In the annals of English literature, certain lines of criticism have left a lasting sting. One of the most memorable of these came from the screenwriter and cartoonist John Rogers, who had this to say about the relative merits of J.R.R. Tolkien and Ayn Rand: There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. Rogers didn’t know it when he wrote that in 2009, but he was foreshadowing the obsessions of today’s political far right. From JD Vance to Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, we’re now dealing with a generation of reactionaries who meld the worst of both literary worlds: Tolkien’s and Rand’s. Like Ayn Rand’s sociopathic heroes, they believe rich capitalists ought to run the world, and they have bottomless contempt for concepts like equality and democracy. But they’ve also latched onto Tolkien’s fantasy realm of Middle-Earth as a cultural touchstone—one they believe is symbolic of their own worldview. They name their slush funds and surveillance companies, like Thiel’s Palantir, after magical artifacts from Tolkien’s books, and they use long, torturous metaphors about elves to explain their strategy for waging the culture war. But, as often happens with the political right, they’ve fundamentally misunderstood the works of art they claim to love. Despite the notable flaws in his own politics, it’s unlikely that J.R.R. Tolkien would have had any fondness or respect for oligarchs, war profiteers, or their allies. In fact, Tolkien’s whole mythology warns against exactly the kind of power-hungry politics they pursue. For an idea of the kind of fetid ideological stew we’re dealing with here, just consider the story of Vice President JD Vance’s venture capital fund. Back in 2019, Vance wasn’t yet a national politician; he was just the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy and a constant fixture in the liberal media, where his alleged insights into the “white working class” were in high demand. But Vance had big ambitions, and he was starting to build connections with people richer, more powerful, and more evil than himself. So he started a venture capital firm, and he named it “Narya Capital.” For most people, “Narya” probably sounds like an arbitrary corporate pseudo-word. For Vance’s liberal detractors, like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, it has raised suspicions that he just took the word “Aryan” and moved the N. Really, though, the name comes from Tolkien. In TheLord of the Rings, Narya is the Ring of Fire, one of three magic rings created by the elven craftsman Celebrimbor; it’s not the all-powerful One Ring, but it’s still a potent magical weapon.1 Now, ostensibly the purpose of Vance’s fund was to invest in “often-overlooked places” like the ones he’d described in Hillbilly Elegy, taking venture capital beyond the usual California and New York markets and empowering people who wanted to launch a startup in, say, North Carolina. But the name “Narya” betrays that Vance thought of the fund as his very own Ring of Power, which would allow him to wield influence in the world, and that’s how he really used it. In the first place, a sizable chunk of Narya’s $93 million starting capital came from Peter Thiel, the infamous right-wing billionaire who would soon be the top donor to Vance’s 2022 Senate run as well. Other funds came from Marc Andreessen, another billionaire who runs in the same circles as Thiel and whose view of the average American is reportedly “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” Still more cash came fromVivek Ramaswamy, who went to Yale Law School with Vance. In turn, Narya didn’t exactly donate to striving Appalachians who just needed a chance to succeed. Instead, Business Insider reportsthat the fund has given large sums of money to “a gene therapy company founded by Vivek Ramaswamy’s brother” (now there’s a coincidence), to a “Catholic meditation and prayer app” called Hallow, and to Rumble, the right-wing YouTube alternative that’s known for hosting Andrew Tate, Russell Brand, and miscellaneous other sex pests and racists. The one major project that did have a plausible connection to rural America—a startup called AppHarvest that aimed to create lots of high-tech autonomous greenhouses—went bankrupt after only a few years. So it appears that Narya Capital’s primary focus wasn’t altruism, the way it was initially touted in the press. Instead, Vance used the fund to build up tech-based conservative projects and to make connections for himself within the burgeoning techno-right. And it worked, to the extent that the same network of billionaires would help propel him all the way to the White House just five years later. Right-wing Catholicism, in particular, goes a long way toward explaining Vance’s affinity for Tolkien. By his own account, Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, the same year he founded Narya Capital. Today, he’s what’s known as a “traditionalist” or “postliberal” Catholic—in other words, a stridently conservative one who