Why so Weird about Tolkien?

The Founder Fantasies of Silicon Valley

In a recent New York Times feature, Michiko Kakutani returns to an urgent political question—one that some hundred-or-so journalists, culture bloggers, and scholars around the world have puzzled over intermittently for the past few years.

Why are so many leaders of the global far right so damn weird about J. R. R. Tolkien?

To be fair, Kakutani never follows VP candidate Tim Walz in making “weird” her official moniker for phenomenon. But the whole point of her piece is to solicit some knowing smirks from her readers.

After all, it’s not the fascism her article foregrounds, it’s the fantasy.

To my mind, however, Kakutani doesn’t go quite far enough. On the one hand, she doesn’t detail enough Tolkienian arcana to bring home the full weirdness of the political right’s Middle-earth obsession. On the other hand, she doesn’t develop enough evidence of the Tolkien-obsessed tech world’s neo-fascism to give significant political and moral wight to their inhumane enterprise.

So, I thought I’d flesh out a few details Kakutani skips over. At the end, I’ll also note some places people can go to get deeper and more authoritative takes on the subject.

The Lords of Silicon Valley

Kautani begins with a promising set of questions that she aims at the right-sliding tech sector.

Why is it, she asks, that “the most prominent” fans of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are now a nefarious crew of far-right politicians and authoritarian tech lords from Silicon Valley?

How did a trilogy of novels about wizards and elves and furry-footed hobbits become a touchstone for right-wing power brokers? How did books that evince nostalgia for a pastoral, preindustrial past win an ardent following among the people who are shaping our digital future? Why do so many of today’s high-profile fans of “The Lord of the Rings” and other fantasy and sci-fi classics insist on turning these cautionary tales into aspirational road maps for mastering the universe?

It's a good set of questions.

After all, Tolkien’s works had once been the political property of hippies and left-wing college students, who loved the books, as Kakutani notes, for their critique of power, their valorization of the “little guy,” and their idealization of Nature.

Today’s far-right Tolkien fans, on the other hand, appear to have read a different book, since they loot its imagery to brand a futurist program built on three completely antithetical pillars: infinite power, uber-elite social control, and a hyper-digital, post-human world.

Kakutani glances back to the 1970s and 80s to remind us that the tech world’s equally fannish founding generation had maintained a firmer grip on the core values of Tolkien’s mythos (and also to note that they had paid the author tribute with more modest gestures).

Silicon Valley’s love of Tolkien — and fantasy and science fiction more broadly —dates to its earliest days, when rooms at the Stanford A.I. Lab were named after locations in Middle-earth, and a popular thread called “SF-Lovers” effectively became the first online social network in the 1970s.

In those days, the fledgling computer community was very much a part of the Bay Area counterculture, and hackers there saw themselves as rebels going up against the establishment represented by big corporations like IBM. Like many hippies of the day, they identified with the little hobbits who help save Middle-earth and the eccentric outsiders who populate the work of science fiction masters like Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick.

But things changed, of course, as these renegade programmers became billionaire tech-lords and started to identify not with the lowly hobbits but rather with “dark elves” and Numenorean kings. Kakutani continues,

the small gestures of tribute to Tolkien that techies made decades ago (like equipping office printers with Elvish fonts) have given way to extravagant spectacles like the Napster co-founder Sean Parker’s “Lord of the Rings”-inspired wedding, which cost, by some estimates, more than $10 million and featured Middle-earth-inspired costumes for several hundred guests.

More astounding still, Kakutani reminds us, is the fandom of billionaire Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder and aspiring culture-maker recently launched the most expensive television show in history as a Tolkien-based prestige project, spending an unprecedented billion dollars or so on the first seasons of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Similarly outlandish (if also much more prudent) is the genre of symbolic tributes preferred by affiliates of the so-called PayPal mafia—a group of Trumpy, South-African-born broligarchs and their toadies who have taken to naming companies after Tolkienian arcana in order to signal their affinity for the ideology and culture of the European far right.

