Italy’s far-right claim The Lord of the Rings – but they’ve misread Tolkien’s message

[Edmond Dantès]

Context:

Italy's Meloni pays visit to exhibition on Tolkien, her youthful obsession

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni visited on Wednesday a new exhibition on British novelist J.R.R. Tolkien, whose globally popular books have also become a cult in Italian right-wing circles.

www.reuters.com

Italy’s far right embraces Middle-earth as PM opens Tolkien show

Giorgia Meloni’s involvement highlights government’s growing interest in shaping output of Italy’s cultural institutions

www.google.co.uk

Is a Tolkein Exhibition in Rome Part of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's Far-Right Agenda? | Artnet News

A new show dedicated to author J.R.R. Tolkien in Rome is widely speculated to be part of the far-right Italian government's cultural agenda.

www.google.co.uk

How did The Lord of the Rings become a secret weapon in Italy’s culture wars? | Jamie Mackay

Giorgia Meloni and the hard right are celebrating JRR Tolkien’s saga – while taking over Italy’s key cultural institutions, says Florence-based author Jamie Mackay

www.google.co.uk

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni and I have precious little in common. But one important thing we share is The Lord of the Rings. Both she and I regard the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy as a personal "sacred text" which has profoundly shaped our values and our political commitments.

Speaking as a queer, leftist theologian, however, the tricky thing about sacred texts is this: when you come to them searching for echoes of your own beliefs, with a little digging you can usually find something.

The fact that the leader of a far-right political party and I can both come to The Lord of the Rings and find sustenance for our imaginations suggests one of two things. Either Middle-earth is wide and wild enough to admit multiple interpretations, or one of us is reading it wrong.

Conservative Tolkien scholars have frequently claimed the latter. As Joseph Pearce writes in his foreword to Bradley Birzer's book Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth (2003), it is "not merely erroneous but patently perverse to see Tolkien's epic as anything other than a specifically Christian myth".

J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. In a 1954 letter to the Jesuit Robert Murray, he described his trilogy as a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work".

Tolkien was a particular kind of Catholic. Pre-Vatican II era (the most recent council of the Catholic Church) and English, he shared his tradition's deep suspicion of modernity.

Middle-earth, with its ranked orders of elves and angels, and distinctions between High and Low Men, was influenced by the medieval Catholic notion of the Great Chain of Being in which God ordains natural hierarchy in the cosmos.

It's because of this that some of today's far-right claim Tolkien as one of their own, arguing that his work underwrites values such as reactionary nationalism, rigid gender roles and the use of state violence to enforce cultural homogeneity.

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Interpreting The Lord of the Rings
In his book The Reactionary Mind (2011), political theorist Corey Robin argues that conservatism is, at its root, the defence of hierarchy. It would therefore be intellectually dishonest to deny that The Lord of the Rings could have certain right-wing interpretations.

If you are a neofascist, for example, looking to justify xenophobia and racism, you can latch onto Tolkien's troubling tendency to cast nonwhite characters in the role of evil. If you are a reactionary Catholic who longs for a restoration of the Holy Roman Empire, you can read Aragorn's return and coronation as justification for theocracy. These things are an inescapable part of the text.

However, if you wish to produce such a reading of The Lord of the Rings, you will have to ignore a lot of other things about the text too.

The fact, for instance, that the War of the Ring requires cooperation between diverse peoples, from diverse backgrounds, with diverse goals, in order to confront a common threat.

Or the fact that Sauron and Saruman seek to impose their will through forced industrialisation, brutal oppression of subject populations and naked violence on a mass scale – all favourite weapons of the far right. (The Ents even rise up against their mechanising oppressors and drown their factories).

Then there's the fact that the plot hinges around the One Ring, an object with the power to dominate which corrupts all who seek to wield it and which must be destroyed – not deployed – in order to overcome the forces of evil once and for all.