opposes progressive reforms and outreach to marginalized groups like LGBTQ Catholics, to the extent that the late Pope Francis had to lecture Vance about showing compassion to immigrants. In practice, Vance’s brand of Catholic conservatism means he wants to ban pornography along with abortion, and he blames the American epidemic of mass shootings on “the culture of fatherlessness” rather than the widespread availability of guns. It’s a restrictive and authoritarian blend of religion and politics, the polar opposite of “liberation theology,” and it contains little room for nuance or tolerance. As Vance himself puts it, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society.” Historically, that’s the kind of worldview that’s led to crusades and witch trials—and it has a parallel in Tolkien’s world, which is embroiled in a war against absolute evil in the form of the Dark Lord Sauron, a literary Satan figure. Tolkien was a devout Catholic, too, and Vance says that “a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up.” For his part, Catholic scholar Luke Burgis believes that Vance took “an apocalyptic frame of mind” from his reading of The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps imagines himself waging a “final and all-encompassing battle between good and evil” in the way Tolkien’s heroes do. If so, that’s a deeply worrying mindset for a political leader to have. We can see it reflected in Vance’s recent statements, like when he responded “excellent” to a text informing him that a U.S. airstrike had destroyed an entire apartment building in an attempt to kill one Yemeni missile engineer. If you believe in human rights and international law, that’s horrifying. But if you live in a moral universe of Dark Lords and noble warriors who fight them, it’s perfectly acceptable. By himself, though, JD Vance is only of limited interest. The real éminence grise has always been Peter Thiel, who effectively created Vance as we know him today. It was Thiel who gave Vance his first job in high finance in 2016, at his $850 million Mithril Capital fund. The position seems to have been a sinecure; according to colleagues who spoke anonymously to the Wall Street Journal in 2024, Vance was seldom in the office and spent a lot of time traveling to promote Hillbilly Elegy instead of doing investment work. But his time at Mithril allowed Vance to cultivate an image of himself as a successful businessman, which would later serve him well on the campaign trail. Like Narya, Mithril is a Tolkien-inspired name; in The Lord of the Rings, “mithril” is a precious metal that dwarves mine in the mountains of Moria. The company also seems to have provided the model for how Narya would work, with Vance just copying Thiel’s business on a smaller scale. As we’ve seen, it was Thiel who funded a portion of Narya too; it was Thiel who bankrolled Vance’s Senate campaign; it was even Thiel who first introduced Vance to Donald Trump in 2021, setting the stage for him to later become vice president. To a disturbing extent, Vance is Thiel’s proxy and his gateway to political power—and Thiel’s politics are the kind that shouldn’t be allowed any influence, anywhere. There is some debate about whether Peter Thiel is a fascist.2 In the past, he’s claimed to merely be a libertarian. But that doesn’t necessarily prove anything; economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were both libertarians, and they both supported fascist dictators at various points (Mussolini for von Mises, Pinochet for Hayek.) Thiel’s biographer, Max Chafkin, writes that the billionaire’s worldview “combines an obsession with technological progress with nationalist politics—a politics that at times has seemingly flirted with white supremacy.” On his blog Unpopular Front, writer John Ganz argues that, well, that sounds a lot like fascism. And really, it’s less a “flirtation” with white supremacy than a full-fledged love affair. Notably, Thiel grew up in apartheid South Africa and Namibia (formerly called South West Africa). There, he attended a German-language school in a town called Swakopmund which, according to the Guardian, was “notorious for its continued glorification of Nazism, including celebrating Hitler’s birthday” well into the 1970s. On the record, Thiel claims he disliked the “regimentation” of the schools there and turned to libertarianism as a result. But people who have known him personally tell a different story. In a 2016 blog post, author Julie Lythcott-Haims—one of Thiel’s former classmates from Stanford—recalls hearing rumors that Thiel had defended apartheid during their freshman year and confronting him about it: He said, with no facial affect, that apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and moral issues were irrelevant. He made no effort to even acknowledge the pain the concept of apartheid could possibly raise for me, a Black woman. Needless to say, the chill up my spine didn’t go away that day; if anything my fear was now greater knowing I was living