Men of the West: Tolkien, Spengler, and the Modern Crisis

A guest post from Lucius de Geer.

I recently attended a public showing of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King (2003), and found to my surprise the audience was overwhelmingly leftists, with fat cosplayers and blue hair abounding. Rainbow flags dotted the crowd. I would have expected such a display at a showing of Harry Potter or Comic-Con—the nerd subculture has skewed left for a long time. But J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Catholic and a staunch man of the Right, and his works and the movies based on them are filled with themes of Christianity, Nationalism, and old European heroic ethics, ideals which the pro-LGBT multicultural socialists who surrounded me would certainly describe as fascist, bigoted, and patriarchal.

As I contemplated this absurd phenomenon, it occurred to me that Tolkien’s works, which captured the imaginations of the English-speaking world, have been subverted and co-opted by almost every political group in America, from neocons to libertarians even to outright leftists. In the process, the true meaning of The Lord of the Rings has been obfuscated to modern readers. In contrast to modern narratives seeking to turn Tolkien’s writings into an allegory for the Second World War, a polemic on state power or foreign policy, or some coded ideology of liberation, I will argue that Tolkien was attempting a world-historical diagnosis of the decline of Western Civilization—one which matches closely with the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, and which readers of this Substack can appreciate.

Like Spengler, Tolkien offers a vision of “The West” in decline, besieged by external enemies and sapped of strength by its weak and treacherous leaders at home. He shares Spengler’s skepticism of modern technology and “progress” and contempt for the spirit of ressentiment which lay at the heart of socialist movements. Finally, like Spengler, Tolkien calls for a heroic embrace of fate in response to the modern crisis while entertaining the hope that a great man will rise again and restore political legitimacy.

False Interpretations

Nearly every political faction in America tries to point to the Lord of the Rings to legitimize itself. Most recently, vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance attracted attention from Politico for his outspoken love of Tolkien, but he is not alone. The phenomenon of people deriving their politics from fictional works (whether Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or The Handmaid’s Tale) is a topic for another post, but the ubiquity of Lord of the Rings references speaks to its ability to capture the imaginations of Americans across the political spectrum. This results inevitably in distorted interpretations of the text, and a few of those are worth addressing. 

One of the most common interpretive mistakes low-IQ pundits make is reading The Lord of the Rings as an allegory for the Second World War, with Sauron as Hitler, Orcs as Nazis, and the ragtag assortment of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, and Men as the Allied Powers. The first problem with this reading is that, as has become almost cliched to point out, Tolkien hated allegory, declaring in a letter: 

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Further, in a foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explicitly denied taking inspiration from the war: 

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.

Finally, the text itself makes a mockery of attempts to draw a direct connection between the World War and the War of the Ring: Sauron is not a man but a spirit, orcs are perversions of elves rather than human soldiers from a real country, and the forces of Mordor seem to lack any clear ideology, let alone a racialist one.

Yet, despite its absurdity, this reading of Tolkien’s work provides the basis for one of its more common political readings, that of the Neoconservatives. In their view, the main lesson of The Lord of the Rings is the need to embrace globalization and crusades against foreign evils. As the Politico article I cited earlier states: 

But his [Vance’s] fandom also is in tension with some of Tolkien’s ideas about how nation-states should approach the outside world. The books are, in many ways, anti-isolationist. Frodo wants to ignore the ill tidings and stay home but eventually realizes that the Shire isn’t untouched by troubles elsewhere (like, say, NATO being pulled into defending Ukraine from Sauron Putin). In the end, Rohan, Gondor, the elves, ents and dwarves, all must band together and end their petty nationalist squabbles. Their lives are, they realize, interconnected.

The article also cites Republican neoconservative Rick Santorum in defense of this view: 

“I’m a huge Tolkien fan,” he [Santorum] continued. “I’m also someone who believes that the message of Tolkien is that evil must be confronted. And so the idea is that well, we can wait until it comes to the Shire, but that is not a very good game plan. You gotta go to Mordor.”

