Tolkien, Vance, and... Marx?

Sharing Robert Tally's Underrepresented Take

A pair of lovely vacations, some delightful out-of-state company, a landmark Democratic National Convention, and belated fall course-preparations have conspired to gobble up nearly all of my August. Wonderful as it all was (and there are pictures to prove it), it completely derailed my plans for a timely article on J. D. Vance’s symptomatic admiration of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Luckily, Tolkien scholar Robert Tally Jr. dove headlong into the breach, quickly churning out an expansive and thoughtful take—and one that has the blessed bonus of being nothing like what I would have said (which still leaves me some chance of returning to my draft once fall classes are safely underway).

Tally’s article is “Tolkien’s Deplorable Cultus.” Jump over and check it out at Specter, if you want an authoritative primer on the subject before September’s conjunction of political debates and Rings of Power episodes pushes the unlikely pairing back into the headlines.

For those wondering about the merits of a Marxist approach to Tolkien’s fantasy writing, here is Tally’s defense of his project.

A Marxist approach to Tolkien does not simply involve selective reading, looking for utopian needles in the vast ideological haystacks, but rather it would examine the totality of the work, disclosing the “positive” alongside the “negative” to be found there. Just as Marx himself discovered in the royalist Honoré de Balzac’s fiction the most fully fleshed out vision of bourgeois social relations available, just as Georg Lukács found in conservative Walter Scott’s historical romances the basis for a Marxian historicist worldview, and just as Jameson revealed the utopian potential in the fascist Wyndham Lewis’s vicious anticommunism, a dialectical reading of Tolkien’s work can elicit productive material for radical cultural criticism. Given the overwhelming popularity of Tolkien and Tolkien-related franchises today, in fact, Marxist criticism has a duty not to cede this entire domain to the right-wingers who wish to claim it as their own.

An admirable goal that I wholeheartedly share.

I’ve been speaking to Tolkien scholars about this long-standing, very public, right-wing project to appropriate Middle-earth since the spring of 2011, when I joined Dimitra Fimi and Douglas Anderson on a “Tolkien and Nationalism” panel at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo. Two years ago, Dani Holtz and I elaborated on additional aspects of this right-wing project in our “Eye of Sauron” podcast series, even noting J. D. Vance’s place among the neoreactionary, Silicon Valley “broligarchs” in our episode on Elon Musk, “Review-Bombers and Billionaire Trolls.”

The fashy techno-billionaire set that Vance emulates have learned to harness Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings to boost their corporate brands and also subversively signal their ideological affiliations with the far right. Mostly, they do this by taking names that Tolkien made up (for mystical objects, mysterious places, or magical beings) and, then, adopting them as the names of their tech- and finance-centered companies.

Here is Tally’s catalogue of the offenders.

Vance is among the latest figures in a multinational panoply of right-wing political leaders and businessmen who claim Tolkien’s ideas as the source of their own. Vance’s mentor, Thiel, has frequently mentioned Tolkien’s influence as well as (more bizarrely) that of his former Stanford professor René Girard. Thiel has founded a number of investment funds and other companies named after terms found in Tolkien’s legendarium, including Palantir Technologies, Mithril Capital, Valar Ventures, Lembas LLC, Rivendell One LLC, and Arda Capital. Thiel, along with Vance, were also key investors involved in the founding of Anduril Industries, a defense contractor.

I’ll leave it to Talley to explain the Tolkienian figures (Mithril, Valar, Lembas, Rivendell, Arda, and Anduril) and to spell out just how grotesque an appropriation each of these is.

More important to me is the silly, Silicon-Valley project’s resonance with that of the Italian neofascists of the 1970s, who made Eowyn the name of their women’s journal and dubbed their multi-year, Nazi-affiliated culture festival “Campo Hobbit.” I’ll be telling the full (and very violent) story of that neofascist racial project in an upcoming academic publication, but you can hear Dani and I giving the early, Readers-Digest version in our bonus episode, “Hobbit Camp Fascists.”

While Tally’s article has taken the predictable flack on X for daring to put Marx and Tolkien in a single subtitle, his conclusion is unobjectionable.

Tolkien is not himself a Marxist (far from it!), but his work is well suited to a Marxist analysis that may disclose elements of the political unconscious and counter-narratives implicit in the texts, which in turn may stand in opposition to the facile and self-serving misreadings of Tolkien’s right-wing fans. It may not be possible to rescue Tolkien from his far-right admirers, fascist hobbit campers, and palantíri-obsessed corporate Big Brothers, but there is ample space within Tolkien’s own writings for alternative interpretations.

As anyone with an English degree should be able to explain, that’s as much as to say that Tolkien’s writing is “literature.”

But, then again, as anyone in my field of Romanticism could just as easily reply (so long as they’ve also spent decades analyzing the hundreds of right-wing Tolkien takes that are logged in the Internet Archives), none of these people are the least bit interested in the politically-ambivalent, humanistic cultural project that we call “literature.”

Now, because I promised pictures, here I am wobbling on a paddle board in Stone Harbor, NJ (photo credit, Dani Holtz).