with someone who seemed indifferent to human suffering or felt that oppressing whole swaths of humans was a rational, justifiable element of a system of governance. More recently, Thiel has said that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” because “welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women” have “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” In his view, the wrong kinds of people are voting, you see. Thiel has also praised the ideas of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, saying that he sees “parallels in the U.S. in the 2020s to Germany in the 1920s, where liberalism is exhausted. One suspects [that] democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted.” Absurdly enough, he’s even used a Tolkien analogy to express sympathy for Nazism, comparing society in Weimar Germany to “the dwarves in Moria where they [delve] too deep and finally awaken the nameless terror.” The implication is that if Weimar Germans hadn’t gone too far with their decadent liberalism, there wouldn’t have been a Nazi takeover, just as the demonic Balrog in The Lord of the Rings wouldn’t have woken up and devoured a bunch of dwarves if they hadn’t disturbed its rest with their too-ambitious mining project. That’s an unsubtle form of victim-blaming—especially since some critics have compared Tolkien’s short, bearded, and gold-loving dwarves to 20th century antisemitic caricatures—and it’s only a hair’s breadth away from saying that Hitler had a point. In terms of his business ventures, Mithril Capital isn’t the only Tolkien-branded company in Thiel’s portfolio. In keeping with the “obsession with technological progress” Chafkin noted, he’s up to his elbows in surveillance and weapons technology, and his whole project seems to revolve around amassing as much money and power as humanly possible. His flagship company is Palantir Technologies, and it’s named after a type of enchanted crystal ball that the wizard Saruman uses to spy on people across Middle-Earth. Like its fictional namesake, Palantir specializes in surveillance, along with data analysis and tracking. At the time of writing, they’ve just won a $30 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to build an AI model that tracks immigrants for deportation. They also have a “strategic partnership to supply technology to Israel” for use in Gaza, including “AI-based predictive policing systems” that allow the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to arrest Palestinians before they’ve actually committed any offense, based purely on the AI’s prediction that they may. Oh, and the leader of the company’s London office is Louis Mosley, the grandson of Oswald Mosley, who founded and ran the British Union of Fascists back in the 1930s. That’s certainly a choice. The whole thing is just cartoonishly sinister, and that’s before you even get into Anduril Industries. It’s a weapons company, and it’s named after the sword Anduril in Tolkien’s books—a special weapon wielded by kings, including Isildur and his descendant Aragorn (played with panache by Viggo Mortensen in the film adaptations.) Among other nasty products, the company makes Barracuda cruise missiles, quadcopter drones with “lethal precision firepower” onboard, and a “torpedo-inspired underwater attack drone” called Copperhead. Like with Palantir, many of its products incorporate AI in some way; a key goal appears to be creating autonomous “swarms” of drones that can fly in sync with each other and overwhelm air defenses, leading to more efficient killing. Technically, Thiel didn’t found this company; that was Palmer Luckey, who, like Vance, is another of his acolytes. But the New York Timespoints out that Luckey received “seed funding from the Founders Fund,” another venture capital firm co-founded by Thiel, and the fund still supplies Anduril with periodic infusions of cash in the billions, so it’s very much a part of his extended business empire. It’s also attracted the attention of the anti-war group Veterans for Peace, whose members have been protesting the construction of a $900 million drone factory in JD Vance’s Ohio. Thiel has a hand in several other, less prominent Tolkien-themed companies, too, and the journalist Paris Marx has compiled a thorough list. There’s Valar Ventures, yet anotherstartup fund named after the gods of Tolkien’s universe, plus two more venture capital funds called “Rivendell” (an elven city) and “Lembas” (a type of magic bread). The latter firm, Marx reports, has funded “a series of seemingly defunct food and blockchain startups.” (I know I’ve been waiting patiently for my food to be on the blockchain.) There’s Athelas, which aims to get more AI into the healthcare industry and is named after a fictional medicinal plant; Thiel associate Garry Tan is one of its “key investors.” And of course there’s Thiel’s Founders Fund, which he reportedly calls “the precious” behind closed doors, the same way Gollum refers to the One Ring. Thiel’s fixation on Tolkien has