Since the start of the Russian invasion, more than one Ukrainian official has described his nation’s struggle with reference to The Lord of the Rings.

It is perhaps peculiar that Tolkien’s trilogy resonates in this part of the world, given its troubled publication history in the Soviet Union. The first (unsuccessful) attempt saw it rewritten as a sci-fi book, in which the ring is a scientific instrument. Subsequent attempts were marginally more successful, but still only abridged versions. A full, authorised Russian translation appeared only in 1992, after the Soviet Union had collapsed. A Ukrainian one followed in 1993.

Why was the USSR so suspicious of Tolkien? From a Western perspective, his fantasy seems innocuous. But to Soviet eyes, it seemed dangerously close to a Cold War allegory: the good, individualistic, “free peoples” of the West versus the evil, industrial totalitarianism of the East. Tolkien certainly didn’t intend his novels to be interpreted this way, famously denouncing allegory “in all its manifestations”. But as those Ukrainian officials are showing today, finding allegories in familiar material can be used to powerful effect.

And they are not the only ones. In the late Nineties, years after the Soviet Union had collapsed, a Russian palaeontologist called Kirill Yeskov self-published a book that enshrines the Soviet interpretation of The Lord of the Rings. The Last Ringbearer assumes that Tolkien’s story is indeed a Cold War allegory, but tells it from the other side. “Lord of the Rings is the historiography of the victors,” Yeskov’s narrator reminds us towards the book’s end. He offers the Kremlin’s version of events.

In the face of a looming climate catastrophe, the peaceful eastern realm of Mordor, under His Majesty Sauron VIII, harnesses modern technology to embark upon an industrial revolution, aided by its elite class of scientists, the Nazgûl. A universal literacy law is passed, and thanks to an experienced diplomatic corps and powerful intelligence apparatus, the standing army is drastically reduced.

But the “bone-headed aggressive West”, led by the war-mongering imperialist Gandalf, feels threatened by Mordor’s achievements. Gandalf concocts a “final solution to the Mordorian problem”, in collusion with the racist elves from across the Western ocean. Using the puppet Aragorn, the elves have dominated the men of Middle Earth, leaving only Mordor a free country. But then Mordor is conquered, and in its place a “bad copy” of the West is erected.

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In sum: a great civilisation attempting to build a rational society based on science and technology (the Soviet Union) is met with irrational hatred from the so-called “free peoples” (the West) led by elves from across the sea (Americans). These elves conspire to destroy Mordor and divide the race of men (Europeans), who constantly push their influence eastwards (Nato expansion). It is left to heroic spies (Putin?) to save Mordor.

Yeskov’s retelling is unauthorised by the Tolkien estate and not considered a masterpiece. But it is popular with Tolkien fans — especially in Russia. The Last Ringbearer is more than just a simple Cold War allegory, however. It is also a window into the mind of the Soviet baby boomer generation (to which both Putin and Yeskov belong) — and how the end of the Cold War informs their view of international relations. The best example is the fate of the Elven ally, the nation of Umbar.

Umbar, a republic to the south of Middle Earth, used to balance relations between Mordor and the elves. But when it decided to abandon Mordor and team up with the West, disaster struck. “A fad for all things Elvish swept the Umbrian youth. The simpler ones made do with Elven music and symbols, whereas the more sophisticated were offered a comprehensive ideology” — a “concoction” of what sounds like Zen Buddhism, “anarchism” and environmentalism. Aimless Western individualism, in other words.

It gets worse. “It transpired that not sharing those views was unseemly and even dangerous, all persons who had the ill grace of expressing anything other than admiration and support for them were ostracised and persecuted.” Umbar’s folly was its naivete. The nation allowed itself to be turned into a “bad copy” of the West. It failed to notice that the elves’ interest in an alliance sprang from nothing more than cold national interest.

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When the USSR collapsed and Russia, under Yeltsin, embarked on a Westernising, capitalist course, the old Soviet certainties were thrown out. A fashion for all things Western swept the nation. For the older generation, this was difficult to come to terms with. Putin’s reign has seen a revival of Soviet nostalgia and neo-Soviet aesthetics for this very reason: Russian baby boomers have a deep and residing respect for the USSR, and a suspicion of all things Western.

Yeskov’s novel subverts the incredibly simplistic Western notion of the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil, by upending Tolkien’s tale of incredibly clear-cut morality and purely unsympathetic villains. In his version of Middle Earth, ideas such as “good” and “evil” are just ideological cloaks for the pursuit of national interests; they are the invention of the victors, like Tolkien, who chronicle events. Yeskov is not suggesting that Mordor and the orcs of Lord of the Rings are the good guys; he is suggesting that there are no good guys. Incidentally, the fact that we in the West can’t seem to understand this — that we apparently parrot idealism, while acting on realism — is one of Putin’s biggest gripes.

Yeskov’s playful reinterpretation of Tolkien’s work is not, however, the result of a nefarious Russian desire to identify with Mordor, as some commentators seem to suggest, and the Cold War parallels shouldn’t be stretched beyond their limits. Like The Lord of the Rings, The Last Ringbearer was not written as a straightforward allegory. Ultimately, it is a meditation on the nature of history written by the victors, and how it feels to be on the other side.

The question that drove Yeskov’s book is: what if Tolkien’s trilogy really were a historical chronicle? “One has to note that the public’s knowledge of these events is mostly derived from the adapted Western epos, The Lord of the Rings,” Yeskov’s narrator reminds us. It would make sense to wonder if the account is an exaggerated, romantic, simplified tale.

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That Yeskov’s retelling gives us some insight into Putin’s perspective on international relations is incidental rather than intentional. But it is nonetheless an important insight. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the fears and desires that drove it, and the justifications claimed by the Russian side, all bear the hallmarks of an intergenerational conflict as much as a national one. The Russian attempt to portray the war in Ukraine as a war with the US and Nato — a war defending the memory of the Soviet victory in Second World War — is an attempt, by a Soviet baby boomer, to avenge the defeat of the Cold War.