And the fact that the salvation of the world is brought about not by force of arms, but by the dogged persistence and fierce love of the small and powerless, by pity for the pitiless and mercy upon the merciless. These are, to my mind, far more "fundamentally religious and Catholic" ideas than racialised hierarchy is.

In a recent paper, I argued that The Lord of the Rings is too open to interpretation – and too enchanting – to collapse into a single authoritative meaning.

In his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien defends "the freedom of the reader" against reductive readings. He was far more concerned that readers take his novel on its own terms as a work of art, rather than arrive at some objectively "correct" interpretation. There is, quite simply, no one "right" way to read Tolkien – but, in my opinion, there are wrong ones.

There are readings that ignore what's in the text, twisting it to suit the reader's own religious, cultural and political purposes. Far-right readings of The Lord of the Rings do not come from nowhere. But they are far from the only solution to the riddle of Middle-earth's enduring power. Tolkien was savvy enough to realise that his imaginative reconstruction of a mythic past was fiction. Reactionary ideologues lack any such self awareness.

Far-right readings of The Lord of the Rings are therefore wrong in the sense that they are technically bad interpretations. More importantly to my mind, however, they are ethically wrong. There is nothing in Middle-earth – not even its most troubling elements – which requires readers to take it as an argument for far-right nationalism. That interpretation is a choice – and it must be resisted.

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Italy's far-right claim The Lord of the Rings – but they've misread Tolkien's message

Tolkien was far more concerned that we take his novel on its own terms as a work of art than that we arrive at some correct interpretation.

theconversation.com

An interesting analysis.

 

[B-Dubs]

I mean, I'd point out that the fellowship itself was an incredibly diverse gathering of peoples. Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves, a Wizard, Humans. All they were really missing was an orc or a troll and it'd be representative of all the races of Middle Earth.

Ironically, you could easily read the Lord of the Rings as a take on WW2. The fellowship being the allies and the armies of mordor being the axis. It's also been read as a commentary on WWI or industrialization vs enviornmentalism.

 

[Loxley]

I guess nobody told them about the time the Nazis asked Tolkien to prove his Aryan heritage before they would agree to publish The Hobbit in German and he told them to fuck off.

On the time J.R.R. Tolkien refused to work with Nazi-leaning publishers.

This week marks the 130th birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings writer, academic, and pranking enthusiast—and today we’re revisiting a time Tolkien stood up for his beliefs a…

lithub.com

 

[MinerArcaniner]

I guess nobody told them about the time the Nazis asked Tolkien to prove his Aryan heritage before they would agree to publish The Hobbit in German and he told them to fuck off.

On the time J.R.R. Tolkien refused to work with Nazi-leaning publishers.

This week marks the 130th birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings writer, academic, and pranking enthusiast—and today we’re revisiting a time Tolkien stood up for his beliefs a…

lithub.com

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Yeah, I doubt he'd want Mussolini apologists stanning his work for political points.

 

[Khanimus]

I mean, I'd point out that the fellowship itself was an incredibly diverse gathering of peoples. Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves, a Wizard, Humans. All they were really missing was an orc or a troll and it'd be representative of all the races of Middle Earth.

Ironically, you could easily read the Lord of the Rings as a take on WW2. The fellowship being the allies and the armies of mordor being the axis. It's also been read as a commentary on WWI or industrialization vs enviornmentalism.

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Well except for the brown people. A bunch of "Easterlings" showing up with armies of super elephants and shit against a bunch of Anglo-Saxon white dudes.

Tolkien's work has had less-than-favorable reads in regards to racial politics before.

 

[Aske]

I still remember the Stand Men of the West pamphlets Nazis were spreading around near to theatres. Yeah, anything romanticizing old-fashioned, conservative bias towards a "traditional way of life" can be spun into a support of racism. This actually makes me a bit suspicious of anyone who seems a bit too attached to tradition. But that's my bias - the one doesn't necessitate the other.