even spilled into his creepiest extracurricular project: his attempts to extend his own lifespan, which have led him to look into blood transfusions from younger people. In a 2023 interview with the Atlantic, he compared this pursuit to the existence of immortality in Tolkien’s universe, asking: “Why can’t we be elves?” For someone with his oversized ego and ambitions, the limitations of the human species are just unacceptable; he wants to transcend them and become a supernatural being, even if “vampire” would be a more apt comparison than “elf.” Speaking of elves, we can’t avoid talking about Curtis Yarvin (née Mencius Moldbug) any longer. A self-described “neoreactionary” and “monarchist,” Yarvin is a key intellectual influence on this far-right technocratic sphere. JD Vance has referenced him in interviews, and in 2012 Yarvin made a proposal called “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE) that seems to have provided the blueprint for Vance’s later calls to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.” For Yarvin, RAGE is just the first step in an agenda to end U.S. democracy and replace it with a corporate monarchy: You need a CEO. And a national CEO is what’s called a dictator. There’s no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they are going to have to get over their dictator phobia. Like Vance, both Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have cited Yarvin’s work with approval, although they’re always a little cagey about precisely which of his many provocative statements they like; in his Thiel biography, Chafkin describes him as the billionaire’s “house political philosopher.” And as you could probably guess from the fact that he used to blog under the pen name “Mencius Moldbug,” Yarvin is an enormous dork who frequently peppers his turgid prose with Tolkien metaphors. In a particularly embarrassing 2022 blog post, Yarvin set up an extended analogy between different kinds of magical creatures from Middle-Earth and what he imagines to be the different factions in today’s American culture wars. The conservatives who make up the Republican base, he writes, are like hobbits, who “just want to be governed sensibly, in a way that makes sense to hobbits.” Liberals, meanwhile, are like elves who “use political power to impose elf culture” onto the hobbits. (This is an oblique reference to Yarvin’s belief that basically all institutions have been captured by a “Cathedral” of stifling left-wing orthodoxy; there aremore extremely long blog postsabout that.) But hobbits, Yarvin writes, are constitutionally incapable of taking power themselves; they “will always be governed by elves,” and it’s “normal and fine for hobbits to be ruled by elves,” because that’s just the natural order of things. So, he says, the only way conservatives can win the culture war is to hand “absolute power” to “dark elves” like himself: in other words, intellectual elites who favor a reactionary “pro-hobbit regime” to replace the liberal one. The dark elves will “become and remain influential in narrow circles,” eventually “establishing cultural dominance” in order to “seduce the ruling high elves into losing faith in their own prestigious institutions” and “rule the future.” It’s a long, tortured metaphor, and I’m simplifying it to make it halfway intelligible, but it boils down to a Tolkien-themed expression of Yarvin, Thiel, and Vance’s agenda: dismantle liberal institutions, sow doubt about the concept of democracy itself, and build an alternative right-wing regime. The trouble is that, in order to make his stupid elf metaphor, Yarvin has to twist Tolkien’s mythology completely out of shape. For one thing, hobbits and elves get along fine in The Lord of the Rings; they’re not in conflict. For another, there’s no such thing as a “dark elf” in Tolkien’s writings. Those come from later fantasy novels and games, like Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons (where they’re calledthe “drow” elves) and R.A. Salvatore’slong-running Forgotten Realms series.3 And when they do appear in fantasy literature, dark elves are almost always villains. In Salvatore’s lore, they worship an evil spider god called Lolth and live in a creepy underground city called Menzoberranzan, which is basically Elf Hell. The only heroic one is the dual-sword-wieldingDrizzt Do’Urden(yes, that’s his name), and he’s only sympathetic because he rejects the spidery ways of his fellow dark elves and escapes to live in the surface world. So what Yarvin has done here is take some of the least subtle works of literature ever penned and loudly declare: You know the comically evil characters? I’m like them! And he’s not the only one. For his part,Thiel says he prefers Sauron and his kingdom of Mordor out of all Tolkien’s fictional lands, saying that “Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.” But he’s wrong about Mordor “working.” True, it has a large and impressive goblin-based military, but Tolkien always portrays it as a desolate wasteland full