Tolkien Against the Grain

Tolkien Against the Grain

The Lord of the Rings is a book obsessed with ruins, bloodlines, and the divine right of aristocrats. Why are so many on the left able to love it?

With over 150 million copies sold, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-selling prose narratives of the twentieth century and remains beloved by fans across the globe. The genre-defining story it tells of an unlikely provincial hero fated to save the world from destruction—and the close-knit, multi-species fellowship that aids him on his quest—has become the template for countless imitators in fantasy and science fiction, to say nothing of the series’ own adaptations into numerous popular films, television shows, and games.

But if we judge Tolkien by those who claim his fellowship the loudest, we might grow concerned. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has said that not only is Tolkien his favorite author but that “a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up.” And Vance has the receipts to prove it: he named his firm Narya after one of the three Elvish Rings of Power, just as Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel invoked Tolkien when naming Palantir Technologies, Mithril Capital Management, Lembas Capital, Valar Ventures, and Rivendell One LLC. In the 1970s the Italian right revitalized itself at “Hobbit camps,” a formative experience in the life of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who attended one of the camps as a teenager. Far-right and extremist groups in many other countries also revere Tolkien. The UK’s “Prevent” anti-terror program even recently characterized him (along with C.S. Lewis and George Orwell), somewhat preposterously, as a kind of gateway drug for potential radicalization.

Since the founding of the tiny corner of academia known as science fiction studies in the 1970s, there has been a sense that science fiction is of the left, while fantasy is of the right. Science fiction is about the future, about the utopias we might someday build, about science—while fantasy is about looking back toward an imaginary past of kings, empires, war, and magic (which is to say, nonsense). If science fiction is about revolution, fantasy is about restoration. Or so the Marxist critics who have championed science fiction and decried fantasy for the past half-century would have it. The fantasy work of some authors (like China Miéville, M. John Harrison, Michael Moorcock, or Ursula K. Le Guin, all writers who don’t fit neatly into any one genre category) are considered exceptions to this general tendency, but even when leftist fantasy...