No One Has Actually Read Lord of the Rings
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #185. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Elsewhere, here.
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There’s a popular genre of post in which people observe that someone dorky and evil has gotten the wrong lesson from science-fiction/fantasy. Sometimes the tone is ironic (search “flying cars” on Bluesky), sometimes mocking and sometimes angry because how do you read Superman and become Lex Luthor? How do you watch The Matrix and think oh yeah, let’s expend all our resources on these robots. How do you read The Lord of the Rings and decide to make a Palantir IRL? How do you read The Lord of the Rings and think trying to live forever is a good idea?
Lord of the Rings comes up a lot in these kinds of tweets and skeets, especially now that Harry Potter posting is politically tricky to do without signaling ideological agreement with its author, (how can the author of Harry Potter?! etc. etc.) and thus has become largely the domain of the TERFs and the only-on-Instagram. Tolkien’s book is also, apparently, the favorite book of every tech-and-adjacent-bro that’s making your life suck a little more. Sean Parker, (of Justin Timberlake fame) had a designer from the Peter Jackson movies costume all the attendees at his Lord of the Rings wedding, and was subsequently fined 2.5 million for crimes against nature (“how could someone who’s watched The Lord of the Rings endanger a forest of all things!”). Peter Thiel keeps naming companies after Elvish words, as has J.D. Vance. There has been much written on the subject and the pieces tend to argue either that these men got it right because Tolkien was a conservative, or the aforementioned how could they that keeps going viral.
These posts often gesture to some lack of reading comprehension or cognitive dissonance that allows them to keep identifying with the good guys, but I also think we should consider that they haven’t read the book. Like… they probably haven’t read the book. Maybe they read it, or most of it, when they were thirteen, but when I started re-reading it in 2020 I hadn’t re-read it in full at least since 2007 and maybe even since the first time I completed a read of it in 2001, and I was surprised at all the things I’d forgotten or misremembered. The movies are such excellent adaptations that it’s easy to forget that they aren’t necessarily the most faithful. They’ve probably seen the movies, probably many times. But what they’ve probably metabolized into their personalities more than either the book, or the films, are the memes.
I am particularly aware of the density of Lord of the Rings memes because I get sent them a lot. It’s a side perk of writing a dissertation chapter on the subject and hosting viewing parties of the films and publicly fantasizing about alternatives to the current television series. It’s not a bad brand to have and it makes more sense than the time a joke about Paris Hilton got misattributed to me and I got that’s hot themed gifts for years afterwards to my absolute confusion. There are a lot of Lord of the Rings memes. Enough that by interfacing with them as frequently as I do it makes me feel like I have seen the movies very recently even though it’s been about a year. The volume of memery that has come out of those films is staggering, especially given that it travels well outside of fandom. One can keep a foot in Middle-earth this way.
I have no evidence that these men have never read The Lord of the Rings, obviously, obviously. All I have is the repeated abuse of the text, the vagary of their comments on it and a proven track record of lying as a personal and cultural trait amongst their milieu. They lie about everything and it is really easy to lie about having read a book that many people are familiar with but many fewer accurately remember. People lie about having read or seen things all the time, for all kinds of reasons, and they may not even realize they’re lying after a point. I mean they get the jokes, right? They know the references. That’s reading!
I just think it’s worth considering that the answer to how could someone is sometimes… they didn’t! They didn’t fucking read it! They name drop it for the yucky combination of everyman and nerd-king that they’re always trying to project. It’s like calling yourself a Jedi Master except that Star Wars is politically flexible enough to not cause the dissonance that calling yourself Elrond while burning down the world might. (Tolkien was not a leftie hero by any stretch of the imagination but he did objectively love water and trees and hate technology). It also has the added benefit of being a book, and if you’re obsessed with IQ scores but you don’t actually engage with literature or literary people you might not understand that it’s kind of an embarrassing pick for your favorite author (I can say this, I’ve been reading in a loop in some form or another for the last five years).
To use Lord of the Rings for this kind of signaling does not require reading the book or understanding it if you did, because it fundamentally does not matter what my, or yours, or Tolkien’s perception of what the book is about. It’s a signal to find their own people and assert themselves within that order, in the same way that their embrace of neo-Nazi numerology does. (And The Lord of the Rings fits much more neatly into their racist ideology than their environmental one). Their hypocrisy is not really relevant in the same way that the hypocrisy of “pro-life” politicians not supporting universal healthcare is not relevant. Hypocrisy is triggering, it makes us fume under the collar, but I at least find it calming to remind myself that it’s not really hypocritical if they’re just not telling the truth.
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Natasha Ochshorn is a PhD Candidate in English at CUNY, writing on fantasy texts and environmental grief. She’s lived in Brooklyn her whole life and makes music as Bunny Petite. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.