 

[DarkCronos]

Italian post-fascists have tried to claim Tolkien for almost 30 years, no big news here.

 

[LordRuyn]

Yeah, I found about this recently when a friend sent me a couple of articles on the subject. Goes back a while and it was fascinating to read how there were far right LOTR camps for teens where they read and discussed the books.

It's the reason there was backlash when Meloni opened a Tolkien exhibit.

 

[Glimlocker]

Yeah, the unfortunate part is the lack of diversity - or rather, as was said here, when there were non-white characters from the race of Men, they were almost always portrayed as the evil ones. However, there are plenty of "white" characters that are also evil, eventually leading to the entire downfall of what was once the strongest, most powerful group of Men - and ultimately helping proliferate the ultimate evil in the world.

Still, all the main heroes are portrayed as someone that we would interpret to be light skinned.
Then again, Tolkien also wrote some of the earlier works of Middle Earth with the intention of being England's pre-colonial mythology - though LotR may not be part of that mythology.
Buuuuut, it was also written during an age of British colonialism and all the horrific events against non-British/English that go along with colonialism.

Yeah, it's a tricky subject that does need to be discussed in contemporary times.
I don't care at all for almost any aspect of the Rings of Power, but at least they're attempting to right the wrongs of Tolkien, for the most part.

 

[B-Dubs]

Well except for the brown people. A bunch of "Easterlings" showing up with armies of super elephants and shit against a bunch of Anglo-Saxon white dudes.

Tolkien's work has had less-than-favorable reads in regards to racial politics before.

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You are not wrong about that bit.

 

[Hollywood Duo]

Ranked order huh. That is a very purposeful misreading.

 

[Man God]

Yep the entire south/east of Middle earth is filled with heathens and swarthiness is considered an undesirable trait.

Part of the reason the first LotR movie rules is that they made Aragorn and presumably the rest of the numenoreans coded as Native American.

 

[Sesha]

Right wingers rallied around Alita, a movie set in Mexico about a tiny girl immigrant (played by a Mexican woman) whose main enemy is a literal great white patriarch in an ivory tower (and in the manga, her closest allies include a trans man and a black woman), and pitted it against a movie starring a white blonde woman, whose in the air force (and the movie had a lot of air force wank), clad in red and blue, and fights evil aliens. Because the latter was a Disney movie. Yet both movies had central themes of female empowerment.

Fascists see what they wanna see.

 

[Deleted member 24052]

Fascists see what they wanna see.

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Absolutely, and they twist everything they can to their advantage. I mean shit, Sauron is a fucking fascist for crying out loud. The villain of the story, the central figure that the heroes are working together to destroy.

I agree with the notion described in the OP, that the far-right has to willingly ignore many other aspects of the texts in order to arrive at the conclusion that they can claim Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings.

 

[Death Metalist]

far right dimwits and abysmal media literacy, name a more perfect duo

 

[mbpm]

Far right always means they are far from being right

 

[H.Cornerstone]

Yeah, the unfortunate part is the lack of diversity - or rather, as was said here, when there were non-white characters from the race of Men, they were almost always portrayed as the evil ones. However, there are plenty of "white" characters that are also evil, eventually leading to the entire downfall of what was once the strongest, most powerful group of Men - and ultimately helping proliferate the ultimate evil in the world.

Still, all the main heroes are portrayed as someone that we would interpret to be light skinned.
Then again, Tolkien also wrote some of the earlier works of Middle Earth with the intention of being England's pre-colonial mythology - though LotR may not be part of that mythology.
Buuuuut, it was also written during an age of British colonialism and all the horrific events against non-British/English that go along with colonialism.

Yeah, it's a tricky subject that does need to be discussed in contemporary times.
I don't care at all for almost any aspect of the Rings of Power, but at least they're attempting to right the wrongs of Tolkien, for the most part.

