How Lord of the Rings became a bible for the far right

And how literature, art, and music are co-opted to spread white supremacist talking points.

I saw a viral Twitter thread on “pre-Jackson Tolkien/Middle Earth aesthetica” full of white supremacist dogwhistles—subtle signals that tell true believers to support and spread this innocuous appreciation post because it’s part of the alt-right pipeline.

There’s nothing overtly white supremacist about this…right?

Quick intro: the alt-right pipeline

The alt-right knows that open support of white supremacy is polarizing. So a loose network of ever-shifting creators form a network that grows incrementally more extreme. It uses the same principles as the marketing funnel, but instead of promoting, like, Minecraft, it wants to turn you into a brand evangelist for pure hwite culture, Bobby.

This account knows it’s top-of-funnel. Someone else in the pipeline can radicalize you. Topics at this level have broad appeal: European art, homesteading, gaming, and pop culture. Nativist or anti-globalist undertones wax nostalgic about returning to simpler times.

How did an author who fought Nazis in World War II become a cornerstone of online neo-Nazism? Well, Don Black runs the white nationalist messageboard Stormfront, and in the 2010s his son Derek set up a forum on Stormfront about Lord of the Rings’s racial mythmaking. (Derek has since renounced his old beliefs and has written about his long road to deradicalization.)

Lord of the Rings’s loudest white supremacist: Varg Vikernes

If you spend enough time reading about metal music, Tolkien, or tabletop RPGs you’ll eventually run into the name Varg Vikernes. The most entertaining summary of Varg’s career comes from a three-part series on Norwegian black metal (church-burning and all) produced by The Last Podcast on the Left.

Varg, a Tolkien superfan, took Burzum as the name of his black metal band. He also spouted Nazi rhetoric and served 15 years in prison for the murder of a fellow Norwegian black metal performer. The cover of the Burzum EP Aske is a photograph of the charred ruins of a historical church that Varg was strongly suspected of burning down, and he included a lighter with the first 1,000 copies he sold.

This was the Fantoft stave church. Aske is Norwegian for “ashes.”

You know the inscription on the One Ring? Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

One Ring to rule them all, one ring to find them; One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

In the Black Speech of Mordor, the word for darkness is burzum.

Varg says that his white supremacy is not “esoteric Nazism” but something he calls odalism. The othala, or odal rune, is a Germanic rune whose meaning relates to heritage and the inheritance of property. The Anti-Defamation League notes that the odal rune can appear in both racist and non-racist contexts: although it appears in white supremacist banners, it’s also in Lord of the Rings, as the dwarvish letter U.

The odal rune sometimes appears with "wings" or "feet."

Hey, wait a minute.

That viral thread has a tangent about Burzum and living off the land in Appalachia. The original poster replies with reaction gifs of Varg himself. He suggests you go follow some “frens” of his.

THIS is the alt-right pipeline in action.

These tweets.

This twitter account's full of white supremacist dogwhistles.

In Italy, a fascist resurgence also has roots in Lord of the Rings

During and after World War I, an art movement called Futurism flourished in Italy. It glorified war, technology, and nationalism, and it flirted with fascism for decades.

At first, Mussolini’s death in World War II looked like the end of fascism. But where futurism failed, the next generation of Italian fascists forged a seemingly-harmless identity rooted in pastoralism and demilitarization. It took the form of “hobbit camps,” a Woodstock-like festival of music and politics. And a suspicious number of Celtic crosses.

And the new far-right Prime Minister of Italy, Georgia Meloni, loves Lord of the Rings and grew up posting online about fandom and far-right politics.

In the spirit of hobbit camps, she named her own far-right convention Atreju, a reference to The Neverending Story. One guest to her 2018 conference was Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has a vision for a far-right movement that unites politicians across Europe.

Campo Hobbit has a lot of Celtic crosses. Steve Bannon and Georgia Meloni pose at the Atreju conference.

White supremacists don’t agree on all the details. Meloni’s fascism is Christian, but Varg (whose birth name was actually Kristian) hates Christianity. He believes that if white Europeans are truly to return to their roots, they must revert to pre-Christian paganism.

This behavior poisons the well of a hobby

Varg spun all this ideology together into a tabletop roleplaying game he calls Myfarog: “mythic fantasy roleplaying game.” It’s incredibly racist—this review shows a sidebar on his Othala nobles and notes that “darklings” get a bonus to spear-throwing. Really.

Oh, and the whole thing is typeset in Papyrus. 🤨

White supremacists carve out spaces in music, gaming, history, and fitness scenes. The upshot of this is that it makes any unvetted newcomer to your social circle look suspicious if they’re really into Norse myth or genealogy or Warhammer 40K. We have to remain vigilant and look for context clues to know who to keep out and who’s actually okay let in.

All this bloviating about how elves are the uncorruptable master race is also why I am especially skeptical of anyone who claims that The Rings of Power was ruined by diversity.

That show was mid because J.J. Abrams’s protégés leaned too heavily on his signature mystery box plotlines. But that’s another article.