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TOLKIEN AGAINST THE GRAIN  
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Gerry Canavan
April 28, 2025
Dissent Magazine
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_ The Lord of the Rings is a book obsessed with ruins, bloodlines,
and the divine right of aristocrats. Why are so many on the left able
to love it? _

A page from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring,
Zanastardust/Wikimedia Commons

 

With over 150 million copies sold, J.R.R. Tolkien’s _The Lord of
the Rings _is one of the best-selling prose narratives of the
twentieth century and remains beloved by fans across the globe. The
genre-defining story it tells of an unlikely provincial hero fated to
save the world from destruction—and the close-knit, multi-species
fellowship that aids him on his quest—has become the template for
countless imitators in fantasy and science fiction, to say nothing of
the series’ own adaptations into numerous popular films, television
shows, and games.

But if we judge Tolkien by those who claim his fellowship the loudest,
we might grow concerned. Vice President JD Vance has said
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not only is Tolkien his favorite author but that “a lot of my
conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up.” And
Vance has the receipts to prove it: he named his firm Narya after one
of the three Elvish Rings of Power, just as Vance’s mentor Peter
Thiel invoked Tolkien when naming Palantir Technologies, Mithril
Capital Management, Lembas Capital, Valar Ventures, and Rivendell One
LLC. In the 1970s the Italian right revitalized itself at “Hobbit
camps
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a formative experience in the life of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni,
who attended one of the camps as a teenager. Far-right and extremist
groups in many other countries
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Tolkien. The UK’s “Prevent” anti-terror program even recently
characterized him (along with C.S. Lewis and George Orwell), somewhat
preposterously, as a kind of gateway drug
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potential radicalization.

Since the founding of the tiny corner of academia known as science
fiction studies in the 1970s, there has been a sense that science
fiction is of the left, while fantasy is of the right. Science fiction
is about the future, about the utopias we might someday build,
about_ science_—while fantasy is about looking back toward an
imaginary past of kings, empires, war, and magic (which is to say,
nonsense). If science fiction is about revolution, fantasy is about
restoration. Or so the Marxist critics who have championed science
fiction and decried fantasy for the past half-century would have it.
The fantasy work of some authors (like China Miéville, M. John
Harrison, Michael Moorcock, or Ursula K. Le Guin, all writers who
don’t fit neatly into any one genre category) are considered
exceptions to this general tendency, but even when leftist fantasy is
recognized, Tolkien himself nearly always stands as the bad example.
In his 2005 _Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia
and Other Science Fictions_, Fredric Jameson interprets Tolkien as the
champion of a system of “reactionary nostalgia”; the climax of his
most celebrated work, after all, is titled _The Return of the King_.
(Tolkien considered _The Lord of the Rings _a single book, but it is
typically published in three volumes.)

What is it about Tolkien’s work that supports this reading? _The
Lord of the Rings_ seems immersed in racism (the superiority of the
fair and noble elves, the inferiority of the brutish, mongrel orcs),
colonialism and imperialism (the return of the king means the
restoration of empire), and deeply retrograde sexism (with a core cast
of characters that is overwhelmingly male). There is also a
generalized suspicion of democracy, cities, modernization, progress,
cultural relativism, and materialism in favor of monarchism,
agrarianism, stasis, fantasies of good versus evil, and a
traditionalism that at times borders on religious fundamentalism
(Tolkien himself was a pre–Vatican II Catholic). _The Lord of the
Rings _is a series obsessed with ruins, bloodlines, the divine right
of aristocrats, and a sense of history as a tragic, endless fall from
grace.

Despite all this, Tolkien has many left-wing fans. They can point to
his celebration of working-class heroes like Sam Gamgee over the more
well-heeled and gentlemanly Frodo, his call for an ethics of
selflessness and self-sacrifice, his rejection of the desire for power
and control in favor of humility and communal society, and his
absolute contempt for tyrants of all stripes. A chapter late in _The
Return of the King _titled “The Scouring of the Shire” sees the
four returning hobbit heroes throwing out the fascists who have taken
over their homeland during their absence, using a mix of mockery,
civil disobedience, pleasure activism, and strategic mass action
(including, in the end, a violent uprising that leaves dozens of
hobbits and men dead).

For the leftist critic who seeks to explain their fondness for _The
Lord of the Rings,_ however, most justifications come with a caveat.
Perhaps the books’ depiction of a wartime esprit de corps, bringing
people of different backgrounds together to achieve a common goal, can
be likened to the solidarity needed for the hard work of changing the
world. But this camaraderie cannot sustain itself beyond times of deep
crisis—and, in any event, it’s typically predicated on a logic of
shared, unrelenting racial hatred for orcs.

There is likewise a stirring ecological politics and love of nature in
Tolkien. Gardeners of varying sorts turn out to be the ultimate key to
human thriving. But Tolkien’s is a deeply tragic environmentalism,
largely impossible to separate from the elves’ doomed desire to
freeze time in a world that has begun to move beyond them. The
hobbits’ Shire provides the glimmers of a model for some third way
between capitalism and communism, two systems that Tolkien found
equally repugnant—yet the hobbits cannot sustain their paradise
through the conclusion of the book without magical assistance, and the
evidence suggests that in the end their world is brutally destroyed in
favor of our own.

Finally, there is some beautiful antiwar sentiment in Tolkien’s
work, a rejection of war’s glories and a refusal to celebrate its
violence—but this goes hand-in-hand with a compromised pacifism, set
aside when the moment demands the heroes take up the sword. The
central protagonist of _The Lord of the Rings_, Frodo, spends much of
the end of the book begging people to stop hurting each other, and he
never gets what he wants.