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I mean, Tolkien was born in the late 1800s, did he have some some views that would be considered racist today? Absolutely. I just don't think it totally pervades his work especially since later in life he made the Blue wizards successful as they worked with easterlings to fight off sauron there, and of course, his letter to the nazis and him changing dwarves when someone pointed out how they played to Jewish stereotypes.

 

[Everybody Lies]

Ranked order huh. That is a very purposeful misreading.

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It's part and parcel of the far right, no matter the country.

 

[nded]

Even if he wasn't mega racist Tolkien was still kinda regular racist. I say this as someone who loves his books and thinks he probably would balk at the kind of virulently fascist chuds attempting to co-opt his work.

 

[Fevaweva]

Ironically, you could easily read the Lord of the Rings as a take on WW2. The fellowship being the allies and the armies of mordor being the axis. It's also been read as a commentary on WWI or industrialization vs enviornmentalism.

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Actually, in the introduction to The Fellowship of The Ring, Tolkien himself vehemently denies any such interpretation. He goes so far as to say he dislikes texts that are metaphorical in such a way.

 

[Glimlocker]

I mean, Tolkien was born in the late 1800s, did he have some some views that would be considered racist today? Absolutely. I just don't think it totally pervades his work especially since later in life he made the Blue wizards successful as they worked with easterlings to fight off sauron there, and of course, his letter to the nazis and him changing dwarves when someone pointed out how they played to Jewish stereotypes.

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I totally agree.
I realized I should have framed that more as which aspects right-wing people latch onto and why, rather than a critique.

As mentioned in the article, another big reason right-wing people might be attracted to it is the love of hierarchy and a ruling class - despite many clear examples of why that's very often not a great idea.

Indeed, there are many, many more examples of anti-far right themes (though perhaps not entirely intentional?) throughout his writings of Middle Earth.

As with many things, it takes a lot if severe misreading and misinterpretation to draw conclusions that ultimately support far-right thinking. But, uh, that's par for the course for this group.

So, yeah, totally agree, but didn't I frame that very well.

 

[Kain]

A key concept of being far right is that they always have no fucking idea of what they are talking about.

 

[Aprikurt]

I mean, I'd point out that the fellowship itself was an incredibly diverse gathering of peoples. Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves, a Wizard, Humans. All they were really missing was an orc or a troll and it'd be representative of all the races of Middle Earth.

Ironically, you could easily read the Lord of the Rings as a take on WW2. The fellowship being the allies and the armies of mordor being the axis. It's also been read as a commentary on WWI or industrialization vs enviornmentalism.

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They also defy widely held stereotypes about their race e.g. the Hobbits are not lazy or simple, Gimli/Legolas overcome their prejudice for each others race, Aragorn overcomes the possibility of corruption

 

[Mivey]

I find most attempts to extract clear political metaphors from Lord of the Rings to be a fools errant. The books are hardly apolitical, let's get that out of the way, but it's more a hotchpotch of often rather contradictory ideas, like having multiple gods (in essence) but still having technically a monotheistic order, but then the lack of a clear religion by humans who understand this order. Is it pro religious? Is it anti-religious? I dunno, you could argue for both. There is clearly a bias against non-white characters, but yeah, it also makes a point that cooperation across different people's is key to the survival of a complex, diverse social order. None of this neatly maps into any existing ideological framework. And then there's the question whether we map the ring itself to any real-world object like the nuclear bomb. Depending on how you want, you can think of the book as metaphor that argues against the active use of nuclear weapons, but given that other, lesser rings stay around, does it make a case for limited nuclear proliferation? It's all a mess, and while I assume Tolkien was an overly conservative Catholic dude and a lot of his believes are in there, he did not set out to make a political book and was primarily interested in making a compelling story. It's not meant to make sense and easily map to the real-world, and it indeed does not.

 

[Koukalaka]

I guess nobody told them about the time the Nazis asked Tolkien to prove his Aryan heritage before they would agree to publish The Hobbit in German and he told them to fuck off.