“After all, that’s what memoirs are for: to let veterans recast their losses as victories after the fact,” Yeskov’s narrator pointedly tells us at the end of The Last Ringbearer. In a sense, this is Putin’s ultimate goal in Ukraine: to recast the confrontation of East and West as a victory for the East, not the West. For Mordor to persist as its own civilisation, free of elven values. For most Ukrainians, Tolkien’s original provides a preferable framework. It’s not yet clear which history will turn out to be that of the victors.

I need not have worried, of course. From the moment the lights dimmed in the Odeon, Leicester Square on 10 December 2001, the Lord of the Rings films were a phenomenal success. And although poor Tom B. never made it onto the screen, Jackson’s trilogy carried all before it, grossing a staggering $3 billion and winning a record-equalling 11 Oscars for the final instalment alone.

Two decades on, the films stand up remarkably well. As for the wider Tolkien industry, the bestselling books just keep on coming: The Fall of Arthur in 2013, Beren and Luthien in 2017, The Fall of Gondolin in 2018. And next autumn sees the release of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel series – at a cool $1 billion over five seasons, the most expensive television project in history. Not bad for a writer who’s been dead since 1973.

To some people, all this could hardly be more infuriating. For as we all know, Tolkien is still associated in the public mind with a sweaty, furtive gang of misfits and weirdos — by which I mean those critics who, for more than half a century, have been sneering at his books and their readers.

As far back as the mid-Fifties, the American modernist Edmund Wilson published a comically wrong-headed review dismissing Tolkien’s work as “juvenile trash”, marked by — of all things! — an “impotence of imagination”. Decades later, Philip Pullman, never happier than when sneering at his Oxford forebears, called Tolkien’s efforts “trivial”, and “not worth arguing with”. And whenever some new survey crowns The Lord of the Rings as the public’s favourite novel, the reaction is always the same.

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“Another black day for British culture” was Howard Jacobson’s verdict after a Waterstones poll put Tolkien’s work well clear at the top. “Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964,” agreed Germaine Greer, “it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century. The bad dream has been realised.” Yet by her own admission, she had never even read him.

So are Tolkien’s works “trivial”, as Pullman claims? Surely not. Even if you can’t stand them, only a fool would deny that The Lord of the Rings occupies an extraordinary place in the modern imagination. Indeed, in his trenchant defence of Tolkien’s reputation, the literary scholar Tom Shippey suggests that much of the criticism is rooted in pure social and intellectual condescension, not unlike the rank snobbery that Virginia Woolf directed at Tolkien’s fellow Midlander Arnold Bennett. Shippey even argues that in the future, literary historians will rank The Lord of the Rings alongside post-war classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Lord of the Flies and Slaughterhouse-Five. Who’s to say he’s wrong?

One reason highbrow people dislike The Lord of the Rings is that it is so backward-looking. But it could never have been otherwise. For good personal reasons, Tolkien was a fundamentally backward-looking person. He was born to English parents in the Orange Free State in 1892, but was taken back to the village of Sarehole, north Worcestershire, by his mother when he was three. His father was meant to join them later, but was killed by rheumatic fever before he boarded ship.

For a time, the fatherless Tolkien enjoyed a happy childhood, devouring children’s classics and exploring the local countryside. But in 1904 his mother died of diabetes, leaving the 12-year-old an orphan. Now he and his brother went to live with an aunt in Edgbaston, near what is now Birmingham’s Five Ways roundabout. In effect, he had moved from the city’s rural fringes to its industrial heart: when he looked out of the window, he saw not trees and hills, but “almost unbroken rooftops with the factory chimneys beyond”. No wonder that from the moment he put pen to paper, his fiction was dominated by a heartfelt nostalgia.

Nostalgia was in the air anyway in the 1890s and 1900s, part of a wider reaction against industrial, urban, capitalist modernity. As a boy, Tolkien was addicted to the imperial adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard, and it’s easy to see The Lord of the Rings as a belated Boy’s Own adventure. An even bigger influence, though, was that Victorian one-man industry, William Morris, inspiration for generations of wallpaper salesmen. Tolkien first read him at King Edward’s, the Birmingham boys’ school that had previously educated Morris’s friend Edward Burne-Jones. And what Tolkien and his friends adored in Morris was the same thing you see in Burne-Jones’s paintings: a fantasy of a lost medieval paradise, a world of chivalry and romance that threw the harsh realities of industrial Britain into stark relief.

It was through Morris that Tolkien first encountered the Icelandic sagas, which the Victorian textile-fancier had adapted into an epic poem in 1876. And while other boys grew out of their obsession with the legends of the North, Tolkien’s fascination only deepened. After going up to Oxford in 1911, he began writing his own version of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. When his college, Exeter, awarded him a prize, he spent the money on a pile of Morris books, such as the proto-fantasy novel The House of the Wolfings and his translation of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga. And for the rest of his life, Tolkien wrote in a style heavily influenced by Morris, deliberately imitating the vocabulary and rhythms of the medieval epic.

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But there’s more to Tolkien than nostalgic medievalism. The Lord of the Rings is a war book, stamped with an experience of suffering that his modern-day critics can scarcely imagine. In his splendid book Tolkien and the Great War, John Garth opens with a rugby match between the Old Edwardians and the school’s first fifteen, played in December 1913. Tolkien captained the old boys’ team that day. Within five years, four of his teammates had been killed and four more badly wounded. The sense of loss haunted him for the rest of his life. “To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years,” he wrote in the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. “By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”

Tolkien arrived on the Western Front in June 1916 as a signals officer in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, and experienced the agony of the Somme at first hand. In just three and a half months, his battalion lost 600 men. Yet it was now, amid the horror of the trenches, that he began work on his great cycle of Middle-earth stories. As he later told his son Christopher, his first stories were written “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candlelight in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire”.

