This week, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow welcomed J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings to the fellowship of things, such as patriotic flags and, uh . . . physical fitness, that are now bad because the “far right” likes them. Maddow reacted to Donald Trump’s selection of J. D. Vance as his running mate by noting Vance’s connections to tech billionaire Peter Thiel, and finding fault in their affinity for Tolkien’s work:
Mr. Thiel . . . has named his companies after things in the Lord of the Rings series of J. R. R. Tolkien books. Lord of the Rings is a sort of 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. Peter Thiel names all of his things after Tolkien figures, like his company Palantir, for example. Like his mentor, like Peter Thiel, who had given him all his jobs in the world, Mr. Vance also when he founded his own venture-capital firm with help from Peter Thiel named it after a Lord of the Rings thing. He called it Narya, N-A-R-Y-A, which you can remember because it’s “Aryan” but you move the “N” to the front. Apparently that word has something to do with elves and rings from the Lord of the Rings series. I don’t know.
Maddow’s snide rant towers to such absurd heights as to resist being taken seriously. But let’s try. It is true that Thiel, like some of his professional peers, enjoys naming things after The Lord of the Rings (even though, in his case, he appears not to understand the text). But do you know who else likes The Lord of the Rings? Basically everyone. Exact figures are hard to pin down, but at least 150 million copies of the work (divided into three entries) have been sold; it has been translated into more than 40 languages. Works in the same legendarium, such as The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, have also sold astonishingly well. And Peter Jackson’s two trilogies of movies based on Tolkien’s work (the first of which is a true theatrical delight) have made about $6 billion in box-office receipts worldwide.
That level of success is difficult to achieve with a narrowly cast partisan appeal. Yes, there are conservative fans of Tolkien. He wrote in a letter to a priest discussing emerging affection for the work among Catholics that The Lord of the Rings “is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” But there are fans of Tolkien on the left as well. In fact, in the ’60s and ’70s, the emerging counterculture found much to love in The Lord of the Rings (much to Tolkien’s supposed bemusement). Tolkien’s work deals in transcendent and timeless themes — heroism, good vs. evil, resistance to false authority, corruption, friendship, the importance of nature — that need not have a partisan valence.
Tolkien would also scoff at Maddow’s apparent contention that “Narya,” the elvish ring of power after which Vance named a venture-capital firm, has some connection to Aryan racial mythology. In 1938, Tolkien entered discussions for The Hobbit to be published in German. The German publisher he was working with wondered whether he was “Aryan.” Speaking to his English publisher, Tolkien wondered whether the country’s “lunatic laws” required confirmation that he was, and, if so, preferred no German translation appear at all if it meant “giving any colour to the notion” that he “subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.”
He also wrote directly to the Germans. A portion of his reply is worth quoting at length:
I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject – which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.
Conservatives often complain — rightly — that the Left dominates vast swaths of our culture. The Left, in its arrogance, now wants to deem those aspects of culture the Right still appreciates to be “far-right,” and therefore somehow suspect. But if it continues to apply such labels to popular and accessible things — such as patriotism, fitness, and The Lord of the Rings — then it shouldn’t be surprised if someday conservatives return as kings of our national life.