People here have made some good comments on Tolkein's politics but I want to enter a slight demural. Tolkein's real-life politics were spotty: as a Catholic conservative he admired Franco as the saviour of Spain from red ruin. Yet, percisely because of his religous beliefs, Tolkien was way of Nazism, with its mixture of neo-paganism and racial pseudo-science. So one way to describe Tolkien is to say he was a fascist, but not a Nazi. But of course an author's books can mean something very different than what their author intends. As Chris Mooney and others have noted, Tolkein's Catholicism is slightly at odds with the stoic sense of a fallen world which we find in his great trilogy.
I wrote an article about all this 2 years ago for the National Post. For those who are interested, I've posted it below.
Best, Jeet
PDATE Monday, January 21, 2002EDITION NationalSECTION Arts & LifePAGE B13LENGTH 937 wordsSTOTYPE NewsHEADLINE One Rings will do for them all: Creatures of all political stripes claim J.R.R. Tolkien as one of their ownBYLINE * Jeet HeerSOURCE National PostDNOTE
During his lifetime, J.R.R. Tolkien resisted attempts by readers to find a hidden political message in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the continuing popularity of the fantasy series, recently bolstered by the release of a hit movie, has renewed... efforts to discover the true ideology of the books. Surprisingly, Tolkien's fantasy has been claimed not only by environmentalists, free-market libertarians, social conservatives and pacifists, but even by the neo-fascist far right.
The extreme right's appropriation of Tolkien is most evident in Italy, where the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement ran summer training centres called "hobbit camps" in the 1970s. Currently, the National Alliance, another Italian far-right group, is hoping to cash in on the success of the first Lord of the Rings movie, The Fellowship of the Ring, by launching a recruitment campaign inviting young people to "enter the fellowship."
"The far right thing has been going on for ages," notes Tolkien biographer Michael Coren. "If Tolkien had any politics, they were definitely anti-fascist, but the far right wants to claim Tolkien as one of their own because he was anti-urban and used northern myths and legends." During the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a great rediscovery of the folk culture of Germany and other northern European countries. This renaissance of the north fed into the work... of such artists as composer Richard Wagner and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Whatever their personal politics, these artists were often acclaimed by fascists for their "Nordic" vision.
As a scholar who specialized in Anglo-Saxon literature, Tolkien was part of this northern revival, and his fiction drew on the same cultural wellspring that nurtured Wagner and Riefenstahl. According to Coren, "one of the reasons Tolkien hated the Nazis was that he really loved the pristine beauty of northern myths and legends and he thought the Nazis were ruining them."
Tolkien explicitly criticized the "racialist" use of the word "Nordic" by the Nazis. In 1938, the publishing house Rutten and Loening wanted to issue a German translation of The Hobbit, but in compliance with Nazi law they needed assurance that the author was Aryan and not Jewish. Tolkien sent back a curt response that mocked Nazi racial politics.
"I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy or any related dialect," Tolkien wrote. "But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people."...
"It doesn't surprise me that the fascists are still trying to claim Tolkien," Coren says. "They are not really scholars and they need all the authors they can get. How long can you keep quoting Ezra Pound? They are trying to get some sort of intellectual credibility. They see that Tolkien is hugely popular and they figure if we can convince people that Tolkien is of the far right, that can do us some good."
Fascists are not the only ones who have looked for a political message in The Lord of the Rings. In the 1960s, many on the left saw the books as a parable about the dangers of imperialism and environmental degradation, since in the novel the evil forces of Sauron conquer other nations and exploit nature. More recently, Christian conservatives have used Tolkien, who was a devout Catholic, as a counterweight to the perceived paganism of Harry Potter.
Libertarians, who oppose attempts to regulate capitalism, have also drawn subsistence from Tolkien. For example, Justin Raimondo of the Center for Libertarian Studies in Sunnyvale, Calif., argues that The Lord of the Rings is best read as a laissez-faire parable about the dangers of centralized government.... "Any attempt by the fascists to claim him seems like a big contradiction," argues Raimondo. "Tolkien was for decentralization of power and had the libertarian insight that power corrupts. Lord of the Rings is really a critique of state capitalism or crony capitalism, rather than laissez-faire."
Although he acknowledges that Tolkien hated the "oppressive state," Coren rejects the libertarian reading of Tolkien. "Libertarians are obsessed with the individual, but Tolkien's concern was with the community. The two groups that have the strongest claim on Tolkien are the environmentalists and Catholic conservatives." When pressed, Raimondo acknowledges that Tolkien himself was probably more of a cultural conservative than a libertarian.
"Tolkien was basically a conservative," Raimondo admits. "The future was always dark and ominous but the past was a lot better. He was always looking for stuff that needed to be rediscovered, so lost knowledge was very important to him."
"Conservative ideology is there in Tolkien if you want it, but the books are much more complicated than that," argues Chris Mooney, a... senior writer at the liberal magazine The American Prospect. Mooney believes attempts to find a simple ideological message in Tolkien inevitably lead to a "reductionist" reading. "For example, Tolkien was undoubtedly a devout Catholic, but he deliberately kept religion out of Lord of the Rings because he followed the Beowulf model of being a Christian writing about the pagan world," says Mooney.
In his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explicitly criticized allegorical readings that would link his work in a crude and explicit way with the real world. "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence," Tolkien wrote.
"What these political interpretations amount to is an allegorical reading of a literary text whose author disdained allegory," Mooney argues.