Tolkien Tuesday: We Mustn't Let the Conservatives Own Tolkien
Even though conservative politicians like JD Vance want to claim Tolkien as their own, the author and his work are far more nuanced and sophisticated than they are willing to acknowledge.
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Welcome to Tolkien Tuesdays, where I talk about various things that I love about the lore and writings of Tolkien, whether in a chapter reading or a character study or an essay. I hope you enjoy reading these ruminations as much as I enjoy writing them and, if you have a moment, I’d love it if you’d subscribe to this newsletter. It’s free, but there are paid options, as well, if you’re of a mind to support a struggling writer. Either way, thank you for joining me!
It’s no secret that conservatives love the work of JRR Tolkien. Even if they aren’t Catholic in religious orientation, they seem to find in the great fantasist’s works something that calls to them, that reassures them that their particular vision of how the world should work and how people should behave would have his imprimatur were he still alive. It’s one of the things that I’ve always found very perplexing, since for me Tolkien offers so many other things that aren’t necessarily attached to or tainted by the ugly politics of the present.
At the same time, it’s easy to see why they would gravitate toward Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings in particular, since, on the surface, the text seems to be so simplistic in its moral worldview. However, as anyone who has studied the book will tell you, Rings is far more morally complex and textured in its articulation of good vs. evil than the many surface readings suggest, and anyone who has read it–and I mean, actually read it–will tell you that it has hidden depths that are easily missed by the sort of cursory readings that politicians and right-wing dilettantes like to trot out when they think it’s convenient.
All of which leads us, inevitably, to JD Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy and Donald Trump’s pick for Vice President. A recent piece in Politico lays out in some (albeit frustratingly thin) detail how much Vance’s political orientation and philosophy has been inspired by his reading of The Lord of the Rings. While on the one hand it’s always nice to see Tolkien get some exposure, it’s also tremendously frustrating to see a poser like Vance daring to align himself with an author whose work is, in many ways, the very antithesis to everything he stands for and propagates, both as an author and as a politician.
Indeed, as I was reading this piece I kept coming back to the same set of questions. How was it possible, I wondered, for anyone, let alone a supposedly serious thinker like Rod Dreher, to ask, “What might God be doing with him? J.D. Vance might be Frodo of the Hollers, a veritable hillbilly hobbit?” As a friend of mine put it, this would only be true if said hobbit were to have grown up in Mordor. I can think of at least two dozen people who have a better claim to being a Frodo of the Hollers than JD Vance, I can tell you that much.
It’s also worth pointing out that Vance’s understanding of Tolkien and Rings is remarkably rudimentary, even simplistic. Anyone who has ever read anything by Tolkien knows that he did not trade in absolutes. He literally goes out of his way to note that Sauron, the Dark Lord himself, wasn’t evil in the beginning but was instead driven into darkness by his will to bring the world under his own idea of order and dominion. Just as importantly, as Sam’s encounter with the warrior from Harad demonstrates, there are far more gray areas in The Lord of the Rings that most people, particularly conservatives, want to acknowledge.
What I find most distressing about the conservative appropriation of Tolkien’s works, however, is the extent to which conservatism, at least as it is currently constituted, is antithetical to the worldview of both the man himself and The Lord of the Rings. This is the movement that, in its modern iteration, loves to indulge in cruelty for its own sake; goes out of its way to turn away from the values of compassion, empathy, and tolerance; and seeks to crush the working class and poor in every way that they can. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that today’s GOP is akin to Mordor, the party does bear more than a passing resemblance to Saruman and his ilk, who are very skilled at manipulating the baser elements of the Shire to their own detriment. And if there’s one thing at which the silver-tongued Saruman excels, it’s cruelty.
Moreover, this is also a conservative movement that loathes education in all of its forms. They make no secret of this fact, and Vance himself is on record as stating that professors are the enemy. I’m sure that this would sit quite well with Tolkien, who devoted much of his life to the academy and the study of language and literature and who was a noted scholar and academic.
I also find it particularly rich that conservatives like Vance would hold up Tolkien as their model–and would even go so far as to claim that he is an advocate for the small, beleaguered folk of the world–when his entire career has trended in exactly the opposite direction. Hillbilly Elegy traffics in pernicious stereotypes and misinformation about the people of Appalachia, and as I and many others have argued it’s clearly Vance’s attempt to make political and social hay out of a culture to which he has a tenuous connection (while his grandparents were firmly Appalachian, he grew up in an Ohio town that is more akin to Cincinnati than Appalachia). Moreover, it’s not as if the Republican Party of today really cares that much about the working class, despite its weak-willed movement in that direction in recent years.
All of this isn’t to say that I’m surprised by the conservative movement’s continued appropriation of Tolkien’s works; far from it. Indeed, the past couple of decades have seen right-wing groups across the world reaching back to various pieces of antiquity, whether real or imagined, to provide ammunition and ballast to their culture war crusades. To some degree this makes sense, because Tolkien was deliberately evoking the past in his creation of Middle-earth. However, just because he was doing so doesn’t mean he would feel aligned with today’s conservatives or that they should be given carte blanche to interpret his work however they like. While every text and every author is open to interpretation, and while there is much in Tolkien’s life and philosophy that is conservative, to reduce his complexity down to score cheap political points is a grave disservice to his work and his literary legacy.
Thus, I think it behooves those of us who love Tolkien’s work but who aren’t afraid to criticize it to engage and refute those who would hold Vance up as some sort of A similar reckoning is happening in the field of classics, and once again it’s because those on the right are determined to try to twist antiquity and its cultures for their own benefit. This doesn’t have to be end of the story and, to paraphrase our dear Sam in Jackson’s adaptation, there’s good in Tolkien, and it’s worth fighting for.