Mr. Santorum’s favorite part of the book, I’m sure, was when the Hobbit army flew into Mordor with its F-16s, bombed the civilian population, and replaced Sauron with an American-style democracy for the orcs. I exaggerate, but only slightly; people like Santorum and the author of the Politico article do direct violence to the text. Frodo and company do not represent a military intervention on behalf of the Shire, and Hobbits lack the power to try and project their will. Indeed, Appendix A of The Return of the King states that, after the events of the main story, the Hobbits returned to their isolation, and Aragorn banned all others from entering the Shire. 

Another enduring reading of The Lord of the Rings is as a libertarian parable along the lines of Lord Acton’s famous quote that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.” In this reading, the Ring represents political power and dominion over others, which inevitably corrupts those who bear it even with the best of intentions. 

Unlike the neocons, the libertarians actually have some evidence for their position. In a much-quoted letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien wrote 

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)... The most improper job of any many, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

A closer look, however, reveals a far more complicated picture of Tolkien’s politics. The full quote from the letter reads as follows: 

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good.

Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people … The most improper job of any many, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. 

What Tolkien here was criticizing is not power or coercion as such, but rather the impersonal systems of the modern state, where men are subject to a massive bureaucracy claiming to represent “the people.” He preferred the honesty of “personal names,” the swearing of fealty to a man in “‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy” and the network of personal relationships known as “feudalism.” Further, he criticizes democracy, where all leaders “seek the opportunity” to rule rather than being born into it as a duty. These views can be fairly criticized as antiquarian and impractical, but what they are not is the libertarianism of Gary Johnson or Tim Moen, the Canadian libertarian who declared “I want gay people to be able to protect their marijuana plants with guns." 

The actual text of The Lord of the Rings is not libertarian either. The “Ring as political power” interpretation has to contend with the fact that Tolkien’s heroes wield plenty of state power. They lead armies, hold political authority, and pass wise laws. While Tolkien certainly opposed government micromanagement and looked to traditional English ideas of property and limited government, he did not oppose the use of power as such. 

By far the most bemusing political interpretations of The Lord of the Rings, however, come from the Left. They come in all sorts of varieties: British socialist John Molyneux saw Tolkien as an environmentalist and socialist critic of industrialism; Viggo Mortensen, the actor who portrayed Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s movies, criticized right-wing use of his character by describing Aragorn as “a multilingual statesman who advocates the knowledge and inclusion of the various races, customs and languages of Middle Earth"; academic articles have been written on Tolkien’s “Inadvertent Feminism” while Screen Rant described Eowyn as a “feminist icon”; worst of all, the internet is filled with articles about the supposed gay undertones of The Lord of the Rings, from publications including the tabloid Vice, nerd outlet Polygon, and the gay activist website PinkNews. 

These arguments get increasingly absurd, so I will deal with the dumbest first and then move on. Nowhere in Tolkien’s writings is there a single shred of evidence of any approval of homosexual behavior; Tolkien was a staunch sexual conservative, and his letters are filled with defenses of traditional marriage and even include a screed against divorce after his friend C.S. Lewis publicly defended the practice. Tomes have been written on the absurdity of reading sexual or romantic elements into male friendship in fiction, so I will not waste time repeating arguments made better by others. 

The “Eowyn as feminist” argument is worth some further discussion, if only because of its broad acceptance even among non-radical audiences (at the movie showing that prompted this essay, the line “I am no man” drew loud cheers and applause). Her subversion of gender roles to go fight makes her no more a feminist figure than Joan of Arc. She is motivated, not by a sense of injustice about the plight of women, but rather by a nationalistic love of her people and a heroic despair typical of the Germanic myths from which the trope of the “shield-maiden” derived. Further, she renounces the life of a shield-maiden when she meets Faramir and embraces a more traditionally feminine role, although the movies leave out (or, in the extended editions, minimize) this plotline. 

Mortensen’s claims about Aragorn are true insofar as Aragorn is multilingual, but fall apart under any scrutiny. Aragorn is not a petty nationalist, but defends “The West” against hostile forces; he responds to the “mass migration” of the Haradrim and the Easterlings with violent resistance, not by appealing to diversity and multiculturalism. 

