LOTR and the Far-Right

Google ‘Lord of the Rings and the far-right’ and you’ll find a bunch of articles fretting over the far-right’s appropriation of Tolkien’s classic. You’ll also find a bunch of articles claiming that there’s nothing remotely right-wing about the books. The truth is, the books can easily be co-opted by any side for the same reason that certain readers have criticised Tolkien; that is, for his simplistic binary narrative of good vs evil, light vs dark. This sort of binary thinking can be co-opted by any side, but it is particularly attractive to the far-right, which expectedly racializes the light/ dark distinction.

This thinking is epitomised by the political theory of Carl Schmitt, the German jurist and Nazi Party member who reduced politics to conflict between ‘friends and enemies’. The far-right intelligentsia, who have recently revived Schmitt, have published several books on this sort of right-wing reading of Tolkien, including Arktos’ recent contribution: Tolkien, Europe, and Tradition by Armand Berger. In it, Berger emphasises Tolkien’s desire to create a ‘mythology for England’, as if this sanctions the far-right interpretation of the texts. But if we read Tolkien’s comments in context, it becomes clear that what he is referring to is not the far-right nationalism that some seek it to be, but a national pride in the language and in the clime of the British Isles — ‘bound up with its tongue and…