Why the ‘post-fascist’ Giorgia Meloni loves The Lord of the Rings

“I don’t consider The Lord of The Rings to be a fantasy!” Italy’s newly crowned prime minister Giorgia Meloni once said. “It’s a sacred text.”

When Meloni was a youth-activist in the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement, she attended “Hobbit Camp”, a woodland retreat where the future stars of Italy’s alt-right political scene would dress up as The Lord of The Rings’ characters and feverishly compare their struggles with Gandalf’s quest to return a besieged society to a purer traditionalist age. She even wrote The Lord of the Rings internet fan-fiction, placing her fascist ideals right at the epicentre of Middle Earth.

The leader of the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party has hard-line views on immigration, calling for Italy to fight against “Islamification” and preserve the cultural roots of the so-called “Christian family”. And now that she has top billing in the Chigi, you can be sure Tolkien’s tales of pugnacious Hobbits overcoming evil Orcs will take a position of pride next to the bible on Meloni’s desk.

And she’s not alone. In 2019, Spain’s far-Right party Vox shared a photo of King Aragorn in full warrior mode alongside a Twitter post that urged sword-to-sword conflict against left-wing, feminist, LGBT and separatist groups. Although criticised by Viggo Mortensen (in a lengthy statement, the actor, who portrayed the character in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy, argued Aragorn was in fact “a multilingual statesman who advocates the knowledge and inclusion of the various races, customs and languages of Middle Earth”), the metaphor did little harm to Vox’s popularity; three years later and the once-fringe party is set to form part of a regional Spanish government for the first time.

With Amazon's Rings Of Power TV series in full flow, The Lord of The Rings is closer to the pop culture zeitgeist than it has been in years. But does all this attention simply mean it's an inevitability that The Lord of The Rings' characters will be bent out of shape by fanatics on Reddit? Or are there really shortcomings in Tolkien's words that make it a honey trap for political outsiders with controversial views?

The idea that Tolkien had fascist sympathies is easy to dismiss. The late British fantasy author refused to work with Nazi-leaning, Berlin-based publishers for The Hobbit. Writing to Rütten & Loening, Tolkien said coldly: “Personally, I should be inclined to let a German translation go hang! I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.”

And in another letter to his son, Michael, Tolkien described Adolf Hitler as a “ruddy little ignoramus.” The Lord of The Rings books, released between 1954 and 55, contain obvious callbacks to World War Two, with Sauron a “totalitarian interested only in empire-building and power over land and nations,” according to author and Tolkien historian John Garth, who compares this dark rule to the methods of Hitler.

However, Tolkien’s ultimate belief in a non-fascist world doesn’t change the fact his books have become cannon fodder for organisations with fascist leanings over recent years, something I put to Garth directly. “People on the far Right are not ‘embracing’ Tolkien, they’re misrepresenting him to try and recruit support for racism among his huge number of fans!” he counters. “Any genuine fans should know Tolkien loathed racial apartheid and antisemitism.”

“I think it’s easy to misinterpret and flatten what Tolkien wrote. It’s easy for an ideologically driven reader to take the entire story as a West vs East conflict when the text is actually presenting things in a much more complex way,” agrees Dimitra Fimi, senior lecturer in fantasy at the University of Glasgow. “I think they're oversimplifying the narrative for their own purposes.”

Yet even Fimi concedes some of Tolkien’s ambiguities around race do make The Lord of the Rings books more susceptible to groups with white nationalist sympathies. In a letter Tolkien wrote in 1958, the author noted: “The orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the human form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”

Fimi argues this statement clearly reflects Tolkien’s belief in the commonly accepted racial hierarchy of his time, which consisted of three extreme racial groups: the caucasoid, the Mongoloid, and the Negroid. “Tolkien seems to identify himself with the ‘European’ race, usually associated with the Caucasoid,” she argues. “He chooses for his villains the physical characteristics in the extremes of the so-called Mongoloid race, traditionally seen as inferior from a western European perspective.”

In The Lord of The Rings novels, the men allied to the forces of good (the Rohirim, Gondoroians) tend to be fair-skinned, while those with evil intentions (Southfrons, Easterlings, Haradrim) are dark-skinned. This is a “blind spot” that continues to harm Tolkien in 2022, according to Fimi, who continues: “Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings in the 1930s and 1940s, when issues of race and eugenics were very much part of academic and popular discourse. So, we can't say that he would have been ignorant of these questions.

“I think what we perceive today as a race bias is, partially, one of Tolkien's blind spots. It's one thing to take a stance in the real world when really people's lives were at stake - as he did, against Nazism, for example - and it's another to write fiction, in which more unconscious prejudices may come to the surface. It's complicated.”

Amazon's The Rings Of Power makes overt references to tensions between the different races of Middle Earth and even has a colonial immigration storyline involving the Numenorians. The prominent casting of non-white actors in heroic roles has also been criticised in some quarters, but Fimi says she backs it fully. “I think the series is certainly a corrective in having characters of colour scattered among all the Middle-earth ‘races’, rather than the previous assertion that all the ‘good’ peoples are generally white and all the ‘bad’ peoples are generally non-white.”

But Tolkien’s books share this complexity, too. In the Two Towers, it is revealed that the people of Gondor had once hunted and persecuted the Wild Men of Druadan Forest. This is a parallel to the shortcomings of the Soviet Union, United States, and British Empire, “tribes” guilty of crimes that ranged from genocide to colonialism and slavery, yet ultimately unified in defeating Nazism. For Tolkien, who was very much framing events of Middle Earth within the context of World War Two, his good guys could, and should, be tainted. And flawed heroes then to attract flawed followers.

Yet Garth rejects this interpretation. The clearer reality, he argues, is that Tolkien based his elves, dwarves, hobbits, and orcs on folklore, not real racial theory, using a hierarchy that dated all the way back to the medieval Great Chain Of Being. “Tolkien was writing The Lord of The Rings more than seven decades ago,” he says, “so you can’t expect him to be aware of racial politics as we know them today.”

Rather than being blamed for the rise of alt-Right groups, it would be more accurate for Tolkien, who was a noted environmentalist, to be praised for his prescient framing of the perils of climate change. “On the general danger humans pose to their world, Tolkien was an environmentalist way ahead of his time,” argues Garth. “The Ents are walking, talking trees who take revenge against the machine-minded Saruman who has ravaged their forest.

“Mordor is the ultimate environmental wasteland. The Shire ends up almost ruined by industrialisation. Right now, in 2022, the main message that people should take away from Tolkien’s books is that we must come together to save the world we share.”

There’s a scene in The Two Towers, when Samwise Gamgee considers the plight of the enemy, a Southron. “His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem,” notes the Hobbit. “You wonder what his name is, where he came from. And if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home. If he would not have rather have stayed there… in peace.”

Fimi says Sam’s thoughts mirror those of Tolkien, who felt uncomfortable that war meant other human beings were often dehumanized; an idea he believed in strongly having been a veteran of the First World War. “Sam recognises that this person looks different to himself, and is fighting on the opposite side,” she says. “He is the ‘other’, actually very much the racial ‘other’. But Sam eventually comes to the conclusion that this is also another person with his own (individual) fears and anxieties that should be respected. I think that’s a prime example of the nuance in Tolkien’s writing when it comes to race and racial prejudices.”

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is on Amazon Prime Video now