One route into the thorny question of J.R.R. Tolkien’s politics comes courtesy of Giorgia Meloni. Scarcely a profile of the Italian Prime Minister hits the newsstands these days without the Tolkien references piling up like so many windfall apples: The Hobbit plays put on with fellow-members of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) youth group back in the 1990s; the fixation on the Ringbearer’s sidekick Sam Gamgee (‘Much more useful than Frodo’); the annual birthday tribute to a man who ‘brought up so many of us with his stories’. Here, clearly is a Middle-earth obsessive, Tolkien’s work a direct prompt for political action.

Head a thousand miles north into the Scandinavian forests and the hard-right tocsin clangs even louder. To a generation of Norwegian black metal bands, who gave themselves names robbed from Tolkien’s back-catalogue (‘Gorgoroth’, ‘Darkthrone’ etc), The Lord of the Rings books seemed at times to read like a white supremacist’s almanac. Here, for example, is Varg Vikernes of Burzum (Orc-speak for ‘darkness’): ‘We were drawn to Sauron and his lot, not the hobbits, those stupid little dwarves. The elves are fair, but typically Jewish…’ Vikernes, by the way, spent several years in prison for the murder of one of his musical associates.

All this adds up, to the point where many a left-liberal, imagining the blond-haired, blue-eyed Riders of Rohan trampling their dark-skinned goblin-enemies into the dirt, diagnoses a bad case of (albeit cunningly disguised) fascism. Which, of course, is nonsense.

He was a man who gloried in his backward-looking opinions. ‘Progress’ was bad. Statism was worse

He was a man who gloried in his backward-looking opinions. ‘Progress’ was bad. Statism was worse

Tolkien was a Catholic and a reactionary and a royalist, but he was not a fascist. He deplored apartheid, detested racism, told his publishers that a German translation of The Hobbit could ‘go hang’ when questions were asked about his Aryanism, and disliked cultural imperialists: informed that an eighth of the planet’s population spoke English he remarked that it was a ‘damn shame’.

All the same, there is no getting away from Tolkien’s deep-dyed conservatism, for it hangs over his world like sea-fret. Beyond his work, he was a man who positively gloried in his backward-looking opinions. ‘Progress’ was bad. Statism was worse. The two combined were a virtual guarantee of disaster. If the foregoing makes him seem hidebound to the point of caricature, then, on the other hand, this was an idiosyncratic brand of conservatism, always capable of veering off in unexpected........

© The Spectator