But he never saw his work as pure escapism. Quite the opposite. He had begun writing, he explained, “to express [my] feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalise it, and prevent it just festering”. More than ever, he believed that myth and fantasy offered the only salvation from the corruption of industrial society. And far from shaking his faith, the slaughter on the Somme only strengthened his belief that to make sense of this broken, bleeding world, he must look back to the great legends of the North.

Yet The Lord of the Rings is not just a war book. There’s yet another layer, because it’s also very clearly an anti-modern, anti-industrial book, shaped by Tolkien’s memories of Edwardian Birmingham, with its forges, factories and chimneys. As a disciple of the Victorian medievalists, he was always bound to loathe modern industry, since opposition to the machine age came as part of the package. But his antipathy to all things mechanical was all the more intense because he identified them — understandably enough — with killing.

And although Tolkien objected when reviewers drew parallels between the events of The Lord of the Rings and the course of the Second World War, he often did the same himself. Again and again he told his son Christopher that by embracing industrialised warfare, the Allies had chosen the path of evil. “We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring,” he wrote in May 1944. “But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.” Even as the end of the war approached, Tolkien’s mood remained bleak. This, he wrote sadly, had been, “the first War of the Machines … leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines”.

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“Trivial”, then? Clearly not. Tolkien was at once a war writer and an ecological writer; a product of High Victorianism and also a distant relative of the modernist writers who, like him, were trying to make sense of the shattered world of the Twenties and Thirties. But he wasn’t just a man of his time; he remains a guide for our own.

His portrait of the tortured relationship between Gollum and Frodo — both of whom yield to the temptations of power and knowledge embodied by the Ring — could scarcely be a more powerful vision of man’s inherent weakness and sinfulness. And his themes might have deliberately chosen to appeal to modern readers, anxious about the consequences of science, the environmental costs of industry, the dangers of war and the fate of the individual in the face of the vast forces reshaping Western societies in the early 21st century. To put it simply, then, Tolkien matters. How many writers can you say that about, these days?

As Arthur C. Clarke put it:“I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.” It’s a justified parallel. Dune is as central to science-fiction as JRR Tolkien’s masterpiece is to fantasy.

With Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) on general release we finally have a decent film adaptation. Villeneuve has done for Herbert what Peter Jackson did for Tolkien in the Rings trilogy (2001-2003). But dig a bit deeper into the comparisons, and I fear that team Tolkien comes off worse.

Let’s start with the central character in each story: Frodo Baggins in Tolkien’s epic and Paul Atreides in Herbert’s. Both embody the archetype of the reluctant hero. On screen, they’re portrayed by similar actors — Elijah Wood as Frodo and Timothée Chalamet as Paul. These are very much of a type: one part leading man, two parts haunted Victorian doll. Chalamet, though, oozes charisma, while Wood merely gains our sympathy. Score one to Dune. 

Then there’s the rest of the cast — which in the case of Dune meets the multi-ethnic criteria of contemporary film making. The Rings trilogy, almost 20 years older, does not. This is hardly Jackson’s fault — nor Tolkien’s for that matter. There’s an obvious difference in context between a fantasy world inspired by Nordic legend and the galactic melting pot of the far future. 

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As for gender balance, it must be admitted that Tolkien’s tale is a bit of a Boy’s Own adventure. Nevertheless, Jackson did his best to push female characters to the forefront. It hasn’t been so difficult for Villeneuve. For a start, the source material provides more to work with — for instance the “Bene Gesserit”, an order of terrifying space-nuns. Also Villeneuve was able to change the sex of one of the originally male characters, the scientist Liet Kynes, without it making much difference to the plot. I’m not sure Jackson could have done the same to, say, Gandalf. 

Still, such excuses won’t cut much ice with today’s progressives. We can expect their tutting disapproval to be layered on top of previous attacks on Tolkien and everything he supposedly represents. 

Dune is a progressive view of the future — it features a revolution against the established order. Tolkien’s fiction, on the other hand, is portrayed as nostalgic and reactionary — a yearning for a golden age that never existed. After all, what are the Hobbits except idealised Little Englanders who’d have definitely voted for Brexit?

The irony is that Lord of the Rings was once at the cutting edge. Though first published in the mid-1950s, it didn’t become a publishing sensation until a decade later — around the same time as Dune in fact. Both novels achieved cult status with the counterculture of the late 1960s. This was a more comfortable fit for Herbert, the free-thinking Californian, than for Tolkien, the tweedy, Catholic Englishman. Yet the latter did once observe that his political opinions “lean more and more towards Anarchy”.

The narcotic obsessions of the Sixties are lavishly catered for in Dune — whose entire plot (spoilers ahead!) revolves around a perception-altering substance called “Spice”. There is rather less druggery in Tolkien’s fiction, but some have interpreted the “pipeweed” of the Hobbits as consisting of more than tobacco. Certainly, one can see why the hippies were so entranced by the bucolic, laid-back lifestyle of the Shire. 

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A strong current of environmentalism runs through both books. However, while Herbert was a self-taught ecologist, Tolkien’s obvious distaste for industrialisation strikes his critics as sentimental and unsophisticated. Herbert’s ideas appear to be more astute because they’re informed by scientific and technological speculation. Though the events of his novel take place 20,000 years into the future, they clearly relate to the concerns of our own time. 

Let’s start with the desert world of Dune itself, also known as Arrakis. The planet is the only source of the aforementioned Spice — a drug that enables humanity to navigate between the stars. Without it, space travel would be impossible. Wars are therefore fought to control access to this indispensable resource. 