Taking PayPal co-founder Peter Theil as an exemplary case, Kakutani declares that

Tolkien would have been confounded by Silicon Valley’s penchant for naming tech companies after objects in “Lord of the Rings” — particularly firms with Pentagon and national security ties. And yet two Thiel-backed companies with Tolkien-inspired names are becoming cornerstones of today’s military-industrial complex: The data analytics firm Palantir gets its name from the magical “seeing stones” in “Lord of the Rings,” while the artificial intelligence military start-up Anduril refers to Aragorn’s reforged sword.

Here, Katutani greatly underplays her hand, naming only two of the (at least) eight Tolkien-inspired companies in the PayPal mafia’s orbit. Robert Tally has recently offered a sharp assessment of most of these companies (along with a richly-contextualized account of their counter-Tolkienian activities) so those in search of the definitive take should go there. Below, I’ll offer my own account of the most salient points.

Tolkien as a Neo-Reactionary Brand

We have to start with PayPal co-founder (and one-time Trump bankroller and adviser) Peter Thiel, who has six companies named in Tolkien’s honor. These are Palantir, Rivendell One Llc, Lembas Llc, Arda Capital Management, Valar Ventures, and Mithril Capital Management. After that, we can look at J. D. Vance’s Narya and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril.

Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies is named for the Numenorian seeing stones that corrupted both the white wizard Saruman and Gondor’s deteriorating steward, Denethor, in The Lord of the Rings. A Palantir also features in Amazon’s Rings of Power, where it predicts the coming of Galadriel and the consequent fall of Numenor. Thiel’s Palantir is an AI-driven data-mining company that aptly specializes in spying. It has contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, dozens of police departments, and ICE; and in 2015 and ’16, it became embroiled in election meddling scandals with both Brexit and the Trump campaign. Most recently, it popped back into the news when Wired reported that Palantir was assisting D.O.G.E. in building an interagency surveillance database. Then it made headlines again a month later, when it’s current CEO joined Trump’s trade delegation sniffing out deals in Saudia Arabia.

Thiel has a pair of Facebook investment companies named Rivendell One Llc (after the hidden safeguard of the half-elven lore master Elrond) and Lembas Llc (after the magically sustaining waybread of Galadriel’s elves in the forest kingdom of Lórien). More audacious are his hedge fund Arda Capital Management (which is named after the world of Arda that Tolkien’s Middle-earth sits upon) and his growing global capital firm Valar Ventures (which is named after the angelic demigods, or Valar, who shaped Tolkien’s world of Arda). Valar Ventures just teamed up with Saudi Arabian investors on a $100 million-dollar project to reap profit from Trump’s tariff chaos by facilitating supply-chain relocations across Southeast Asia.

Last up for Thiel is his large-scale investment firm, Mithril Capital Management. This company is named for the ill-fated metal that the dwarves of Moria mined too deeply for, awakening the demonic balrog that killed their king and destroyed their kingdom (a plot that played out in the second season of Rings of Power). Along with funding Palantir’s totalitarian surveillance software, Mithril bankrolls some of the priciest tech ventures on the planet, specializing in biotechnology, robotics, financial software, and alternative energy sources.

It was at Mithril Capital that Thiel planted the young J. D. Vance, and it was in emulation of his benefactor and mentor that Vance and his fellow Mithril alumnus Colin Greenspon co-founded a much smaller venture capital firm, Narya. Narya is named for the elven ring of inspiration wielded by the wizard Gandalf. Stocked with $93 million in seed money from investors including both Thiel and Marc Andreessen, Narya pumps money into an assortment of tech companies working on gene manipulation, space security, automated property assessments, a phone ap for prayer, and far-right communications systems—most notably Vivek Ramaswamy’s Rumble.com, which undergirds Donald Trump’s social media network Truth Social.

