billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
I'm not sure that it does predate Tolkien? The idea that a race could have an alignment, and be an inherently evil (or good) race, seems quite unusual to me. Especially for "humanoid" races. Pre-Tolkien fantasy literature obviously has inherently evil individual creatures (dragons, for example) but not so much with entire humanoid species.
The white martians of Edgar Rice Burroughs were pretty thoroughly evil and they predated Tolkien's publications by a couple of decades.