On the time J.R.R. Tolkien refused to work with Nazi-leaning publishers.

This week marks the 130th birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings writer, academic, and pranking enthusiast—and today we’re revisiting a time Tolkien stood up for his beliefs a…

lithub.com

Click to shrink...

I love how he doesn't just refuse the request, he schools them on their dogshit "race science".

 

[JonnyDBrit]

Even if he wasn't mega racist Tolkien was still kinda regular racist. I say this as someone who loves his books and thinks he probably would balk at the kind of virulently fascist chuds attempting to co-opt his work.

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Ultimately, Tolkien is a man steeped in the biases of his place and time, even while trying to think above them. You can tell at some point he cottoned on that his near-exclusive use of the Haradrim and Easterlings as enemies without any real sympathetic exploration was a problem, so he throws in that bit of mental monologue for Sam on which he realises a dead, Easterling soldier must ultimately just be some guy, far from home and family, and told to march against the west for reasons he may not understand - and that Sam is certainly not privy to. But he doesn't radically alter his work - say, having some of Sauron's forces defect on realising what he actually intends for Middle-Earth, even if it means they won't hold Gondor - to better accommodate that; similar to how he wrangled forever on what the deal with the orcs should be, as it ran against his moral and religious sensibilities that they should somehow be inherently evil, yet intelligent. If they were intelligent - had a soul, for his Catholic worldview - then they had every right for a chance at redemption, because they would as much a work of the Creator as anyone else. He straddles having an understanding of a universal value of 'human life', and not valuing equally the way that life is lived - he thinks some societies (particularly his own) are better, even if he believes everyone should have the chance to explore and work towards such. Yet he has some twinge of the hubris in such a notion - however great any civilisation in Arda is noted to be, if they are consciously aware of it they invariably let it go to their heads and this spells their doom, because they care more about trying to prove and show their greatness rather than just acting it as part of their existence.

That I think, in a weird way is one of the fundamental flaws for any far right efforts to claim the man's legacy. He was racist, because he was a white man living at the height of Empire and so readily viewed the world via the lenses that provided, but he wasn't a fan of racism - of operating on the presumption of one's superiority as owed to one's origin

 

[Gernau Morat Gurgeh]

Right wingers can't do text, let alone subtext

 

[Stalker]

I guess nobody told them about the time the Nazis asked Tolkien to prove his Aryan heritage before they would agree to publish The Hobbit in German and he told them to fuck off.

On the time J.R.R. Tolkien refused to work with Nazi-leaning publishers.

This week marks the 130th birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings writer, academic, and pranking enthusiast—and today we’re revisiting a time Tolkien stood up for his beliefs a…

lithub.com

Click to shrink...

Lets not beat around the bush about this thou. While he might not have been a Nazi Tolkien had a lot of racial bias in his stories. "The only good orc is a dead orc" and the whole basis of Orcs on mongolians springs to mind. He might not of been as racist as other but by the standards of today he would be viewed as having a racial prejudice. He links dwarfs and jews in many cases and their "lust for gold and riches" the majority of his hero races are aryan by design

 

[Urðr]

The Spanish right wing did the same thing some years ago, probably on the basis that Tolkien "supported " the dictatorship for a comment he made in one letter (I haven't read it).

 

[Arkanim94]

They know how to read?

 

[JonnyDBrit]

The Spanish right wing did the same thing some years ago, probably on the basis that Tolkien "supported " the dictatorship for a comment he made in one letter (I haven't read it).

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This is genuinely one of Tolkien's blind spots, but it's ultimately more of a naivete for Franco as the supposed defender of the Catholic Church in Spain, and having been thankful for a general end of the Civil War, which just saddened him. Especially since British Catholics were and are a minority with a history of being persecuted, so the idea of Catholics being oppressed in such an otherwise strongly Catholic country as Spain became something of an overriding concern for many in the community at the time.

