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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The success of "The Lord of the Rings" has launched a war over Tolkien's politics, pitting pundit against pundit, and Viggo Mortensen against John Rhys-Davies.
Feb 28, 2004 | In the years following the mid-1950s publication of "The Lord of the Rings," author J.R.R. Tolkien was often plagued by interpreters who wanted to read his three-volume epic as an allegory of World War II or the Cold War, with the disembodied villain Sauron standing in for Hitler or Stalin, and the fiendishly powerful One Ring representing nuclear weapons or space-age technology or whatever.
Though he detested these interpretations, Tolkien offered a truce by drawing a line between "allegory," which placed responsibility on the author, and "applicability," which left readers free to find parallels of their own without pretending to read the author's mind. However, the worldwide success of Peter Jackson's film version of "The Lord of the Rings" has produced a whole new generation of mind readers claiming to understand Tolkien's motives, and opened up another front in the culture war that has long simmered around Middle-earth's frontiers.
When the book's original paperback editions became campus bestsellers in the 1960s, conservatives wrote it off as hippie-dippie pablum, an incense-scented ur-text of the New Age movement. Religious conservatives were suspicious of the book's popularity with rock groups like Led Zeppelin, and its connection to the seminal role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. But what a difference a generation makes! With "The Lord of the Rings" firmly ensconced in popular culture, Catholic theologians and evangelical activists alike are trumpeting the book's hidden Christian messages. As for the pundits, their successors are happy to claim a story in which good has blue eyes and resides in the West, while evil lives due east and has a really bad complexion. How's that for moral clarity?
It's true that Tolkien's personal politics placed him closer to the conservative line than anything else. The counterculture's early embrace of Tolkien was always comically inapt, though the sight of Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf the Gray enjoying "the finest weed in the valley" can still draw sniggers in the theater. But right-wingers may want to undergo a long-overdue round of soul searching before they lay claim to Middle-earth. In fact, they might be better off giving Tolkien back to the hippies. Unlike, say, "Atlas Shrugged," "The Lord of the Rings" makes for a double-edged weapon in today's culture wars.
The first skirmish in the newest battle flared last year when Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online defended "The Two Towers" against some leftist writers who charged the film with racism because the chief monsters -- burly orcs called Uruk-hai, bred by the turncoat wizard Saruman -- have dreadlocks, dark skin and flat noses. The dispute was a nonstarter because, like their counterparts in the book, the film's orcs also speak with broad Cockney accents and trade insults right out of "Tom Brown's Schooldays." (Fortunately, Jackson didn't follow Tolkien's own description of the orcs: "Swarthy ... like the less attractive type of Mongolian.") But that's nothing compared to the most recent clash, given an acid political edge by the ongoing fiasco in Iraq, and involving members of Jackson's cast: Viggo Mortensen, who plays king-in-waiting Aragorn, and John Rhys-Davies, who plays the stouthearted dwarf Gimli.
When the first installment, "The Fellowship of the Ring," opened only two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, pundits and feature writers were quick to make the War of the Ring an adjunct to the war on terror. During press appearances for the second installment, "The Two Towers," an exasperated Mortensen wore a T-shirt bearing the message "No more blood for oil" and let interviewers know he considered George W. Bush a good buddy of Sauron. Last fall, as the hype machine went into overdrive for "The Return of the King," Mortensen spoke at an antiwar rally in Washington sponsored by International ANSWER, an odious Stalinoid fringe group. Like most of the people who attended the rally, Mortensen seems to have gone in spite of rather than because of the group's involvement -- it's not as though antiwar comment has had so many platforms. Nevertheless, Mortensen has become the piñata of choice for pundits like gay conservative Andrew Sullivan who remain determined to ignore the accretion of lies that fueled the Iraq invasion. (Sullivan, saucy thing, even called Mortensen "cute, but dumb as a post" in his blog.)
Rhys-Davies emerged as a hero to the pro-war faction during a recent press junket, when he offered remarks apparently aimed at Mortensen: "I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged, and if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization. That does have a real resonance with me ... What is unconscionable is that too many of your fellow journalists do not understand how precarious Western civilization is, and what a jewel it is." Rhys-Davies linked all of it to the rise of militant Islam, and conservative pundits swooned.
Since the interview, Rhys-Davies has been making the rounds of right-wing bottom feeders. On Feb. 19 he spent what looked like the longest hour of his life trapped in Dennis Miller's no-laugh zone on CNBC, doing his best to stay awake while the host and Gloria Allred debated Michael Jackson's fitness as a parent. When his moment came, Rhys-Davies warned that Western Europe was on the verge of being overrun by unassimilated Muslims representing homophobia and other forms of religious intolerance. Since then, of course, George W. Bush -- putative defender of the tolerant values of the West -- has announced he will fight for a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriages. Sorry, Gimli -- the barbarians are already inside the gates, and they don't pray to Allah. Before we can preach Western values to the Muslims, we have to get the word out to Pat Robertson and his ilk.
But is that really news to Rhys-Davies? A month before his Dennis Miller ordeal, on Jan. 17, the actor consented to share a podium with Michael Medved, the bush-league Bill Bennett who counts up cuss words in movies and types out screeds like his book "Hollywood vs. America." The venue was the Discovery Institute, the Seattle home base of "intelligent design," the slicked-up version of creationism heavily underwritten by conservative moneybags Howard Ahmanson Jr. If the mere presence of some cranks at a political rally disqualifies Viggo Mortensen from serious consideration, then why would John Rhys-Davies -- by all appearances a worldly and cultivated man -- let his name be linked with a group dedicated to injecting theology into science curricula across the country?
The religious angle on Middle-earth, like the political one, was late in developing. Though Tolkien himself considered "The Lord of the Rings" a Christian (and specifically Catholic) work, he took pains to keep overt religious elements well below the surface. Only by digging through the voluminous appendices at the back of "The Return of the King" does one learn that the Fellowship of the Ring's departure from Rivendell -- the beginning of the mission to save all of creation from unredeemed evil -- comes on Dec. 25, while the timing of other plot developments roughly corresponds to the Annunciation, the Crucifixion and the harrowing of Hell. Meanwhile, the pre-Christian ingredients of Middle-earth -- the Elder Edda, "Beowulf," the Icelandic sagas, the Finnish "Kalevala" -- are fairly obvious, as is the affection with which the author uses them. Tolkien's soul was in the Lord's keeping, but his heart -- like that of his friend, C.S. Lewis -- quickened to a pagan drumbeat.