One only has to substitute crude oil for Spice to see what Herbert was getting at. For a book written in the early 1960s — years before oil shocks of the 1970s — he was well ahead of the curve. To drive the point home, his description of Dune and the culture of its native inhabitants is saturated with words and concepts adapted from Arabic and from Islam. 

Herbert tackles some other contemporary concerns — for instance the risks posed by artificial intelligence. In the future he imagines, AI has been forbidden: the most solemn of religious commands is “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”.

A technology that hasn’t been banned is the “Axlotl Tank” — an organic machine used by a branch of humanity called the “Bene Tleilax” to give birth to clones. The horrible suggestion is that because the Bene Tleilax are exclusively male, the Axlotl Tanks are all that remain of their females. This is the bio-politics of surrogacy taken to its ultimate, ghastly conclusion. 

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You won’t find biting social commentary like that in the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s story was more expansive; it was about something that will never change, which is the corrupting effect of power. Yet this is where Tolkien is superior to Herbert. His heroes — and heroines — pass the test because they refuse to accept the world-changing power that the Ring would confer upon them.

My favourite passage in all of Tolkien is where Frodo freely offers the Ring to Galadriel. For a heart-stopping moment, the elven queen is tempted. It would, after all, be better for her to wear the Ring than the evil Sauron. Yet she understands that she too would be made monstrous by it: “All shall love me and despair!” And so she refuses Frodo’s gift. 

Frank Herbert’s hero, however, does not refuse. There is no actual Ring in Dune, but there is ultimate power. Paul Atreides takes it. Later he has second thoughts, but not before his galactic Jihad has killed sixty billion people and sterilised ninety planets. Bit late to turn pacifist after that. 

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Herbert did say that the “power attracts pathological personalities” and that his stories were meant as a warning that “superheroes are disastrous for mankind”.

And yet in the sequels to Dune, Paul’s son, Leto, takes up where his dad left off. In fact, he turns himself into a giant worm (don’t ask) and imposes an absolute dictatorship on the known universe for next three thousand years. Crucially, Herbert provides him with an excuse — the “Golden Path” — meaning a super-human vision of the best possible future for all mankind. Any unpleasantness along the way is justified by the greater good. 

I think we’ve heard that one before. 

In 1965 Tolkien was sent a copy of Dune. The next year, he was sent another one. Writing back he confessed that he was familiar with the book — and disliked it “with some intensity”. As usual, the old man was right. 

Reports suggest it will be a prequel — the action taking place long before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But luckily Tolkien’s wizards and elves are more or less immortal, meaning that some familiar characters may be appearing as their younger selves. I wouldn’t be surprised if another ‘character’ makes an appearance too: the One Ring.

Arguably the most famous piece of jewellery in all of fiction, the Ring is not only a brilliant plot device, capable of linking events that take place centuries apart; it is also the focus of one of Tolkien’s most important themes: power.

Unlike his friend C.S. Lewis, Tolkien was not fond of allegorical fiction. He had no time for the idea that the Ring — extremely dangerous but hard to get rid of — was an allegory of the atomic bomb. Rather, it was exactly what he said it was: an embodiment of power and the corrupting effects of power.

Tolkien shows us that the only people who can be trusted with great power are those who don’t really want it — or who do, but have the moral strength to reject it. Even then, it’s touch-and-go, the burden of responsibility taking a terrible toll on the reluctant bearer.

Numerous commentaries have been written on this aspect of the story — often summed up by the Lord Acton quote: “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Which is true enough. But Tolkien was onto a whole lot more than that…

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Let’s begin at the beginning. The Ring was made at great cost to Sauron, its creator. He poured much of his own strength into an external object — one from which he could be separated, which in due course he was. So why take the risk? Sauron, though evil, was possessed of great cunning — why did he expose himself to such a vulnerability? Did old JRR just not think it through? Does the Ring actually represent a massive hole in the plot?

Not a bit of it. When you understand what Tolkien understood about the nature of power, it all makes perfect sense.

In a letter, he once wrote that the Ring was a “mythological way of presenting the truth that potency… if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalised and so as it were passed, to a greater or less degree, out of one’s direct control.” This is a crucial insight into the way Tolkien understood power to work.

Power in politics is like power in physics: always on the move, a flow not an object. That’s why holding on to power is so difficult — literally so, in the case of electricity. We can generate, transmit and consume vast quantities of the stuff. However, unlike other resources — such as water or grain or coal — it’s very difficult to store in any great quantity.

If only it weren’t. For one thing we’d be able to save up electricity generated in the summer months, when demand is low, for use in the winter. Unfortunately electrons are energy not matter. We can’t stack them up like logs in a woodpile. The closest we can get are rechargeable batteries — but those are limited by the cost of capacity. The best hope for affordable long-term storage lies in using surplus power to make a fuel, like hydrogen, which can then be used to generate electricity at a future date — in other words, the best way to hold onto electrical power is to convert energy into matter and back again.

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Which brings us to back to the One Ring. It can be seen as power in material form — power you can hold onto, ready to be used as and when required. To a power-mad being like Sauron — unwilling to rule within limits — forging the Ring was a smart move.

Here’s another analogy: think of the difference between cashflow and capital. If all you have is cashflow — money which you spend as soon as you earn it — then any interruption leaves you helpless. It doesn’t matter how rich you were up until that point.

However, if you save a portion of your income, then you accumulate capital. And that gives you options — not only a reserve to fall back on, but also a means of boosting one’s own economic power and of acquiring control over that of others.

So that was what the One Ring was to Sauron: an investment of his magical power. You might still think he was foolish to put it all into a single object, small enough to lose down the back of a sofa; but his investment was protected. For a start, the Ring was virtually indestructible. Furthermore, it was so imbued with the identity of its creator that it had a kind of homing instinct, should it get lost. And then there was the effect it had on anyone coming into contact with it.

