I love Tolkien’s works and I’m probably at least 13% Middle Earth by volume. It’s a rich text and very compelling and we all grew up on it and on works directly inspired by it. But I think the degree to which we impose our own values and politics upon the stories and Tolkien himself is incredibly frustrating and more a product of wishful thinking than anything actually reflected in the text.
I don’t even mean this in a “let people enjoy things” way—more than any other author I see Tolkien idolized not just as a talented world builder but as a profound social commentator. To a degree… sure. For some things, sometimes. But for many other things he was regressive and reactionary even for his time and there is an extreme cultural reluctance to engage with that even among people in the Critiquing Reactionary Themes in Media subculture.
For instance: it’s a really common refrain that LotR is “antiwar”. But what is The Lord of the Rings but an exercise in imaging morally compulsory war? It does depict war as something deeply traumatic for the people involved, but it’s also a war in which the enemy is literally cosmic evil and the primary foot soldiers can and should be destroyed with impunity. How can you have a race of noble warriors like the Rohirrim without the existence of noble war? Even in The Hobbit, war is only a stupid, wasteful folly until the inherently evil faction show up. Middle Earth is a setting in which both cosmic evil and the divine right of kings are real and in which war is a painful necessity that’s still ultimately glorious.
