’s amazing the way focus on multiculturalism over class has ruined people’s ability to read art.
Elves are upper class.
Dwarves are working class.
There are traits they have that are references to more ethnic-based cultures, but that’s because our fantasy of those cultures themselves are just projections about class. Ie, the elegant, graceful Easterners are a fantasy about their richness that got projected onto Elves, just as much as stereotypes about Wales and Scotland are based on their lower class relative to England.
Next, people will be like “Uh, vampires are European and zombies are African?”
At least with regard to the Tolkein legendarium (and other genre source texts insofar as they reflect their Tolkein influences), this schema does not work at all.
Dwarves in particular have all the characteristics of an endogamous ethnic minority. They are extremely clannish and xenophobic; their general attitude towards “normal” sorts of people is “we have no use for you;” they are famous for having secrets and customs (crafting-arts, language, magic, etc.) that are powerful but not available to outsiders; they are, importantly when it comes to class analysis, noteworthy primarily for being stupendously wealthy.
Not to mention their folkloric roots in Nibelung-type dwarves, who don’t resemble the “working class” even a little, or for that matter Tolkein’s explicit commentary that various aspects of his dwarf-lore were Judaism-inspired.
The argument makes a little more sense with regard to elves, but even so, they’re too insular and self-sufficient to work very well as stand-ins for the upper-class. They function way better as “Tolkein’s image of an idealized heroic society” than anything more allegorical.
Also, uh…
Next, people will be like “Uh, vampires are European and zombies are African?”
So, OK, not actually African as such. But vampires are creatures of European myth, and zombies are black-by-way-of-Haiti. Their origins certainly don’t reflect everything important to the way we use them now, but they can certainly still be made to matter.
Your favorite metaphors aren’t the only metaphors. Literature is wide.