J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels—and the associated “legendarium” of characters, histories, myths, maps, and constructed languages—have served as a bedrock of so-called “nerd culture” since their publication in the mid-1950s.
With its clear-cut characterizations, and (more-or-less) cleanly delineated lines between Good and Evil, Tolkien’s imagined Middle-earth—a vast and geographically variegated realm teeming with elves, dwarves, wizards, dragons, orcs, and halflings—can be fairly called archetypal. It is the sort of modern myth that can be adapted to any time, place, or scenario. Well, almost any.
Recently, the US Department of Homeland Security has taken to “Shire-posting.” That is: using quotes and imagery from Tolkien’s books (and director Peter Jackson’s blockbuster movie adaptations) as part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enrollment efforts. One meme, posted to X on Wednesday, quoted the character Merry (played by Dominic Monaghan in the films) warning his friend, “There won’t be a Shire, Pippin”—a reference to the peaceable hobbits’ verdant homeland being encroached upon by the forces of the evil wizard Sauron, and his designs to bring the whole of Middle-earth to heel.
Such mythic myopia seems widespread of late. Elon Musk took to X this week to defend British far-right figure and anti-immigration agitator Tommy Robinson, with recourse to Tolkien’s tale: “The hobbits,” Musk waxed, “were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.”
Gondor, for anyone who was too busy being cool in high school to pore over the made-up histories of Middle-earth, was a kingdom of brave warriors called Númenóreans, also known as “men.” It is perhaps worth mentioning that, by the time of the Lords of the Rings unfolding, the throne of Gondor is absent, and the kingdom itself has fallen into disrepair under the shoddy care of a bunch of lazy, corrupt stewards. The so-called “hard men” of Gondor have become cowards, and quislings. More to the point, it’s generally accepted that Tolkien’s hobbits survive (and thrive) because of their humility and noble earnest virtues. Not because they had tough guy warriors running defense for them. Plenty of Musk’s reply guys pointed out that his post propagated a total misreading of the novel.
Throughout Trump’s second term, various government agencies have drawn from a well of pop culture references—from Pokémon to Halo—in a transparent effort to appear relatable, or “based.” (“Based” is an honorific typically bestowed by the right on anyone or anything brazenly sexist, racist, or otherwise “un-woke.”) But The Lord of the Rings posts scan as especially egregious—or just stupid—because they seem so antithetical to Tolkien’s work, and the worldview it expresses.
I am not super-familiar with Tolkien’s extended appendices and all the hefty tomes of non-canon Middle-earth arcana, but as enthusiastic reader of Tolkien as a boy (who had a psychedelic poster for the Lord of Rings books on his bedroom wall), I don’t seem to recall any scenes of Frodo, Samwise, Gandalf, Galadriel, and the gang ripping around in an unmarked van, wearing face-smothering neck gaiters, hassling immigrants at carwashes, and kicking down housing complex doors in late night raids. If anything, such scenes bear more direct comparison to “The Scouring of the Shire,” the penultimate chapter of The Lord of the Rings, which sees the hobbits returning home from their epic adventure to find their sleepy province tyrannized by ruffians and two-bit rent-a-cops, all in the thrall of a decrepit wizard.
“Attaching yourself to Tolkien is part of a larger psychological phenomenon,” says Emma Vossen, a Tolkien scholar and assistant professor of Game Studies at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. “Those who wish to oppress need to see themselves as underdogs (i.e., Hobbits) to justify their actions and values to themselves. It’s very similar to the way the far right uses and abuses the bible to justify their actions.”
Musk, in particular, has a track record of running afoul of nerdery. Gamers still mock him for his brutal character build in the dark fantasy game Elden Ring. (“I don’t think I could design a worse build if I tried,” one Redditor noted.) When he boasted about being good at the hack-and-slash adventure game Diablo IV, many speculated that he was paying other players to play the game for him—or otherwise just straight-up cheating. More than a desperate attempt to ingratiate himself among gamers, geeks, and dweebs, Musk’s purported interest in the high-fantasy genre can also be read as an attempt to be taken seriously by his Silicon Valley technocrat peers.
When Antichrist-obsessed mega-billionaire VC Peter Thiel founded his data analytics intelligence outfit (which has been working hand-in-glove with ICE), he named it Palantir, after the indestructible, crystal ball-like “seeing stones” from The Lord of the Rings. (The company’s Palo Alto office is dubbed “The Shire.”) Vice president JD Vance, a Thiel acolyte, likewise named the venture capital firm he cofounded in 2019 Narya, after Gandalf’s magical power ring. In 2018, Salesforce Tower in San Francisco was even lit up to resemble the evil, all-seeing Eye of Sauron, for Halloween, arguably one of those “Are we the baddies?”–type publicity stunts.
Robin Anne Reid, editor of the Studies in Tolkien scholarly volumes, says she and other academics who study Tolkien “have been horrified by the appropriation of his work by the alt-right and the Silicon Valley technocrats.” That said, Reid notes that such culture war appropriations of Middle-earth are nothing new. Because of their massive popularity, and that near-mythic, archetypal quality, Tolkien’s works have been claimed across a broad swath of cultural and political movements.
The 1960s counterculture glommed on to Tolkien’s epic in different ways. Ballantine Books’ 1965 paperback reissue of the books exposed Middle-earth to a new generation. Rock bands from Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath and Rush mined The Lord of the Rings for inspiration. Suffice to say, images of idle, shoeless hobbits, tooting on their pipe-weed chimed with certain of the era’s sensibilities. Hippies sported “Frodo Lives!” pins and slapped “Gandalf for President” bumper stickers on their jalopies.
Tolkien was also taken up by the Italian far-right, who found in the books a grand struggle between tradition and modernity. In the 1970s, fledgling neofascists attended anti-communist outdoor concerts dubbed “hobbit camps.” In 2023, Italy’s far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni cut the ribbon on a museum exhibit dedicated to Tolkien, installed at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art and bankrolled the Italian culture ministry. Meloni herself once claimed, “I don’t consider The Lord of the Rings fantasy.”
“Those of us who love what Tolkien really stood for despair at the misuse and misunderstanding of his works by folks who only seem to have given them a surface reading,” says Janet Croft, editor of the peer-reviewed journal Mythlore, published by the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit that promotes fantasy literature. “They become blind to the deeper moral issues and implications of his life-long project.”
Even more casual readers of Tolkien will point out that the author himself was a conservative, a monarchist, and so Catholic that he backed fascist dictator Francisco Franco and his Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. He also compared his money-hoarding dwarves to Jews, writing that they were “constructed to be Semitic,” naturally raising questions of his antisemitism. At the same time, he was a vocal opponent of Nazism and its notions of racial hierarchy, criticizing Hitler’s “lunatic laws” in a letter to his publisher. Born in South Africa, Tolkien had also claimed he had “the hatred of apartheid in my bones.”
Of course, cleanly mapping the ideological worldview of an English philologist and fantasy writer born 133 years ago over the contemporary political landscape can feel a bit futile. But even a basic skim of the works themselves reveals patent contempt for the sort of bullying authoritarianism that agencies like ICE enforce.
Speaking to Tolkien’s anti-authoritarian streak, Croft points me to a letter the author sent to his son, Christopher, while he was at Royal Air Force training camp during the Second World War. “The most improper job of any man,” the elder Tolkien wrote, “is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.”
Remind you of anyone?
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