During MSNBC’s coverage of the Republican National Convention, anchor Rachel Maddow noted that Vice-Presidential candidate JD Vance had named his venture capital firm after a magic ring from Lord of the Rings, the epic series by J.R.R. Tolkien. According to Maddow:
Lord of the Rings is a sort of favorite cosmos for naming things and cultural references for a lot of far-right and alt-right figures, both in Europe and the United States. Peter Thiel names all these things after Tolkien figures in places like his company Palantir, for example.
Maddow then said of Vance’s company, “He called it Narya, N-A-R-Y-A, which you can remember because it’s ‘Aryan,’ but you move the N to the front.”
Maddow is not the only one to link Middle-earth with right-wing politics. In The Boston Globe, Alex Beam pointed out that conservative Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni once attended “Hobbit Camp” as a girl and that her followers see their political struggle “as a battle cry to protect Middle-earth.”
Though not exactly anachronistic accusations that Tolkien’s works or Tolkien are alt-right, the guilt-by-association is clear. For millions of fans around the world, including fellow progressives like Steven Colbert, who are huge fans of The Lord of the Rings, these accusations sting. Still, attempts to make Tolkien a radical of the Right continue to pop up from time to time. Last year, a government-backed group in the U.K. put The Lord of the Rings on a terror watch list, along with authors like G.K. Chesterton and Shakespeare, and books like 1984 and Brave New World.
Tolkien himself addressed the topic in an appropriately snide letter he sent to Germany in the 1930s when a German publisher asked if he were “Aryan.”
I am not of Aryan extraction: that is, Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware, none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.
Perhaps jealous that Tolkien is too often associated with the Right, the far-left magazine Jacobin offered a Marxist take on Middle-earth in 2023. The author puzzled over how Tolkien’s conservative outlook could still be so popular. Though he appreciated Tolkien’s tremendous skill as a writer, he concluded that all of the kings and duties to the nation and strict morality present in the series were due to his Christian ethics.
Possibly the most amusing attempt to shoehorn Tolkien is the claim that The Lord of the Rings is not particularly Christian at all. According to a writer for Medium, “Christianity makes a big effort to claim . . . [The Lord of the Rings] as a Christian text. A story about magic rings, elves, and wizards … is Christian? They keep saying so, but that doesn’t make it true.”
Dr. Austin Freeman of Houston Christian University wrote an excellent book that refutes this idea that something must look Christian to be Christian. Tolkien, Freeman argued, offered “a coherent theology of God and his works” in The Lord of the Rings.
Behind attempts to squeeze Tolkien’s faith from his writing is a postmodern axiom that truth is in the eye of the beholder. French philosopher and father of deconstruction Jacques Derrida infamously claimed, “There is nothing outside the text,” no meaning, no authorial intent, no real world that is being described. Derrida severed the link between an author’s meaning and his work.
This makes it possible to claim Tolkien as a prophet of the alt-right, a Marxist propagandist, a dead WASP, or a tool of the patriarchy. What he meant is irrelevant. What is read into what he wrote is all that matters.
This kind of thinking only guts Tolkien’s work of its brilliance. The stories of Middle-earth are compelling because they are rooted in a bigger story, or as Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis might have put it, a deeper magic. All that is presented as good, beautiful, and true are rooted in eternal things, not social constructs or power dynamics. Like all true art, The Lord of the Rings resonates with the transcendent things written on our hearts. They remind us, like Sam Gamgee’s moving speech in the movie version, that there is good in the world, and it’s worth fighting for.
This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you’re a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.
Photo Courtesy: ©Getty Images/Haywood Magee/Stringer
Published Date: August 12, 2024
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.