Rachel Maddow: Liking The Lord of the Rings Is 'Far-Right'

Yes, J.D. Vance likes J.R.R. Tolkien. So do most people.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow thinks it's very interesting that Republican vice presidential contender J.D. Vance named his venture capital firm after a magical object from the series The Lord of the Rings (LOTR).

"Lord of the Rings is sort of a 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," said Maddow on Wednesday.

She further noted that Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and supporter of Vance, also named one of his companies, Palantir, after a LOTR item.

It is absolutely true that Vance and Thiel are fans of The Lord of the Rings, the fantasy series by J.R.R. Tolkien. Many arch-conservative and probably alt-right figures are as well. Moderates also love LOTR. So do liberals, lefties, and the completely apolitical. That's because LOTR is one of the most popular and best-selling book series of all time. The films, adapted for the screen by Peter Jackson, were among the highest-grossing movies of all time. They won 17 Academy Awards.

Everybody loves The Lord of the Rings. Really.

Tolkien set the baseline for modern fantasy: The ubiquity of archetypes such as the gray-bearded wizard, the immortal elf queen, the spectral dark lord, and the brutish orc are all due to his influence. His works are not exactly devoid of political themes, and they do depict a civilized "West" triumphing over the forces of evil. Tolkien's own views were somewhere between monarchism and anarchism—he had libertarian tendencies in terms of his distaste for large and authoritarian states, though he also fretted about industrialization's negative impacts on the environment and the community. His most overtly political character, the scheming wizard Saruman, can be read as a critique of urban development, but other scholars have read him as an imperialist or even communist figure, alternatively.

That's a long way of saying that The Lord of the Rings is, like many great works, open to interpretation. It is not a far-right text, despite whatever Maddow would have her viewers believe.

For a more thorough review of the politics of The Lord of the Rings, read Reason's Christian Britschgi.