Muskery

There have been other articles published, analyzing Elon Musk's peculiar misreading of The Lord of the Rings, but I'd like to unpack it a little further.

Musk wrote, "When Tolkien wrote about the hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of the English shires, who don’t realize the horrors that take place far away. They were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor. ... It is time for the English to ally with the hard men, like Tommy Robinson, and fight for their survival or they shall surely all perish." And, in the part I omitted, he referred to a post by Robinson describing "the Afghan attacking the public" in an incident in England, with an anti-immigrant conclusion.

Andrew O'Hehir, in an article I linked to above, describes this as "an especially idiotic misreading of Lord of the Rings as a right-wing warmonger fable," and it is, but it's actually a distorted mirror-reflection of the situation Tolkien describes.

First off, one must clarify that Tolkien intended absolutely no contemporary geopolitical reading whatever, particularly one only occurring after he wrote the book (he finished a draft in 1948, soon after World War II), and that looking for one is extremely perilous. Some early readers assumed a parallel to the war, and Tolkien was at pains to point out, in the foreword to the second edition, that the stories were entirely different. "If [the real war] had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron" and Saruman would, like the USSR getting the Bomb, would have made his own Ring and challenged the West. "In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves."

Those inclined towards Muskery should look hard at that last sentence. His claim to save hobbits looks more like it will trample them.

As part of the same point, the hobbits aren't "the gentlefolk of the English shires." True enough that Tolkien modeled hobbit society on the English countryfolk of his pre-WW1 youth, but that's just a model, not a parallel, and even if you can force through a parallel to the WW2 situation, that has absolutely no applicability to the period that inspired Tolkien's creation. The bucolic countryside, as he saw it, was long gone by the 1930s and 1940s when he wrote the book. (I can further quibble by pointing out that, while Tolkien as a youth lived in "the shires" - Worcestershire, Warwickshire - Robinson's incident took place in Uxbridge, which historically was in Middlesex, a county but not a shire.)

Now: "protected by the hard men of Gondor." This is a grotesque distortion of Tolkien's story. The Shire and its hobbits were not directly protected by Gondor, certainly not in any sense in which a Tommy Robinson parallel would be at all apt. Gondor was very far away. (In what sense Gondor did protect the Shire, I'll get to.) The nugget of accuracy here is that the Shire was protected, but by the Dúnedain, Aragorn's people. In a rather condescending speech at the Council of Elrond, Aragorn says, "The North would have known [peace and freedom] little but for us. Fear would have destroyed them. But when dark things come from the houseless hills, or creep from sunless woods, they fly from us. What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave? ... Travellers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names. 'Strider' I am to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. That has been the task of my kindred, while the years have lengthened and the grass has grown."

And I suppose if you're sufficiently evil-minded, simple-minded, and starkly prejudiced, you could draw a parallel between those "foes" and the immigrants denounced by the likes of Tommy Robinson. But it does violence to Tolkien's story to do so.

But in what sense are the Dúnedain "hard men"? They're tough fighters when necessary, to be sure, but Aragorn says they keep secret. The Dúnedain are known in Bree only as the Rangers, mysterious "wandering folk" who pop in from time to time. They're not known in the Shire at all. Aragorn is very gentle with Frodo, because he needs to win his trust. I will leave any suggestion that this is even remotely like the posturing of Tommy Robinson with the silence it deserves.

Now, back to Gondor. In Tolkien's story, Gondor played another part. Its role was to defend the bulkwarks of the West against the onslaught of Mordor. From a distance, yes, this is in the defense of everything behind them, including the Shire. But its equivalent in a blinkered simplistic post-WW2 distorted-Tolkien fable is not indigenous rabble-rousers like Tommy Robinson, but NATO, protecting the West against the armies of the USSR and then Putin. Completely irrelevant to Musk's and Robinson's warnings against immigrants.

But if we do apply Gondor to this scenario, Musk's entire intended moral point falls apart.

Most importantly, Gondor's defense is insufficient. Even with allies, it cannot hold off Mordor entirely. Mightily though Gondor struggles, relying on it as your protection will fail. As Gandalf tells Frodo, there is but one thing that prevents Sauron from gaining the "strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences, and cover all the lands in a second darkness." And that is that "he lacks the One Ring." Which cannot be used by the West either, or only a second Sauron would emerge. It is the two tiny figures of Frodo and Sam, crawling through the dust of Mordor on a quest to destroy the Ring entirely, who are the key to the achievement of the story. It is (spoiler alert) the destruction of the Ring which saves the Host of the West from final annihilation by the forces of Mordor at the last minute.

Where is the equivalent of this in Musk's metaphor? There is none.

Then we're back to the "hard men" again. Like the Dúnedain of the North, Gondor's men are doughty warriors. But the unfortunate fates of Boromir and Denethor are there to show us the perils of relying on your status as "hard men." It is easily possible to be too hard, too rigid, and to fool yourself about the nature and extent of the dangers you face. Panic - from what Denethor sees, or thinks he sees, in the palantír, and what Boromir fears in the refusal to employ the Ring - is the cause of their error and the source of their downfall, and that Musk and Robinson are similarly panicked over immigrants seems depressingly obvious.

Better far than being "hard men" is the role and position taken by the noblest of all Gondor's warriors, Faramir - whom I begin to think is the most misunderstood character in The Lord of the Rings; certainly he was profoundly misunderstood by Peter Jackson. In his profoundly wise statement, Faramir says, "War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom."

I think a little more love of what we defend, and less lusting for the sword and the arrow and the "hard men" who wield them, would do us good. That is one thing Tolkien is trying to tell us.