José Manuel Ferrández Bru

Web de Jose Manuel Ferrandez - Gimli - y sus actividades sobre TOLKIEN

www.josemanuelferrandez.com

 

[H.Cornerstone]

I find most attempts to extract clear political metaphors from Lord of the Rings to be a fools errant. The books are hardly apolitical, let's get that out of the way, but it's more a hotchpotch of often rather contradictory ideas, like having multiple gods (in essence) but still having technically a monotheistic order, but then the lack of a clear religion by humans who understand this order. Is it pro religious? Is it anti-religious? I dunno, you could argue for both. There is clearly a bias against non-white characters, but yeah, it also makes a point that cooperation across different people's is key to the survival of a complex, diverse social order. None of this neatly maps into any existing ideological framework. And then there's the question whether we map the ring itself to any real-world object like the nuclear bomb. Depending on how you want, you can think of the book as metaphor that argues against the active use of nuclear weapons, but given that other, lesser rings stay around, does it make a case for limited nuclear proliferation? It's all a mess, and while I assume Tolkien was an overly conservative Catholic dude and a lot of his believes are in there, he did not set out to make a political book and was primarily interested in making a compelling story. It's not meant to make sense and easily map to the real-world, and it indeed does not.

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I think the only quasi-political thing you can take from LOTR is the anti-industrialism views of the texts, which I am not sure if that could be considered political.

 

[Urðr]

This is genuinely one of Tolkien's blind spots, but it's ultimately more of a naivete for Franco as the supposed defender of the Catholic Church in Spain, and having been thankful for a general end of the Civil War, which just saddened him. Especially since British Catholics were and are a minority with a history of being persecuted, so the idea of Catholics being oppressed in such an otherwise strongly Catholic country as Spain became something of an overriding concern for many in the community at the time.

José Manuel Ferrández Bru

Web de Jose Manuel Ferrandez - Gimli - y sus actividades sobre TOLKIEN

www.josemanuelferrandez.com

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Hmm, I see. That makes sense. Besides, you can't exactly know what's happening inside a foreign country until time passes, so...

 

[Panquequera]

it's such a bizarre phenomenon, the party of the dipshit that is the future president of my country coopted both dragon ball and chainsaw man. (tho the latter one was sort of a response to the opposition trying to tie chainsaw man in a negative way to the party but it became extremely sincere in no time)

It's something that is both infuriating and bizarre to me

 

[Sander VF]

Right wingers rallied around Alita, a movie set in Mexico about a tiny girl immigrant (played by a Mexican woman) whose main enemy is a literal great white patriarch in an ivory tower (and in the manga, her closest allies include a trans man and a black woman), and pitted it against a movie starring a white blonde woman, whose in the air force (and the movie had a lot of air force wank), clad in red and blue, and fights evil aliens. Because the latter was a Disney movie. Yet both movies had central themes of female empowerment.

Fascists see what they wanna see.

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Reading this reminded me how much that discourse got on my nerves. Especially when some people back here bought into it and also started slandering Alita's source material and talking out of their ass about how supposedly infantile and meek Alita is versus the badass female representation of Captain Marvel.

I felt like I was taking heavy dosage of crazy pills

 

[Messofanego]

Fascists want to desperately claim media so they can spread their fantasy easier among the underlings or those they want to convert.

 

[Sesha]

Reading this reminded me how much that discourse got on my nerves. Especially when some people back here bought into it and also started slandering Alita's source material and talking out of their ass about how supposedly infantile and meek Alita is versus the badass female representation of Captain Marvel.

I felt like I was taking heavy dosage of crazy pills

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Yeah, I remember that. Gally being called meek is hilarious given one of her core character traits is being hot-headed and impulsive. Maybe if they only read like the first couple chapters and just assumed that character development doesn't exist, I can see how they came to that conclusion. And Carol Danvers has been subject to some of the most horrendously misogynist writing in comics. It's incredible just how easily some people, even leftists, fall into the tribal mentality.