Molyneaux’s argument, however, has some weight. Tolkien did critique industrialism and capitalism and was concerned with the environment. However, he did so from the Right, not from the Left; international class struggle and revolutionary politics are nowhere to be found in Tolkien, and his skepticism towards the modern state I have already discussed. Tolkien’s opposition to industrial capitalism bears a far greater resemblance to the Distributism of his fellow Catholic Englishmen Hillaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, or perhaps even to the radical anti-industrialism of Theodore Kaczynski.

Tolkien’s Spenglerian Vision 

In thinking about the various misreadings of The Lord of the Rings out there, I inevitably had to stop and think about what lessons readers (and movie viewers) should draw from Tolkien’s work. I am not qualified to give an authoritative reading of Tolkien (plenty of smarter people than myself have tried), but I was struck by similarities between Tolkien’s worldview and that of German thinkers like Spengler and Nietzsche. I have never seen evidence that Tolkien read either of them, and unlike them, he was a believing Christian, yet the thematic similarities abound. 

The key to understanding the broader themes of Tolkien’s writing is to identify Sauron. As I previously established, Sauron is not human, or even much of a character; he is never shown in the books, nor does he interact with any of the characters except through supernatural means such as the Palantir. But neither is Sauron representative of Satan or evil as such, as that role in Tolkien’s mythology is filled by Morgoth, to whom Sauron is a mere servant. 

Rather, Sauron, the orcs, and all the other evil entities of The Lord of the Rings are best understood by their primary motivation: ressentiment. Nietzsche popularized the term in Genealogy of Morals and exemplified it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra through the tarantulas: 

“What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge” — thus they speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all those whose equals we are not” — thus do the tarantula-hearts vow… You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy—perhaps the conceit and envy of your fathers—erupt from from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge.

Sauron, like the tarantulas, has no true ideology or plan to improve the world, he desires merely to destroy what is strong and beautiful, and to rule as a tyrant for its own sake; orcs are perversions of elves, and burn and kill as a reflection of their own ugliness. The role played by spiders in Tolkien’s writings—Shelob in The Lord of the Rings, Ungoliant in The Silmarillion, and the spiders of Mirkwood in The Hobbit—is not a mere coincidence. If Sauron represents anything, it is the spirit of ressentiment. 

For Spengler, ressentiment is the basis of the modern crisis and the motivating factor of socialism, particularly Soviet Communism. As he wrote in The Hour of Decision: 

One has only to glance at the figures in meetings, public-houses, processions, and riots; one way or another, they are all abortions, men who, instead of having healthy instincts in their body, have only heads for full of disputatiousness and revenge for their wasted life, and mouths as their most important organ. It is the dregs of the great cities, the genuine mob, the underworld in every sense, which everywhere constitute the opposition to the great and noble world and unite in their hatred of it… It is from this befogged milieu that the heroes of the moment of all popular movements and Radical parties arise. 

The spirit of ressentiment is the great threat facing the real West just as much as Tolkien’s fictional West. 

This spirit, for both Tolkien and Spengler, is connected to faith in technological progress. Throughout The Lord of the Rings, industrialism and mechanical cleverness are associated with Sauron and the other forces of evil; at the same time, in Man and Technics, Spengler presents the character of “the progress-philistine of the modern age,” with Lenin and the Bolsheviks counted among their number. 

The spiritual threat of ressentiment, in Tolkien’s world, is analogous to Spengler’s “White World Revolution.” Sauron and the forces of Mordor are fully ruled by it, as in Soviet Russia, but it is a more internal threat: Saruman is corrupted and the Ring exerts its pull on all near it. At the same time, the leadership class of the West is innervated against its power, as were the liberals of Spengler’s day, with Theoden under Womtongue’s sway and Denethor succumbing to despair. In addition, Sauron can call on external forces, men from the East and the South—Spengler’s “Colored World Revolution” of Asia and the Global South.  Against this crisis, Tolkien and Spengler offer the same two solutions, one personal and one political. 

