As one who has been reading Tolkien since elementary school, and even now enjoys discussing his works with my adult children, I am beset by many emotions when I read something like this. I feel as if someone has hijacked something from my childhood or like a memory has been violated.
And yet, I must confess that as the years have progressed and I have reflected more on Tolkien's Middle-Earth and learned more of the man, my feelings are increasingly complicated. I am unwilling to dismiss the works regardless of the many valid criticisms that can be levied at them – as well as the criticism due Tolkien himself.
But this... there's something wrong about it, something opportunistic, something exploitative.
Tolkien himself expressed admiration for the likes of Franco even while he detested Hitler and the way in which the Nazi movement polluted the magnificent heritage of Germanic folklore. This touches on the complicated discussion regarding how fascism itself is defined. I would argue Franco was a fascist leader and yet his fascism was obviously of a rather different stripe than the Third Reich in Germany.
And so it's complicated and yet I feel like with Meloni's appropriation there is something dishonest at work.
Is Tolkien a voice or pillar in defense of Christian and Western identity against modernization, globalization, and invasion by foreign peoples?
It's interesting how elements on the Left can embrace such notions (minus anti-immigration) but read it all through a rather different lens. And make no mistake in an earlier generation it was the Left that really loved Tolkien. There were constant allusions to the Lord of the Rings in elements of hippie culture and many will be familiar with the references found in the songs of Led Zeppelin and other folk artists.
On some level, Tolkien did represent the aforementioned reactionary notions associated with today's conservatives or Right, and yet I don't believe the Lord of the Rings was written as a means of addressing these questions. Tolkien's values and experiences shine through and thus the book cannot be divorced from his life-context. And yet he was primarily attempting to create a grand fantasy epic in a coherent world with its own culture and history that seem very real to those who interact with it. And yet it was not entirely unique nor can Middle Earth be classified as sui generis, as its history and cultures are patently derived from and dependent on real-world examples. Once again – it's complicated.
I find it hard to imagine JRR Tolkien approving of someone like Meloni and the course she has chosen in life but at the same time it's certain he wouldn't have appreciated the way a group like Led Zeppelin latched on to and made use of some of his themes and imagery. When I reflect on Tolkien, there are problems to be sure, but when in the midst of his world these contemporary angles and dilemmas seem out of place. Was he a Libertarian as some would have it? Only by imposing a libertarian read on the medieval peasantry can one think so – an interpretation that is highly problematic and yet can seem plausible when used as a foil vis-à-vis industrial culture and sociology.
While Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings during the war years and after, the story's foundations precede it. The Hobbit and the material that would later be published as The Silmarillion were written before those events. As such we might argue that the attempts of later movements whether Right or Left, conservative or libertarian are all engaged in anachronism. Tolkien for all his flaws had a rather wide purview when it came to notions of history and culture. The man was rooted in the Middle Ages and in the culture of myth. While some borrow from this iconography and appropriate it for nationalist purposes, I think it's impossible to argue this is what Tolkien was doing and as such there is a degree of recognizable absurdity in what groups like the Fratelli d'Italia (FdI) are attempting to do.
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