When energy becomes matter, it acquires mass. Enough mass in one place has a warping effect on time and space, which generates gravity, pulling other things towards it. There’s a parallel process in finance. Great accumulations of capital can distort entire economies. Certainly, they exert a gravitational pull: money comes to money and the rich get richer.

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In parallel fashion, the Ring — as a great accumulation of power — enabled Sauron to bend the will of others to his own. In seeking to exalt themselves, they became his slaves.

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Of course, we’re talking about magical power here — in a fictional, fantasy world. But Tolkien’s story is highly relevant to the real world, where power is political.

Most of the time political power is merely exercised. Successful politicians get the chance to direct the flow of power — but only for a while. They are either in power or out of it, and when you’re out, there really is nothing left of what you had. As is sometimes said in Westminster, “there’s nothing more ex than an ex-MP”.

Sometimes, however, power is invested — poured into some external but enduring form. I don’t mean an Ozymandian statue left broken and lifeless in the desert, but something still thrumming with influence — perhaps even long after the death of its creator.

The Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975. His authoritarian regime did not long outlive him and democracy was soon restored. In 1940, however, Franco ordered that work begin on a vast project — the Valley of the Fallen, which was a memorial to the dead of the Spanish Civil War and supposedly an “act of national atonement”. It took two decades to complete, with some of the work done by prisoners. The site consists of a complex of buildings — including a Benedictine abbey, a basilica and a 500 foot high stone cross.

To its many critics, the bleak grandiosity of the complex suggests an apparently Christian monument possessed by the spirit of Fascism. And though meant to honour the dead of the Civil War, it also contains the tomb of someone who did not die in the conflict: Franco himself.

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The Valley of the Fallen is still a focal point of intense controversy. Spanish governments have gone to great lengths to stop the site being used as a rallying point for Francoist sympathisers – and debate rages as to how the monument can be re-invented.

However, there’s no question of pulling it down like those statues of Lenin after the fall of the Soviet Union. The physical challenge alone would be enormous – the basilica is literally built into a mountain. It is also consecrated ground — a place of worship and the final resting place of 40,000 of the fallen, including some from the Republican side. Whether or not Franco’s remains are moved elsewhere (as the current Spanish government wishes to do), the monument is embedded in the substance and memory of the nation.

*

An investment of power doesn’t always have to take an architectural form. It can be something more diffuse than that. In the back story to the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien tells us that, in addition to the One Ring, 19 subsidiary ‘Rings of Power’ were created and distributed among the movers-and-shakers of Middle Earth. The recipients thought they were getting a free gift; in reality they were plugging themselves into a network under the ultimate control of the One Ring, which Sauron retained for himself.

Now can you think of anything like that in our own world? A networked service whose benefits are given away for nothing and yet which amply repays the ‘generosity’ of those who control it? Doesn’t that sound like certain big tech companies one could mention? I’m not saying that Mark Zuckerberg is Sauron, just that the business model of Mordor isn’t entirely unknown in Silicon Valley.

Though we’re not forced by law to use social media, the technology is so enmeshed in the way we live that it’s getting harder to do without it. And that’s without taking into account its addictive qualities. Even when we don’t actually need it, we wants it. Yesss, we do, my precious. Now, where did I put my phone?

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Another way of solidifying power is through constitutions and treaties. Unlike ordinary laws that can be passed and repealed by whoever happens to be in power at the time, constitutions and treaties are intended to have a binding effect – perhaps lasting for generations. Such arrangements can provide a foundation for fundamental rights or a predictable set of rules for international trade; but beyond a certain point they begin to crowd out the normal democratic process – and the need of governments to seek and renew a mandate from the governed.

Of course, constitutions can be amended and treaties abrogated. But when they’re allowed to proliferate and entangle themselves around the life of a nation, breaking free of their binding power can only come at great cost. It is what the Greeks found out in the Eurozone crisis and what the British are finding out as we struggle through Brexit.

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The EU and its project of ever-closer union is nothing if not an attempt to accumulate power, acquired from sovereign states and deposited layer by layer. It represents decades of political investment, initiatives taken and compromises made – often with the best of intentions.

One has to understand how those who have invested so much for so long feel about the idea of throwing it all away. However, so much power solidified in one place exerts a force that disrupts everything around it – and so one must also understand the motivations of those who wish to resist.

The stars of the EU flag represent the coming together of nations. But one can’t help but notice the shape that they form.

Reports suggest it will be a prequel – the action taking place long before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But luckily Tolkien’s wizards and elves are more or less immortal, meaning that some familiar characters may be appearing as their younger selves. I wouldn’t be surprised if another ‘character’ makes an appearance too: the One Ring.

Arguably the most famous piece of jewellery in all of fiction, the Ring is not only a brilliant plot device, capable of linking events that take place centuries apart; it is also the focus of one of Tolkien’s most important themes: power.

Unlike his friend C.S. Lewis, Tolkien was not fond of allegorical fiction. He had no time for the idea that the Ring – extremely dangerous but hard to get rid of – was an allegory of the atomic bomb. Rather, it was exactly what he said it was: an embodiment of power and the corrupting effects of power.

Tolkien shows us that the only people who can be trusted with great power are those who don’t really want it – or who do, but have the moral strength to reject it. Even then, it’s touch-and-go, the burden of responsibility taking a terrible toll on the reluctant bearer.

Numerous commentaries have been written on this aspect of the story – often summed up by the Lord Acton quote: “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Which is true enough. But Tolkien was onto a whole lot more than that…

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Let’s begin at the beginning. The Ring was made at great cost to Sauron, its creator. He poured much of his own strength into an external object – one from which he could be separated, which in due course he was. So why take the risk? Sauron, though evil, was possessed of great cunning – why did he expose himself to such a vulnerability? Did old JRR just not think it through? Does the Ring actually represent a massive hole in the plot?

Not a bit of it. When you understand what Tolkien understood about the nature of power, it all makes perfect sense.