of monsters and volcanoes, to be avoided at all costs. For Tolkien, who was a World War I veteran, the point is that a society exclusively dedicated to war and destruction is a bad thing. Apparently that was lost on Thiel. Superficially, it’s understandable why the American far-right might believe they’ve found a kindred spirit in Tolkien. After all, The Lord of the Rings is essentially a monarchist fantasy about a noble king returning to solve all the world’s problems. Concepts of hereditary power and virtue are downright fetishized. Aragorn, who’s secretly the heir to Gondor’s throne, can heal people’s battle wounds by touching them and command an army of ghosts simply because he has royal blood in his veins. Democracy as a concept just doesn’t enter into the equation. There’s also plenty of old-timey racism to be found in the books. The world of Middle-Earth features strictly-defined races of creatures, and there are inherently “good” and “bad” races; elves and dwarves are good (although they can have flaws, like pride and greed), while orcs and goblins are always evil and fit only to be killed. Humans are the only morally mixed race—but there, it’s notable that the good humans tend to get descriptions like “Yellow is their hair, and bright are their spears. Their leader is very tall,” while the bad ones are described with language like “swart, slant-eyed” or even “black men like half-trolls.” It’s ugly stuff, and it’s led the Marxist novelist China Miéville to describe Tolkien as “the wen on the arse of fantasy literature,” lambasting his “small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos.” That’s harsh, but not entirely baseless. However, it’s more complicated than that. Although there’s plenty in Tolkien that is reactionary and racist, there’s plenty that isn’t, too. Notably, the Fellowship of the Ring is a multi-racial coalition of heroes, and Tolkien’s extended universe contains a pivotal important interracial romance between the human warrior Beren and the elf princess Luthien. In the real world, too, Tolkien was more hostile to racism than his descriptions of “dark” villains might suggest. Like Peter Thiel, he spent part of his childhood in South Africa—but when he later reflected on its system of government in a valedictory speech at Oxford University, he had this to say: There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White. The use of the term “Dark Continent” raises a wince today, but this is clearly an anti-apartheid statement, which is more than Thiel could muster decades later. Elsewhere, Tolkien wrote in a letter to his son Christopher that “I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust,” and he was horrified by the development of the nuclear bomb and modern weaponry in general: The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope “this will ensure peace.”' This last passage, from another letter to Christopher, is especially striking because Tolkien is condemning the exact arms industry that people like Thiel and Vance now champion. With old J.R.R. in his grave since 1973, there’s no way to be certain, but it seems likely he would have been deeply disturbed to see the words “Anduril” or “Palantir” inscribed on a cruise missile or an AI targeting system. In other letters, Tolkien wrote that “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.” This is obviously contradictory and eccentric, and literature scholars have spent decades debating exactly what he meant by it. But we get a clue a few sentences later, when Tolkien writes that “The most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.” I take that to mean that Tolkien liked the idea of “unconstitutional monarchy” in theory, if a purely benevolent king like his fictional Aragorn could be found, but he didn’t trust any actually existing leader to fill the role, and so opted for anarchy and the “abolition of control” as a lesser evil. (Other readers will, doubtless, disagree.) At any rate, the bit about “those who seek the opportunity” to wield power being the least fit of all is another clear rebuke to people like Thiel, Vance, and Yarvin, whose entire lives seem devoted to becoming more wealthy and powerful. In fact, we could call that the moral core of Tolkien’s entire mythos. It’s especially ironic, when you know the ins and outs of Middle-Earth, that Peter Thiel chose to name his surveillance company “Palantir.” In The Lord of the Rings, a palantir is not a good thing to have. Actually, almost everyone who lays a hand on one is cursed and driven to their destruction by the experience. First there’s the wizard Saruman, who was once a wise ally of the elves and his fellow wizard Gandalf but eventually becomes corrupted and raises his own army of orcs, becoming a kind of mini-Sauron. (Saruman? Sauron-man? Get it?) The turning point in his moral downfall is when he arrogantly decides to start using a palantir, only to find that A) he quite likes having the power to spy on anyone he wants, and desires more power, and B) he’s now