In a recent diary for The Spectator, the editor noted that many of the world’s leading tech companies have names inspired by The Lord of the Rings: Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Mithril; Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. ‘J.R.R. Tolkien has a curious hold on the minds of Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters,’ he wrote.
Well, they’re not the only ones. If I had founded a company I probably would have called it Anduril too. While less odd teenagers spent their money on CDs or football boots, I used to have a life-sized replica of the Elvish sword hanging above my bed. I, like the tech bros, was a LOTR obsessive. A super fan. I still am.
Tolkien was a genius and I have read his books many times over. But I am unashamed to say I have been equally as influenced by the LOTR films, Peter Jackson’s adaptation being for my money the greatest trilogy ever made (and which serves to highlight just how badly the Harry Potter equivalents have failed to do J.K. Rowling’s world justice). I credit Howard Shore’s film score as the thing that first got me into classical music. And I regard LOTR as perhaps the single greatest influence (after my parents) on my ethical code.
Each take away something different from Tolkien’s world. But it is, for everyone, a story of good pitched in battle against unquestionable evil. A world where courage and loyalty are among the highest virtues. A world of manliness, and of men having a clear role. A world of standing up to defend not just one’s kin but one’s home. To this day, when I grow weary from the culture wars and our civilisational fight, I find fresh inspiration in Aragorn’s final battle cry before the gates of Mordor: ‘By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!’
It is a story of friendship, and of fellowship. As Michael Gove wrote in his column – of good people banding together, and putting aside their differences, to defeat a mutual enemy. It’s a world where family and ancestry are sources of pride and respect – one thinks of the patronymics used to address characters. There is a love of adventure too – recall Bilbo reminiscing about ‘seeing the Misty Mountain again, one last time’.
Hope against all odds and beyond all reason. Beauty defended from forces that seek to destroy it. Love of home. The corruption of power. All of these things, and more, I learned from LOTR. Yet while it is full of meaning and moral lessons, it is entirely free of moral hectoring or social commentary. That absence gives LOTR its substance.
Tolkien’s world convinced me that there exist things like chivalry and honour. That there is nobility in standing by friends; but not standing by as one’s country is engulfed by darkness.
Unlike his friend and contemporary C.S. Lewis, Tolkien explicitly expressed his aversion to allegory. Hence, despite being deeply Catholic, he sought to avoid all explicit reference to Christianity or other parts of the real world. Simplistic metaphors – like that the ring represents the atomic bomb – are therefore usually bunk. But the leitmotifs from Christian theology are hard to deny: self-sacrifice, repentance, free will and divine providence. Man’s weakness in resisting evil. The hope invested in the return of the king. Gandalf, Frodo and Aragorn have even been said to exemplify the three offices of Christ’s earthly ministry – prophet, priest and king.
Middle Earth’s morality has been criticised. Edwin Muir lamented it as simplistic: for him, Tolkien’s ‘good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil’. I am not sure that is true. For all Boromir’s bravery and patriotism, he exhibits weakness in the face of temptation too. It is that which has made him many fans’ favourite character – his humanness. Certainly LOTR does not provide a complete and faultless moral framework, as Tolkien himself was the first to admit as he grappled with a philosophical dilemma posed by the orcs (to regard them simply as beasts to be slaughtered without compunction, or as sapient, morally-aware creatures deserving of mercy?).
But young men today require purpose, meaning and identity. And while it would be an overstatement to say that LOTR gave me those in their entirety, Tolkien’s world did convince me that there exist things like chivalry and honour. That there is nobility in standing by friends; but not standing by as one’s country is engulfed by darkness.
What stays with me perhaps above all is the Shire. If Tolkien envisaged his work as a kind of national myth for an England that lacked one, as Homer was for the Greeks, the Shire must stand as the purest encapsulation of what England meant to him. At a formative time in my life, it filled me with an abiding love of the English countryside. For Gollum the ring is his ‘precious’; but the rest of us are left feeling that the Shire is the thing truly deserving of that descriptor. Like Robert Browning dreaming home thoughts from abroad, of an April’s day in England, I think often of Sam’s words as he and Frodo lay on an erupting Mount Doom: ‘Do you remember the Shire, Mr Frodo? It’ll be spring soon, and the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields. And they’ll be eating the first of the strawberries with cream.’ That is as clear an expression of love of home as to be found anywhere in the English language.
His tender depiction of the Shire reflected Tolkien’s despair at much of modernity. As David Engels has written: ‘In his own epoch he already felt himself to be an outmoded man, and had put his creative power… to cast the memory of the basic truths of the old Occident into a new form, to save it over the hated modern age and to make it available to a new generation.’ Tolkien showed me where lies honour and goodness. Or, in Samwise Gamgee’s words: ‘That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.’ Another tech bro, Elon Musk, has said that he keeps that quote on his bedside table.
Which brings me back to that replica sword. You see, for several years as a teen I spent much of my spare time on obscure internet chat forums, nattering away with characters I imagined to be overweight, middle-aged Americans who took part in Viking battle re-enactments at the weekend. Perhaps they were, but now it seems that their number also included those who would go on to become the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. On one level it’s surprising. But perhaps it’s also not that strange that these geeky personalities with names like ‘Slayer of the Nazgul’ or ‘Gimli son of Gloin’ have become the Musks and Thiels of today. If you’re entrepreneurial enough to sell replica armour and wizard staves, and bright and determined enough to learn Elvish, you’ve probably got what it takes to found a multi-billion dollar company. Perhaps the tech bros, like me, even had replica swords mounted on their walls. Granted it’s a far cry from your ordinary teenager’s celeb poster. But LOTR tends to have an extraordinary effect on people.
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