In a letter, he once wrote that the Ring was a “mythological way of presenting the truth that potency… if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalised and so as it were passed, to a greater or less degree, out of one’s direct control.” This is a crucial insight into the way Tolkien understood power to work.

Power in politics is like power in physics: always on the move, a flow not an object. That’s why holding on to power is so difficult – literally so, in the case of electricity. We can generate, transmit and consume vast quantities of the stuff. However, unlike other resources – such as water or grain or coal – it’s very difficult to store in any great quantity.

If only it weren’t. For one thing we’d be able to save up electricity generated in the summer months, when demand is low, for use in the winter. Unfortunately electrons are energy not matter. We can’t stack them up like logs in a woodpile. The closest we can get are rechargeable batteries – but those are limited by the cost of capacity. The best hope for affordable long-term storage lies in using surplus power to make a fuel, like hydrogen, which can then be used to generate electricity at a future date – in other words, the best way to hold onto electrical power is to convert energy into matter and back again.

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Which brings us to back to the One Ring. It can be seen as power in material form – power you can hold onto, ready to be used as and when required. To a power-mad being like Sauron – unwilling to rule within limits – forging the Ring was a smart move.

Here’s another analogy: think of the difference between cashflow and capital. If all you have is cashflow – money which you spend as soon as you earn it – then any interruption leaves you helpless. It doesn’t matter how rich you were up until that point.

However, if you save a portion of your income, then you accumulate capital. And that gives you options – not only a reserve to fall back on, but also a means of boosting one’s own economic power and of acquiring control over that of others.

So that was what the One Ring was to Sauron: an investment of his magical power. You might still think he was foolish to put it all into a single object, small enough to lose down the back of a sofa; but his investment was protected. For a start, the Ring was virtually indestructible. Furthermore, it was so imbued with the identity of its creator that it had a kind of homing instinct, should it get lost. And then there was the effect it had on anyone coming into contact with it.

When energy becomes matter, it acquires mass. Enough mass in one place has a warping effect on time and space, which generates gravity, pulling other things towards it. There’s a parallel process in finance. Great accumulations of capital can distort entire economies. Certainly, they exert a gravitational pull: money comes to money and the rich get richer.

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In parallel fashion, the Ring –  as a great accumulation of power – enabled Sauron to bend the will of others to his own. In seeking to exalt themselves, they became his slaves.

*

Of course, we’re talking about magical power here – in a fictional, fantasy world. But Tolkien’s story is highly relevant to the real world, where power is political.

Most of the time political power is merely exercised. Successful politicians get the chance to direct the flow of power – but only for a while. They are either in power or out of it – and when you’re out, there really is nothing left of what you had. As is sometimes said in Westminster, “there’s nothing more ex than an ex-MP”.

Sometimes, however, power is invested – poured into some external but enduring form. I don’t mean an Ozymandian statue left broken and lifeless in the desert, but something still thrumming with influence – perhaps even long after the death of its creator.

The Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975. His authoritarian regime did not long outlive him and democracy was soon restored. In 1940, however, Franco ordered that work begin on a vast project – the Valley of the Fallen, which was a memorial to the dead of the Spanish Civil War and supposedly an “act of national atonement”. It took two decades to complete, with some of the work done by prisoners. The site consists of a complex of buildings – including a Benedictine abbey, a basilica and a 500 foot high stone cross.

To its many critics, the bleak grandiosity of the complex suggests an apparently Christian monument possessed by the spirit of Fascism. And though meant to honour the dead of the Civil War, it also contains the tomb of someone who did not die in the conflict: Franco himself.

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The Valley of the Fallen is still a focal point of intense controversy. Spanish governments have gone to great lengths to stop the site being used as a rallying point for Francoist sympathisers – and debate rages as to how the monument can be re-invented.

However, there’s no question of pulling it down like those statues of Lenin after the fall of the Soviet Union. The physical challenge alone would be enormous – the basilica is literally built into a mountain. It is also consecrated ground – a place of worship and the final resting place of 40,000 of the fallen, including some from the Republican side. Whether or not Franco’s remains are moved elsewhere (as the current Spanish government wishes to do), the monument is embedded in the substance and memory of the nation.

*

An investment of power doesn’t always have to take an architectural form. It can be something more diffuse than that. In the back story to the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien tells us that, in addition to the One Ring, 19 subsidiary ‘Rings of Power’ were created and distributed among the movers-and-shakers of Middle Earth. The recipients thought they were getting a free gift; in reality they were plugging themselves into a network under the ultimate control of the One Ring, which Sauron retained for himself.

Now can you think of anything like that in our own world? A networked service whose benefits are given away for nothing and yet which amply repays the ‘generosity’ of those who control it? Doesn’t that sound like certain big tech companies one could mention? I’m not saying that Mark Zuckerberg is Sauron, just that the business model of Mordor isn’t entirely unknown in Silicon Valley.

Though we’re not forced by law to use social media, the technology is so enmeshed in the way we live that it’s getting harder to do without it. And that’s without taking into account its addictive qualities. Even when we don’t actually need it, we wants it. Yesss, we do, my precious. Now, where did I put my phone?

*

Another way of solidifying power is through constitutions and treaties. Unlike ordinary laws that can be passed and repealed by whoever happens to be in power at the time, constitutions and treaties are intended to have a binding effect – perhaps lasting for generations. Such arrangements can provide a foundation for fundamental rights or a predictable set of rules for international trade; but beyond a certain point they begin to crowd out the normal democratic process – and the need of governments to seek and renew a mandate from the governed.

Of course, constitutions can be amended and treaties abrogated. But when they’re allowed to proliferate and entangle themselves around the life of a nation, breaking free of their binding power can only come at great cost. It is what the Greeks found out in the Eurozone crisis and what the British are finding out as we struggle through Brexit.