Finally, we have Palmer Luckey, who along with Palantir alumnus Trae Stephens, co-founded Anduril Investments. Andúril (meaning “flame of the West”) is the reforged sword of Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. It’s the sword that Isildur had used millennia earlier to cut the One Ring from the hand of the Dark Lord Sauron. Anduril’s founder, Palmer Luckey, was fired from Facebook after Buzzfeed linked him to anonymous posting on Reddit’s notorious, white-nationalist chat board r/The_Donald. Luckey built Anduril, as he loftily claims, in order to save Western Civilization. Specifically, the company mass-produces American-manufactured autonomous weapons systems, which it supplies to the U.S. Department of Defense, ICE, and the Ukrainian military—its products include AI sensors, VR gear, and a host of “killer robots,” from smart missiles and drones to unmanned fighter jets.

Anduril’s mission, as Luckey recently told Tablet’s Jeremy Stern, “is to serve as the Western world’s gun store, turning America and its allies into ‘prickly porcupines so that no one wants to step on them.’”

Palantir, Lembas, Mithril, Narya, Anduril: weird name choices, right? Obscure, complex, and silly for anyone who hasn’t spent years studying Tolkienian lore. And frankly perverse to most who have. Social media, biotechnology, venture capitalism, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, digital disinformation, and the multi-national military-industrial complex are among the least Tolkienian enterprises a real Rings fan might imagine. Nonetheless, these are the improbable pet projects to which Tolkien’s techno-billionaire superfans have bound his works.

Of course, the bigger pet project that some of them share is ending liberal democracy, and this is where their link to the European far right comes in.

From “Founder Mode” to Full Fash

In her article, Kakutani cites several examples of far-right groups that have appropriated Tolkien’s novels over the past few decades, including Spain’s far-right Vox party, which, she notes “tried to hijack” Tolkien’s “imagery” with a post of Aragorn “facing off against [. . .] left-wing, feminist and L.G.B.T.Q. groups.” She also notes Tolkien’s popularity with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, whose love for fantasy fits into a long tradition of neofascist appropriations.

But none of these groups or movements finds elaboration in Kakutani’s article, which instead merely hints at the generic “authoritarianism” of Silicon Valley’s executive philosophy.

Describing the tech sector’s burgeoning “taste for kingly power,” Kakutani recalls a warning that former Apple and Google executive Kim Scott published last year in The Times. There, she warned of “a creeping attraction to one-man rule” that she called “founder mode,” which she said was spreading “in some corners of tech.” This go-it-alone philosophy, she wrote, “embraces the notion that a company’s founder must make decisions unilaterally rather than partner with direct reports or frontline employees.”

Kakutani links this dictatorial disregard for other stakeholders to the “traditionalist” worldview of classic fantasy.

The new mood of autocratic certainty in Silicon Valley is summed up in a 2023 manifesto written by the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who describes himself and his fellow travelers as “Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons and bringing home the spoils for our community.”

While this elitist version of the hero’s journey runs counter to Tolkien’s plebeian focus on the quiet heroics of “little folk,” other elements of Tolkien’s stories prove harder for Kakutani to wrest away from the right. Considering the far-right’s fixation on binary moral codes and apocalyptic crises, she begrudgingly admits that

Classic fantasy and science fiction stories have informed how many [Silicon Valley Tolkien] fans think about the world, giving them a Manichaean vocabulary of good vs. evil, and a propensity for asserting that the future of civilization is constantly at stake. The stories also acted as an exhortation to think big and to pursue huge, improbable dreams.

Reminding readers that Elon Musk called The Lord of the Rings, his “favorite book ever,” Kakutani attributes the Tesla and Space X founder’s “grandiose sense of mission” to his emulation of the heroes in Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series and Tolkien’s novels. Explaining why Musk took from the novels his self-proclaimed “duty to save the world,” Kakutani writes:

Like “Lord of the Rings,” the Foundation novels trace a narrative arc that has resonated with right-wing politicians intent on remaking the world. It’s a story line in which a hero or a group of heroes takes on the challenge of a civilization in crisis. They wage war against a dangerous or moribund establishment and aspire to build a brave new world out of the ashes of the old.

