Kulturkampf

[benji]

New year so we need to go over this again apparently:

How did The Lord of the Rings end up so beloved by the right wing?

Elon Musk, JD Vance and Giorgia Meloni have all described JRR Tolkien’s fantasy novels as fundamental to their respective world views – but it’d be too easy to claim they’ve simply misunderstood them. As Peter Jackson’s film adaptations return to cinemas 25 years after they began, Xan Brooks dives into the world’s most complicated fandom

It used to be easy to spot a true Tolkien fan. His tale was the perfect blend of tweedy respectability with folksy eccentricity and was therefore beloved by young nerds, old hippies and a smattering of liberal, literate Real Ale aficionados. But it’s clear that we need to update all the files. Those older fans have died out while the nerds have grown rich and skewed right, dragging the text along for the ride, reframing it as the touchstone for extremist politicians and Silicon Valley billionaires alike.

The libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel is so in thrall to Middle-earth that he’s named his data analysis company Palantir (after Saruman’s seeing stone), his capital management firm Mithril (after a rare elvish silver) and his military start-up Anduril (after Aragorn’s sword). JD Vance, the US vice president, credits the story with “shaping his conservative worldview”. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, for good measure, used to cosplay as a halfling at neo-fascist “hobbit camps” outside Rome. The Lord of the Rings is her roadmap, her bible, her mantra for life. “I don’t consider it to be a fantasy at all,” she once said.

The evidence would suggest that Elon Musk doesn’t either. The Lord of the Rings remains the world’s richest man’s favourite book. More worryingly, its epic adventure across Middle-earth has come to shape and inform his hardline views on immigration. Speaking on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year, Musk likened the hobbits of the Shire to the citizens of small-town England, and asylum seekers to Mordor’s orcs. “The hobbits were able to live their lives in peace and tranquillity,“ he explained. “But only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.” In Musk’s real-world reimagining of the Tolkien classic, he presumably casts himself in the role of Gandalf while Tommy Robinson co-stars as the heroic Aragorn.

In the meantime, thank heavens, we are left with The Lord of the Rings as it was envisaged by the director Peter Jackson, with Ian McKellen playing the wizard and Viggo Mortensen as the avenging king. The trilogy blows in like an emissary from a kinder, simpler age, altogether unsullied by recent associations as it sends its lowly underdogs on an impossible mission to destroy an evil ring of power and thereby save the planet. Or as loyal Sam Gamgee puts it, “There’s some good in this world, Mr Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

At this point, it would be nice to hail Jackson’s adaptation as the definitive take on Tolkien’s epic story – its real shape, its true form. Except that this would only be replacing one false narrative with another. Because while Tolkien’s writing contains numerous qualities that contradict Musk’s bizarre theories, it also contains several elements (a sense of moral exceptionalism; an implied racial hierarchy) that tangentially support them. So it’s too easy to say that Musk, Meloni, Thiel and Vance simply misunderstand The Lord of the Rings in the same way that some fans failed to realise Starship Troopers (1997) and Fight Club (1999) were satires. Annoyingly, it’s more likely a case of different interpretations. Jackson gives us the liberal reading of the classic text; Musk the swivel-eyed, ethno-nationalistic remix.

HappyEater
9 min ago
With reference to Lord of the Rings, Stewart Lee sums it up best.

‘I’ve done this show all over, Brexit-voting places, non-Brexit-voting places, this was marginally in favour of Remain, here in Oxford town. But the Remain-voting cities loom out of the map now, don’t they… like fantasy citadels, Tolkienesque landscapes, wondrous walled cities full of wizards and poets… people who can understand data… in the middle of a massed swampy wilderness, with ‘Here there be trolls’ written’.

Not sure there’s been a better explanation of what happened to our country however the far right want to claim LOFTR as their own.

See, just like my animes.