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The EU and its project of ever-closer union is nothing if not an attempt to accumulate power, acquired from sovereign states and deposited layer by layer. It represents decades of political investment, initiatives taken and compromises made – often with the best of intentions.

One has to understand how those who have invested so much for so long feel about the idea of throwing it all away. However, so much power solidified in one place exerts a force that disrupts everything around it – and so one must also understand the motivations of those who wish to resist.

The stars of the EU flag represent the coming together of nations. But one can’t help but notice the shape that they form.

As its influence spreads, so too does its vocabulary. You can see it all over social media. There are Alphas, Betas, Cucks; there are those who have been “Red-Pilled”, as well as those who live in a state of blissful ignorance, asleep to the civilisational threats the alt-Right is fixated on.

The terms aren’t their own. They’ve been borrowed from popular culture, from films or books that have  struck a chord with converts to the cause. There’s something about these works that speaks to those who wish to upend liberal democracy, who feel shut out of the mainstream. Their concepts empower and embolden those on the political fringes. I think if we can understand that attraction, we can better guard against it. Here are their top three primary sources.

Brave New World

At first glance, Aldous Huxley’s 1931 dystopia is the average alt-Righter’s worst nightmare. Dystopias are unpleasant – that’s sort of the point – but Brave New World, in particular, encapsulates some of the alt-Right deepest fears. Inhabitants of Huxley’s futuristic world state – the very concept a rejoinder to nationalism – enjoy a level of sexual freedom at odds with the moralising traditionalist doctrines of the alt-Right. There is even erotic play between children – encouraged by the state – that would disturb the sensibilities of the far-Right, which, even more than your average man on the street, has historically been obsessed with unearthing paedophiles.

The docility of the populace in Huxley’s World State is maintained through a diet of consumerism and regular doses of Soma, an anti-anxiety, hallucinogenic drug of which “one cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments”. The drug is said to contain “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol” but with “none of the defects”. It is the opium of the people in a literal sense.

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A blissed-out population too dull and stupid to see what is being done in its name is a recurring theme on the political extremes. Even George Orwell, the supposed champion of the ‘common man’, had his ‘proles’ purring away in stupid contentment to the ditties turned out by the Stalinist ruling class in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “He really did believe that capitalism controls the ‘proles’… not by physical oppression, but by bread and circuses,” wrote Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick.

But at the same time Brave New World embodies several favoured alt-Right dictums. For a start, the World State’s motto is the distinctly fascistic Community, Identity, Stability. There is no impetus toward equality – something the alt-Right views as anathema to the “hierarchy of competence”, as Canadian professor Jordon Peterson calls it – but instead there is a rigid caste system, in which citizens are hatched in a “social predestination room” in order to fill specific social roles. People are trained not only to accept their inescapable social destiny, but to rejoice in it. There are those at the top of the food chain, and there are those languishing at the bottom. Each is indoctrinated to accept his or her allotted role.

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Through its depiction of strict social hierarchies (though in the book class gradients originate in the laboratory rather than from nature) Brave New World is where the alt-Right takes some of its favourite terms. This includes its labels for men who are said to be naturally superior – “alpha males” – and those who are subservient to them – “betas”. In other words, the world is divided along rigid hierarchical lines to the extent that fixed hierarchies exist within fixed hierarchies. Richard Spencer, an alt-Right figurehead who hopes to turn the United States into a white ‘ethno-state’, told Rolling Stone last year that women gravitated to the alt-Right in order to find partners with “alpha genes” and “alpha sperm”.

Key terms: Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Gammas, Epsilons, Soma, World State.

The Matrix

“The Matrix is a system… That system is our enemy… You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

The Matrix features lots of pseudo-profound monologues like this. The inhabitants of The Matrix are not ready to be ‘unplugged’, just as the inhabitants of Huxley’s World State are not ready to be weaned off the drug Soma. The populace is asleep, and it is the job of a band of revolutionaries – or counter-revolutionaries in the case of the alt-Right – to wake them up to what is really going on.

Neo, The Matrix’s nerdy protagonist, is offered a Red Pill as a gateway out of The Matrix by rebel leader Morpheus. If he takes the pill, he can escape the computer simulation in which most of humanity lives, but in the process he must confront a truth that is much harsher than the comforting illusion most people take for granted. On swallowing the Red Pill, Neo can never return to his prior state of ignorance. In other words, he can never un-learn the things he is about to see.

The Alt-Right love to use the Blue Pill/ Red Pill metaphors – the Blue Pill is the existing state of blissful ignorance – to describe when a person converts to their nationalist worldview.

The “red pill” is not just a gradual thing, it involves a fundamental change of perspective and basic principles. Whether Tucker will ever undergo this change—or remain a transitional figure—is all up to him.

— Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) October 2, 2018

It’s a favourite trope, too, for anti-feminists, INCELs and PUAs. For them all, to be ‘red-pilled’ is to be suddenly awakened to a vast conspiracy propagated by women, minorities and ‘cultural Marxists’ against white men.

Alt-right misanthropy also emphasises the way the masses are trained to enjoy the bondage of the simulated world they inhabit, in the manner of consumerism. “Ignorance is bliss,” says a character named Cypher as he relishes a juicy steak that he knows is not real.

This, for the extremists, is a metaphor for humanity’s plight under consumer capitalism. We pump ourselves full of synthetic food and we passively imbibe a diet of ‘info-tainment’ and ‘fake news’ from the hated ‘MSM’ (mainstream media). Yet because ignorance is bliss, most of us are unwilling to snap out of this walking daze.

Key terms: Red pill, blue pill.

The Lord of the Rings

J R RTolkien is one of the alt-Right’s favourite authors. Poor Tolkien; he spoke out against the fascism of his day. However, his antipathy to 20th-century totalitarianism – he called Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus” – was a rejection not only of fascism’s barbarism but also of its peculiar modernity. The central tenets of Tolkien’s stories are hierarchy, tradition, loyalty, agrarianism and clan loyalty. Thus Tolkien’s work captures several ultra-traditionalist themes that find favour on the alt-Right.

