Tolkien knew the truth about power
One route into the thorny question of J.R.R. Tolkien’s politics comes courtesy of Giorgia Meloni. Scarcely a profile of the Italian Prime Minister hits the newsstands these days without the Tolkien references piling up like so many windfall apples: The Hobbit plays put on with fellow-members of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) youth group back in the 1990s; the fixation on the Ringbearer’s sidekick Sam Gamgee (‘Much more useful than Frodo’); the annual birthday tribute to a man who ‘brought up so many of us with his stories’. Here, clearly is a Middle-earth obsessive, Tolkien’s work a direct prompt for political action. Head a thousand miles north into the Scandinavian forests and the hard-right tocsin clangs even louder.