I have read _The Lord of the Rings _many times since I first
encountered it in elementary school; in my twenties I even was fired
from a job for reading the book when I was supposed to be working (not
to brag). Now, I lead a Tolkien class at least every two years;
Marquette University, where I teach, has the improbable privilege of
being the home of much of Tolkien’s papers, including the drafts of
both _The Lord of the Rings _and its predecessor _The Hobbit_, and
I have been lucky enough to use this archive in the classroom_._

Through all this rereading and archival exploration, I have come to
understand just how strongly _The Lord of the Rings _encourages a
dialectical approach, where we seize on moments of internal
contradiction to read the book against the grain. The work of Robert
T. Tally Jr.—who, like me, was a student of Jameson, and who still
likes Tolkien despite the unambiguous word of the master—is
exemplary of this strategy. Tally excavates the text for signs that
the decline of the elves might not be so bad after all
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or even that the orcs have the better part of the argument
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where we see the orcs unguarded, they too express longing for an end
to war, despising the dark lord Sauron who commands them and his
hideous Nazgûl shock troops. It is Sam’s unexpected pity for a
human who is nominally his enemy that has rightly become one of the
most often-quoted passages from the book: “He wondered what the
man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of
heart or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his
home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.”
Part of what has sustained interest in_ The Hobbit _and _The Lord
of the Rings_ for the last eighty-seven years are precisely these
sorts of rough edges and unfinished thoughts.

For me, however, the key is the books’ frame narrative. Both _The
Hobbit _and _The Lord of the Rings _present themselves not as
novels but as historical documents, uncovered by some anonymous
scholar and presented to the twentieth century as an unknown story of
the very deep past. The story of _The Lord of the Rings _comes from
a copy of a copy of a many-thousands-of-years-old volume called _The
Red Book of Westmarch_, ostensibly written by the saga’s main
characters after the fact and annotated, corrected, and expanded by
various parties later on. These origins can be seen in the book’s
strange and ponderous foreword, along with its more than 100 pages of
pseudo-scholarly appendices.

While the movies and video games based on the book erase this frame,
and many first-time readers ignore it entirely, it was integral to the
work Tolkien understood himself to be doing, and it invites a reading
strategy that is not about established and unimpeachable facts but
rather a deeply contested historical narrative based on extremely
incomplete records and a long and polarized debate. The prose of_ The
Lord of the Rings_ unwinds in places like the appendices, ceasing to
be a fairy tale and instead becoming a self-reflective commentary on
what, how, and why we remember.

Perhaps it is a hazard of the scholarly career that Tolkien and I
share—before he was the world’s premier fantasy novelist, he was
best known as a scholar of _Beowulf_—but when I read _The Lord of
the Rings _now I find myself drawn more and more to the fierce
struggle over historicization that we see happening at the margins of
this odd document, the sense built into the novel that there may be
other Red Books, other legendariums, than the one we currently
possess. The reactionary fantasy of a battle between the forces of
absolute good and absolute evil, in which good triumphed and evil was
defeated, cannot be sustained even within the novel’s 1,000 pages.
Instead,_ The Lord of the Rings_ gives us a self-undermining
critical apparatus that repeatedly undercuts the main text and asks us
to pay attention to silences, gaps, and omissions; to distrust the
narrator; and to dig into contradictions. “Always historicize,”
Jameson once said. In its own strange and deeply uneven way, _The
Lord of the Rings_ says much the same thing.

When my students are unhappy about the final fate of Éowyn, the
proto-feminist warrior-maiden who describes gender normativity as a
cage and who says she would rather die than have to live out her life
according to patriarchy’s script, only to wind up married off
anyway, I point out that the appendices record
people _still_ arguing about Éowyn and what the story of her life
means, centuries after the fact. It is the appendices that tell us
that the restored King Aragorn never stopped waging wars, that his
queen died miserable and mad with grief. These moments of textual
uncertainty are visible across the main text as well: passages that
suddenly leap decades or even centuries into the future, that break
narrative perspective, that provoke questions about the reality of the
saga that the narrator cannot explain or that describe events that no
one actually witnesses but are nonetheless presented as inarguable
historical facts.

It is the ultimate ambiguity and indecision of the text that explains
not only why Tolkien has endured but why so many on the left are still
able to love him, despite all the many perfectly persuasive reasons
why they shouldn’t. There is always another loose thread to pull on,
another unexpected possibility to consider—alongside the dreaded
possibility that Vance and his ilk are right about Tolkien, the
possibility that Tally and I are, too. The book itself cannot choose;
its own characters spend the next century trying to figure out just
what the War of the Ring actually meant. It is in these moments of
textual flux that I find this oddly enduring work remains most
provocative, most unsettled, most interesting, and most alive.

_GERRY CANAVAN is chair of the English department at Marquette
University and the author of Octavia E. Butler._

_DISSENT is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it
quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual
journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Dissent has
published articles by Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A.
Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin,
Czesław Miłosz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chinua
Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz, Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and
many others._

_Dissent is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. We publish the very
best in political argument, and take pride in cultivating the next
generation of labor journalists, cultural critics, and political
polemicists. If this work is important to you, please make a
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* literary criticism
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* JRR Tolkien
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* lord of the rings
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* Racism
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* imperialism
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* sexism
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* democracy
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* ideology
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