In the Lord of the Rings, an ultra-conservative and bucolic social order is threatened by Orcs, who reside in squalor and poverty. More broadly, the story hinges on worship of the past. A rigid social structure was once presided over by kings, wizards and an elite of Elves. However this social structure is constantly threatened by hordes of foreign and grotesque invaders from the lower orders. The story is one of degeneration, but also of violent cleansing and potential rebirth through the restoration of lost ideals (sound familiar?).

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Steve Bannon, ideological foot soldier of the alt-Right, is fond of making references to the Lord of the Rings. “The Hobbits are going door to door in the shire, and they’re getting everybody out,” Bannon said of the campaign last year to elect Roy Moore as the Alabama Senatorial candidate. In a similar vein, NRA spokesperson and conservative radio host Dana Loesch said that Moore had “pushed back against the forces of secularism and he said, just like in Lord of the Rings, ‘You shall not pass’”. She also called Moore the “Gandalf of Alabama”.

Stories which posit a lost golden age are highly attractive to the adherents of extreme and millenarian ideologies. For the Nazis there was the Volk, an imagined community in which German landowners and peasants had supposedly lived in an organic ‘people’s community’. For the Bolsheviks, before capitalism and feudalism men and women had lived under ‘primitive communism’. In the Lord of the Rings, the plot hinges on the restoration of a feudal structure where authority is worshipped and an absolute ruler wields that authority on the basis of blood-line. No wonder, then, that LotR finds favour on the alt-Right.

Key terms: Middle Earth, the Shire, Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, Wizards, Orcs, Gandalf the White.

***

There are certain universal truths contained in these three stories. Ones which you might accept regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. Consumerism can occasionally act as an unhealthy substitute for a life of meaning. As a society we often reach for drugs and medication (Soma) instead of dealing with the root causes of our alienation. Societies also tend to perpetuate convenient myths for the sake of social harmony (the blue pill), even when the premises on which these myths are built are suspect.

But swallowing such themes tout court is the mark of a conspiracy theorist. We do not live a vast computer simulation ala The Matrix. Nor are human beings rendered entirely passive by a diet of consumerism as they are with Soma in Brave New World. But something close to these beliefs do exist on the alt-Right, where reality itself is an imposition, behind which stands a sinister and powerful cast of manipulators and puppeteers. Tear away the illusions, the alt-Right tell us, and you will finally grasp the awful truth.

It is a seductive idea, but one that is closer to fiction than hard reality. On a moral level, we ought to deplore those who decide to join the alt-Right, a racist and misogynist movement that wishes to burn pluralism and tolerance to the ground. On a practical level, we should ask ourselves why so many young men are in a place where they are attracted to literal interpretations of dystopian fiction over liberal democracy.

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Why does he, and it, need defending? Well, with entire academic disciplines dedicated to damnation of dead white males, Tolkien, who is one, is accused of all the ‘isms’. But leaving aside this tedious bigoteering, is there anything in Tolkien’s work – as he meant it – that is genuinely objectionable?

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The key charge is that Tolkien is a reactionary – because the Lord of the Rings revolves around a war to preserve a pre-industrial, pseudo-medieval, aristocratic ‘golden age’:

“Some… have accused Tolkien himself of implicit fascism because the story ends with everyone going back home and order being restored.”

Williams rightly points out just how wrong this interpretation is:

“…the story repeatedly reminds us that all this is taking place in a post-heroic age: the great days of elves and humans are over, and the elves are on their way across the sea, never to return. For all the triumph of the king’s return, some things can never be restored. Straightforward fortissimo heroics are rare and often ineffectual.”

As Galadriel (one of the supposedly absent strong female characters of Middle Earth) says at a pivotal moment in the story “I shall diminish and go into the west.” Superficially, this refers to the ‘Undying Lands’ that lie across the sea from Middle Earth – a last refuge for the Elves and, in time, other heroes of the story. But they weren’t off to found a brash New World. The west is where the sun sets, and Tolkien, who would have understood the symbolism through-and-through, was writing about the passing of an old order.

Far from holding on to the past, the conclusion to the Rings trilogy is about sorrowfully, respectfully, graciously letting it go. This is a conservative, not reactionary, sentiment – and quite unrecognisable to the arid mind of the liberal rationalist.

Not that Tolkien was uncritical of the old order. Time and again his plots turn upon its weakness and corruption – the enemy within, as much the enemy without.

It’s this understanding of mortal imperfection that lays the foundation for what the Lord of the Rings is really about:

“The work is ultimately a fiction about how desire for power – the kind of power that will make us safe, reverse injustices and avenge defeats – is a dream that can devour even the most decent.”

The theme is, of course, embodied in the object of the One Ring. At key points throughout the narrative, the heroes and villains of the story find themselves tempted by the Ring’s promise of absolute power – and much depends on how they respond.

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Free Minds: Doctor Who, a maverick in time and space

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It’s interesting that some of Tolkien’s earliest fans were the hippies of late 60s and early 70s. Their enthusiasm came as quite a surprise to the crusty old professor, but there is in fact a place where the borders of traditional conservatism meet those of the pacificist, anarchical Left – because both share a distrust of over-centralised, overbearing power.

But perhaps that’s also why other elements of the Left dislike Tolkien. At key points in its history, when it could have embraced its anti-authoritarian, decentralising tendencies, the Left has gone the other way – replacing the hierarchies of the old order with an equally hierarchical new order. Whether it was the ‘democratic centralism’ of the communists, the well-meaning bureaucracy of the social democrats, or the foreign interventionism of the Blairites, the Left in power has always taken up the Ring… and tried it on for size.