Why does Lord of The Rings appeal to the radical right?

Musing on New Year’s Eve about the not-at-all delicate subject of racial identity, Canadian music star Grimes tweeted that JRR Tolkien “lamented the damage nazis did to the melting pot that is ‘white culture’”. Possibly unwittingly, her post touched on what is becoming an increasingly pressing question: what is it about the 21st century right in all its unsavoury manifestations, and its fascination with JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth?

Grimes is well plugged into the thinking of the Silicon Valley brand of Tolkien-infused right-wing ideas. A recent biography of Elon Musk, with whom Grimes has parented two children, reported that on the couple’s second date, he subjected her to an impromptu quiz to test her knowledge of The Lord of the Rings (not a recommended wooing strategy, unless you’re one of the world’s richest men).

Musk is not the only tech billionaire who looks to Tolkien’s fantasy epic for inspiration. His fellow PayPal founder Peter Thiel found the names of most of his businesses there, from the data-mining company Palantir to the border security service Anduril.

Interviewed in the current issue of the Atlantic, Thiel, who supported Donald Trump’s first election campaign in 2016 and has bankrolled a number of Trumpist candidates since, declared his disillusionment with electoral politics but maintained his devotion to Tolkien’s worldview, which he seems to believe offers a model of small-Shire light touch regulation in opposition to the nanny state of Mordor, with its socialised medicine and diversity hires.

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He also hankers after the immortality of Middle-earth’s elves and plans to have his corpse frozen in anticipation of revivification once technology makes that possible.

Items on display include memorabilia, correspondence, fan art, a Lord of the Rings pinball machine and a video of the late Leonard Nimoy singing his imperishable 1967 non-hit The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

In the same interview, Thiel avoided answering a question about whether fascism is a desirable form of government, but he is a long-standing patron of Curtis Yarvin, a “neo-reactionary” who proposes replacing US democracy with a strong leader armed with the powers of an absolute monarch. The return of the king, if you like.

Meanwhile, in Italy, where self-described Tolkien superfan Giorgia Meloni was elected prime minister last year, an exhibition, Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author is currently running at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. Items on display include memorabilia, correspondence, fan art, a Lord of the Rings pinball machine and a video of the late Leonard Nimoy singing his imperishable 1967 non-hit The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.

In Italy, it seems, where postwar fascists were unable to draw on the tainted iconography of the Mussolini era, Tolkien provided a handy substitute. As with its American equivalent, the Italian right’s take on Middle-earth mixes arrested adolescent kitsch with an undercurrent of menace. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party is the successor to the neo-fascist MSI, which for decades hosted a “Camp Hobbit” every summer, where teenage fascists would be called to political meetings by a blast of Boromir’s horn.

[ Muddled Earth: JRR Tolkein's tortured relationship with Ireland ]

JRR Tolkien was a conservative Catholic with a deep suspicion of modernity and a psyche scarred by his experience of the trenches in the first World War. He despised Nazism and anti-Semitism, describing Hitler as a “ruddy little ignoramus” set on “ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved and tried to present in its true light”. (That seems to be the quote Grimes was garbling into “white culture” in her tweet.) His deep academic knowledge of Norse mythology, Germanic runes and Brythonic languages – all subjects that have been known to tickle the erogenous zones of white nationalists – has always rendered The Lord of the Rings liable to a particular reading; a few years ago the British National Party urged its members to watch all of Peter Jackson’s adaptations.

For most readers, it remains simply, as the author intended, a rattling good yarn. ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations,’ Tolkein told readers in his preface to the second edition

The book itself undeniably depicts a clash of warring races, with “swart, slant-eyed” orcs and dark-skinned men on one side, and fair-haired heroes on the other, so there’s ample opportunity for those so inclined. Last year’s minor kerfuffle over Amazon Prime’s prequel The Rings of Power surfaced some of that when social media users (including a certain Musk) complained about the show’s colour-blind casting. But since its publication in the 1950s The Lord of the Rings has also been interpreted as an anti-imperialist ecological fable by 1960s hippies, to Tolkien’s befuddlement. For most readers, it remains simply, as the author intended, a rattling good yarn. “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations,” he told readers in his preface to the second edition.

Meloni’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, called the Rome show a “gift” to her. Political opponents have described it as a right-wing counteroffensive, occupying a space usually reserved for modernist art (the Tolkien exhibition replaced a Picasso show). Expect more of this across Europe as the culture wars march into the cultural institutions.