Politically, both Tolkien and Spengler hope that the great man will arise who can restore political legitimacy. In The Lord of the Rings, this role is filled by Aragorn, the eponymous king who returns, while in The Hour of Decision Spengler offers the coming of Caesar. Sweeping aside the stunted political institutions of their day, whether the ruling Stewardship of Gondor or liberal democracy, the great man thus restores Nietzsche’s “grand politics” and the proper order of things. 

Personally, Tolkien calls for stoicism in the face of seemingly inevitable defeat, drawing inspiration from the heroes of Norse mythology. Nietzsche called this disposition amor fati, “love of fate,” writing in Genealogy of Morals 

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.

Tolkien’s characters come to the same conclusion repeatedly, especially in Return of the King. In the chapter “The Last Debate,” Gandalf counsels:

We must walk open-eyed into that trap, with courage, but small hope for ourselves. For, my lords, it may well prove that we ourselves shall perish utterly in a black battle far from the living lands; so that even if Barad-dûr be thrown down, we shall not live to see a new age. But this, I deem, is our duty. And better so than to perish nonetheless—as we surely shall, if we sit here—and know that as we die no new age shall be.

Later, as Frodo and Sam continued through Mordor, Tolkien wrote 

But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength. Sam’s plain hobbit-face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he were turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue.

Spengler presented his version of the same heroic ethic at the end of Man and Technics, writing 

Faced with this destiny, there is only one worldview which is worthy of us, the aforementioned one of Achilles: better a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long and empty one. The danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that it is pathetic to delude oneself. Time cannot be stopped; there is absolutely no way back, no wise renunciation to be made. Only dreamers believe in a way out. Optimism is cowardice. 

We are born in this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue. To hold on like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who died because they forgot to relieve him when Vesuvius erupted. That is greatness; that is to have race. This honorable end is the one thing which cannot be taken from Man. 

As Gandalf famously told Frodo, when he lamented his fate, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”

Of course, Tolkien and Spengler have their differences, revolving primarily around faith in the supernatural. Sauron is not a mere “spirit of the age,” but a real spiritual being; Tolkien believed in real angels and demons, not just metaphors. As Professor Luke Burgis of the Catholic University of America stated in the above-quoted Politico article: 

Of the many ways that Tolkien’s work exemplifies the Catholic imagination, one is the relationship between the visible and the invisible. I think it’s fair to say that Vance believes there is real spiritual evil in this world, and it can become embodied in rites and rituals.

Along with that, Tolkien allows for the miraculous destruction of the Ring, the direct intervention of Divine Providence to make possible salvation where otherwise no hope could exist. For Spengler, there is no ultimate hope for civilization, while for Tolkien, there is hope only in the divine. 

These differences, however, are matters of metaphysical theory and even eschatology; on human action and the state of our civilization, they are in full agreement. Whether or not divine intervention can wrest victory from the jaws of defeat matters very little to how one should act between those jaws. 

Conclusion 

Seen through the lens of Tolkien’s similarities to Spengler, the crowd at the Return of the King showing became even more comical. The morbidly obese lesbian commissars of our modern state saw themselves as gay hobbits resisting Trump-Sauron or as feminist Eowyn stabbing the Witch King of the Patriarchy, failing to see their reflections in the orcs: hideous, twisted progress-philistines tearing down the West in service of the spirit of ressentiment. Tarantulas shrouding tyrannical desires in words of justice, indeed. 

For those with the wisdom to read properly, however, The Lord of the Rings can provide a fictional account of the great drama of modernity and an inspiration for those who follow Spengler and Nietzsche. Further, Tolkien shows how the pagan heroic ethic of the Nietzscheans can be reconciled to Christianity for believers. Christian eschatology and faith in Divine Providence can offer hope, but they cannot absolve man of his need for grim determination in the face of certain defeat. Christian and Nietzschean alike must stand side by side in defense of the West.

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I hope you have enjoyed this guest post from my friend, Lucius de Geer. I certainly did. Subscribe to him, and subscribe to me!