in direct contact with the mind of Sauron, who has a palantir of his own and persuades him to make an alliance with Mordor. Then there’s Denethor, the human ruler of the kingdom of Gondor. Like Saruman, he gets his hands on a palantir and decides to start dabbling in mass surveillance. But his fate is a little different: he’s so terrified by visions of Mordor and its armies that he becomes a pathetic, cowardly figure, refusing to join in the fight against Sauron, before eventually going completely insane and burning himself to death on a pyre: Then Denethor leaped upon the table, and standing there wreathed in fire and smoke he took up the staff of his stewardship that lay at his feet and broke it on his knee. Casting the pieces into the blaze he bowed and laid himself on the table, clasping the palantir with both hands upon his breast. And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone, unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose, he saw only two aged hands withering in flame. Finally, there’s the hobbit Pippin, who gets hold of Saruman’s palantir after his death and is almost driven insane by it before Gandalf rescues him. In all three cases, the palantir is a cursed and treacherous thing—and yet, Peter Thiel apparently read all this and thought it would be cool to own one. Comedy writer Alex Blechman’s joke about the scientists who successfully create “the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus” applies. This type of tragedy, in which someone’s desire for power or wealth leads directly to their downfall, is one of the strongest recurring themes in Tolkien. It happens at the climax of The Fellowship of the Ring, when Boromir (Denethor’s son and a member of the titular group) decides that he can steal the One Ring and use its magic to restore Gondor to its former glory. Instead, he ends up becoming paranoid, turning against his friends, running off into the woods, and getting killed by a lurking orc. Or there’s the heroic dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit, who leads a successful dragon-slaying raid on the mountain of Erebor, but becomes obsessed with the gold he finds there: “Long hours in the past days Thorin had spent in the treasury, and the lust of it was heavy on him,” Tolkien writes. So great is his pride and greed that he refuses to release any of the treasure to the people of the surrounding countries, who the dragon Smaug had been raiding and pillaging for years: “You put your worst cause last and in the chief place,” Thorin answered. “To the treasure of my people no man has a claim, because Smaug who stole it from us also robbed him of life or home. The treasure was not his that his evil deeds should be amended with a share of it.” Inevitably, this leads to war, and Thorin dies. His last words are to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, and as befits a book originally written for children, they just directly spell out the Moral of the Story: “if more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” This couldn’t be clearer. And yet, once again, Thiel and Co. have missed the memo. They’re going around hoarding wealth in their slush funds and Roth IRAs and sitting on them like dragons. Maybe their next company will be called “Smaug Capital.” 
Art by TOM HUMBERSTONE FROM CURRENT affairs magazine, issue 53, May-June 2025
Clearly, Thiel, Vance, and Yarvin don’t understand the first thing about Tolkien. They’ve taken an author who—although capable of racism and a little too fond of kings—was inherently suspicious of wealth, power, and those who seek them, and they’ve turned his words and symbols into celebrations of those very things. “Palantir Technologies” is a bad joke, except it’s real. But this shouldn’t be surprising, because these kinds of right-wing tech and finance people have a notoriously hard time understanding art or really anything that isn’t a profit-maximizing algorithm. After all, understanding art and literature requires a certain amount of empathy, and they don’t really believe in that.
In a similar case, the U.K.’s right-wing Sun tabloid was appalled to find, in 2018, that “snowflake” students sympathize with the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and believe he’s “misunderstood”—which is, in fact, the point of the book. Today, a similar fate has befallen Tolkien, whose works are being distorted and abused by some of the worst people alive. It’s a pity, because he has a lot of good advice to offer them, if they’d only put aside their ego and avarice long enough to listen.
1. Altogether, there are 20 different magic rings in Tolkien’s lore, but you don’t have to think about all of them today. I promise.
2. A bit of life advice: if people are litigating the precise details of whether you’re a fascist or not, you’ve probably done something pretty badly wrong.
3. In an oddly endearing act of hackwork, Salvatore has churned out at least 40 novels about elves in his career, but once again, you don’t have to think about all of them.