Okay, I can't stop thinking about how an older friend of mine, who is in his 60s, told me about how his immigrant parents accidentally sent him to a school sponsored by the John Birch Society (a hyper-conservative, conspiracy-laden US right-wing political advocacy group) when he was a teenager, believing that it was a private school with higher quality education than the public school.
He told me that Tolkien was part of the curriculum at this school, and that the text of Lord of the Rings was used to hook kids into what they thought was an exciting fantasy story that they were then told was all about God, fighting Communism and the scary people from the East (yes, of course, extremely racist), upholding the power of individualism, tradition, and hierarchy, and of course, the importance of being a (white) Man.
Tolkien has been deliberately used as conservative propaganda for a long time. I'm sure someone has already written about this, but part of the vitriolic reaction against both the PJ films and then Rings of Power has to be rooted in the fact that there are people out there who have been indoctrinated into this particular strain of Tolkien interpretation in a very deliberate way. They treat the books like religious texts instead of fantasy novels because they've been taught that it's all just a code for conservative myths that are intrinsic to their worldview and sense of self-worth. And they're fundamentalist about it because that's the way they've been educated to think about texts.
And it's funny, because that strain of fandom runs parallel to the strain of Tolkien fandom I've always been in, which sees the the texts as alternative and open, a way to explore trauma, an imaginative space in which to play with sexuality, and/or a place to subvert hierarchies and accepted narratives.
How these two distinct strains of fandom came to exist is a history thesis waiting to happen (if it hasn't already.)
tl;dr - Tolkien being appropriated by right-wing conservatives is not a new thing
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