The Lord of the Rings is like a rich old uncle who periodically reappears in your life to announce his latest triumph or name-drop his famous friends. It was the epic bedtime story that thrilled you as a kid, then the billion-dollar movie franchise that came to dominate the early Noughties. Now the trilogy is back, celebrating its 25th anniversary with the theatrical release of an “extended edition” that was already available on home video to begin with. So The Lord of the Rings is basically the same as it ever was: a solid entertainment banker, a saga to set your watches by. What has changed is the fanbase. It has grown louder and weirder and a whole lot less edifying.
“Speak friend and enter,” reads the riddle that opens the gates of Moria. This essentially means that if you can say you’re a friend, you’re allowed free run of the house – and never mind that Moria’s self-proclaimed friends might not necessarily be friends with one another, just as all Tolkien fans aren’t always on the same page. It was inside Moria, for instance, that the disputatious Boromir began to wonder just what kind of Fellowship he was a part of, and how much he really had in common with an elf, a dwarf and a bunch of hobbits anyway. I’m feeling a similar sense of estrangement when it comes to The Lord of the Rings’ current crop of high-profile pals.
It used to be easy to spot a true Tolkien fan. His tale was the perfect blend of tweedy respectability with folksy eccentricity and was therefore beloved by young nerds, old hippies and a smattering of liberal, literate Real Ale aficionados. But it’s clear that we need to update all the files. Those older fans have died out while the nerds have grown rich and skewed right, dragging the text along for the ride, reframing it as the touchstone for extremist politicians and Silicon Valley billionaires alike.
The libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel is so in thrall to Middle-earth that he’s named his data analysis company Palantir (after Saruman’s seeing stone), his capital management firm Mithril (after a rare elvish silver) and his military start-up Anduril (after Aragorn’s sword). JD Vance, the US vice president, credits the story with “shaping his conservative worldview”. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, for good measure, used to cosplay as a halfling at neo-fascist “hobbit camps” outside Rome. The Lord of the Rings is her roadmap, her bible, her mantra for life. “I don’t consider it to be a fantasy at all,” she once said.
The evidence would suggest that Elon Musk doesn’t either. The Lord of the Rings remains the world’s richest man’s favourite book. More worryingly, its epic adventure across Middle-earth has come to shape and inform his hardline views on immigration. Speaking on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year, Musk likened the hobbits of the Shire to the citizens of small-town England, and asylum seekers to Mordor’s orcs. “The hobbits were able to live their lives in peace and tranquillity,“ he explained. “But only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.” In Musk’s real-world reimagining of the Tolkien classic, he presumably casts himself in the role of Gandalf while Tommy Robinson co-stars as the heroic Aragorn.
In the meantime, thank heavens, we are left with The Lord of the Rings as it was envisaged by the director Peter Jackson, with Ian McKellen playing the wizard and Viggo Mortensen as the avenging king. The trilogy blows in like an emissary from a kinder, simpler age, altogether unsullied by recent associations as it sends its lowly underdogs on an impossible mission to destroy an evil ring of power and thereby save the planet. Or as loyal Sam Gamgee puts it, “There’s some good in this world, Mr Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”
At this point, it would be nice to hail Jackson’s adaptation as the definitive take on Tolkien’s epic story – its real shape, its true form. Except that this would only be replacing one false narrative with another. Because while Tolkien’s writing contains numerous qualities that contradict Musk’s bizarre theories, it also contains several elements (a sense of moral exceptionalism; an implied racial hierarchy) that tangentially support them. So it’s too easy to say that Musk, Meloni, Thiel and Vance simply misunderstand The Lord of the Rings in the same way that some fans failed to realise Starship Troopers (1997) and Fight Club (1999) were satires. Annoyingly, it’s more likely a case of different interpretations. Jackson gives us the liberal reading of the classic text; Musk the swivel-eyed, ethno-nationalistic remix. The truth – if it’s anywhere – dances somewhere in between.
In his later years, living in moneyed retirement in Bournemouth, Tolkien was reportedly horrified to see his work lauded by a bunch of wide-eyed leftist hippies he had absolutely nothing in common with. It’s safe to assume that he’d be equally dismayed to see it hijacked by a cohort of billionaire tech bros with links to the military industrial complex. But isn’t that the case with every artist who’s lucky enough to produce something that people take to their hearts? Stable door, horse bolted. Wash your hands and walk away.
The Lord of the Rings stopped being Tolkien’s the second he finished writing it, just as it stopped being Jackson’s the second he put his film in the can. It now belongs to all of us. To you and to me, to Thiel and Musk; to anybody, in fact, who declares themself to be a friend of the story. So throw open the gates and let them argue The Lord of the Rings out among themselves, from one side of the Misty Mountains to the other. It’s a good story and a noble pursuit. It’s alive, it’s ongoing, and its issues are forever up for grabs. Tolkien has long gone, but his tale – like the world – is still worth fighting for.
‘The Lord of the Rings’ is back in cinemas from 16 January
