spinning off something @dionysus-complex has been saying about LotR not being particularly anti-war, I think it's a difficult pill for some people (including me) to swallow that, for all its ideological merits (and there are a lot, I think!), Tolkien's work is always first and foremost about returning to a pre-lapsarian age. which is why the fascists have always liked it (that and, you know. the ontologically evil races and the scary hordes of arabs ambiguously "eastern" desert peoples).
ultimately Tolkien was a conservative and a full-blown feudal restorationist. this is not speculation, this is the cornerstone of several of his essays. he thought that the best way forward was to rediscover the social contracts and responsibilities of the past - whether that's the rules of warfare, the chivalry of warriors, or the responsibility of lords and kings.
and i get it, you know? in times of massive progressive social upheaval - both world wars, the decline of empire, the rapid pace of 20th-century technology, the rise of fascism and the disruption of social units, it is very natural to cling onto and look fondly back at what seems like a more stable society. to look at the way the world is currently run, and say: hey, weren't there rules once? didn't we agree on our places once? shouldn't we be able to trust the people in charge and believe in something noble and good?
(and. no. there were never inviolable rules, we never all agreed, and we could never trust the people in charge. but there is a stability to structures like feudalism which comes from. uh. mostly from them not being in a state of rapid and continued transition, i think? we're three hundred years into the industrial revolution at this point, and the fundamental way we govern our societies has changed so much, so many times in those three centuries. it's easy to see the appeal in just knowing where you stand)
and it's not necessarily all bad! it's the same tendency that fuelled a lot of the labour movements in the 18th and 19th century, actually: the desire to reclaim or defend historic rights, customs, and social structures, while redeveloping them for the modern day. good things, things that support working people and ordinary communities, can come out of backwards-looking customary movements. counter-intuitively, you can gain progressive action and ideals from conservative beliefs, and they don't just have to be "RETVRN" bullshit. they can also be community-building. they can be demanding the ruling class honour existing social contracts. they can be saying "we already know it doesn't have to be this bad" about things like war and labour conditions and legal repression.
but it is a bit disingenuous, if not actually dangerous, to view a conservative text about the need to resurrect prelapsarian norms as a call for progressive, modern values. there are many things i would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with tolkien on, but i think it's important to recognise that in many of them we'd be standing there for different reasons. (and i say that as someone who does not consider themselves progressive, precisely because i do have sympathy with the idea of restoring a clear social contract and customary community structures)
there are values which will read across ideologies, but that doesn't mean they have the same meaning in all cases. "take responsibility in proportion to your power" can be equally framed as "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" (socialism) or as "to whom much is given, of him much is expected" (paternalism) or as "noblesse oblige" (feudalism, although it's actually a 19th-century phrase afaict).
so. like. you CAN read Sam as a scrappy working-class hero who proves the value of trusting workers. but the clearly consistent reading is that Sam is good because, as a servant, he knows his place and is happy with his lot. you CAN read éowyn's realisation that Killing Is Bad And Unglamorous as a broad statement on the glorification of war (and god i want to), but it's more likely a reflection of the idea that a woman might move outside her class-station in turbulent times, but that she can and should move back to more traditionally womanly activities when it's done. you CAN read the books as anti-war, but I think it's more accurate to say that they're criticising how war is done now, and saying "war used to be so much better when people played by the rules!"
and you can still take those interpretations and gain value from them (they said, continuing to write reams of extratextual analysis on how you COULD read éowyn's arc), and you can still use them as building blocks in a non-conservative, non-restorationist worldview. you can do that and i honestly think you should. but there's a difference between "i can find a progressive message in this work" and "this is a progressive work".
....anyway i know this is the 4am essay brainrot talking but what i'm really saying is that lord of the rings is a luddite text
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