Sure. But missing here, once again, is any direct reference to fascism.

Because that’s what we’re dealing with when we drift into talk of leading a revolutionary, authoritarian, biopower movement aimed at intervening at a global level to accelerate the collapse of “a moribund establishment” (modern liberal democracy) and build in its place a “brave new world” that’s modeled after the ultra-traditionalist fantasies of the far-right and that will be secured by a semi-privatized, multinational, totalitarian, surveillance apparatus and an army of autonomous killing machines.

The brain behind Silicon Valley’s neofascism is software engineer and one-time alt-right blogger Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencious Moldbug). Yarvin, another enormous Tolkien fan who earns a small nod in Kakutani’s article, is a chief theorist of the tech sector’s openly fascist neoreactionary movement. An advisor to Peter Thiel and philosophical beacon to Vice President J. D. Vance, Yarvin most recently made the news for decrying Elon Musk’s D.O.G.E.-driven demolition of the U.S. governmental apparatus—not for its wanton destruction, however. No, he had called for that. Instead, Yarvin has been worrying that Musk and Trump have blown their historic opportunity to destroy all the trappings of modern liberalism by moving so quickly and recklessly that they’ve accidentally given away the game. With public rage rising and democratic opposition now likely to grow, Yarvin has been warning his hard-right fans in the White House that there’s no hope left for the right if they don’t throw caution to the wind, trampling the constitution and launching a total revolution against “the system.”

Yarvin’s writing (which I’ve been following for nearly two decades) is so fallacy-laden and boring that it slowly melts your brain away like the flame in a sculpted candle. If it weren’t so boring (and interminable!), all the journalists who’ve taken to writing profiles of him recently would have lit their hair on fire over what he says.

Instead, like Kakutani, they seem to find his racism and sexism, his indifference to mass violence, his post-human apocalypticism, and his advocacy for a world of neo-monarchical, corporate dictatorships merely troubling.

So, what’s with Tolkien and all these fascists?

Weird, right?

Want More on Politics and Tolkien?

With some luck at the press, I should have a couple of scholarly book chapters out next year on Tolkien’s far-right appropriations. In the meantime, you can listen to Dani Holtz and me talk about the history of Tolkien’s right-wing fandom on American Id’s 2022 “Eye of Sauron” series.

The most substantial early rejoinder to Tolkien’s right-wing interpreters is Patrick Curry’s Defending Middle-earth, Tolkien: Myth and Modernity (1997), which potently stressed the Green, anarchist, and anti-imperialist tendencies in The Lord of the Rings. It remains a must-read for anyone who wants to engage seriously with Tolkien’s remarkably idiosyncratic political perspectives. Brian Rosebery deepened Curry’s argument a few years later at the end of his book Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (2003), and that’s probably the best full-length follow-up to Curry’s work. From the 2000s forward, there’s no shortage of academic readings that stress features of Tolkien’s writing that disrupt the kind of hard-right appropriations of Tolkien that continue to flourish in neofascist and neoreactionary fandoms.

For a smart take-down of recent, far-right, Tolkien readings, check out Tom Emanuel’s “Italy’s Far-right Claim the Lord of the Rings but They’ve Misread Tolkien’s Message.” And for a rigorous, Marxist application of Tolkien’s works, see Robert Talley’s “Tolkien’s Deplorable Cultus.” For a pair of earlier pieces that consider right-wing appropriations in the context of the racist blowback to Rings of Power, check out writing by Helen Young and Anna Smol.

And give a follow to these lovely folks from the academic Tolkien community, too:

Dimitri Fimi

Robin Reid

Tom Emanuel

Christopher Lockwell

Queer Lodgings Podcast

Tolkien Pop