Tolkien and the Italian Far-Right

An article for The Conversation

If you follow Tolkien news, you may have seen the controversy surrounding a major new exhibition on his life and works at Rome’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. The Lord of the Rings has a complicated legacy in Italy. Whereas it became a central text of the antiwar counterculture in 1960s America, in Italy it became a favorite of post-fascist reactionary movements, who saw in Middle-earth a literary prop for their real-world dreams of political and cultural hegemony. They famously went so far as to host a series of “Hobbit Camps” in the late 1970s, meant to bring young people together to dream a far-right future for their country. Giorgia Meloni, the ultraconservative Italian prime minister, stands in direct descent from these far-right organizations and spoke at the opening of the exhibition last week. She has described The Lord of the Rings as a personal “sacred text” and the Italian culture ministry funded the current exhibition in part as a “gift” to her and her far-right party the Brothers of Italy.

As you can imagine, I find all this pretty reprehensible. So when The Conversation invited me to write about Tolkien and the far right, I had a few choice words:

In his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien defends “the freedom of the reader” against reductive readings. He was far more concerned that readers take his novel on its own terms as a work of art, rather than arrive at some objectively “correct” interpretation. There is, quite simply, no one “right” way to read Tolkien – but, in my opinion, there are wrong ones.

There are readings that ignore what’s in the text, twisting it to suit the reader’s own religious, cultural and political purposes. Far-right readings of The Lord of the Rings do not come from nowhere. But they are far from the only solution to the riddle of Middle-earth’s enduring power. Tolkien was savvy enough to realise that his imaginative reconstruction of a mythic past was fiction. Reactionary ideologues lack any such self awareness.

You can read the full piece here.