A Short Cut to Mutualism in Tolkien’s Political Imagination

Well, I’m reading Tolkien again, as usual.

Every few years, most members of my family return to the comforting ritual of rereading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Growing up the son of a Pastor in South Carolina, The Lord of the Rings sat somewhere above The Pilgrim’s Progress and below the Westminster Confession of Faith in the spiritual canon of my deeply Presbyterian household.

As a child, I had the distinct understanding that Tolkien belonged not merely to our family’s literary imagination, but also to its spiritual imagination. As I grew, he found his way into my political imagination as well.

Over the years, I have found this a difficult thing to explain. For starters, Tolkien does not lend himself to easy political categorization, and his writing appeals, often for different reasons, to all sorts of people from clear across the political spectrum.

This prompted me to compose a Threads post making light of this phenomenon:

Being a Lord of the Rings superfan is weird because you meet another Lord of the Rings superfan and they’re either gonna be a trad-Catholic vaccine truther or a queer anarcho-communist occult practitioner. There’s rarely an in-between.

Instant virality. This sentiment resonated strongly with the app’s Tolkien community and was met with much affirmation–as well as obstinate protest.

Usually, going viral on the Threads app is a bad thing because that accursed algorithm throws you in front of exactly the kinds of people who will encounter your words for the very first time and then interpret them in the least charitable light possible.

It is filled with #Resistance Lib refugees from Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into a pay-per-view platform for racism.

These anxious souls routinely encounter my criticism of Democrats and, with well-worn fingers overused to clutching pearls, take to the keyboard to slander me under the assumption that I am a Right Wing stooge. They are usually quite confused to discover the depth of my radicalism, though they rarely bother to do so.

But on occasion, virality on the Threads app simply introduces me to my target demographic: a bunch of other nerds. These filed into my replies the other day to express their appreciation of my evidently astute observation.

The ironic thing is that the strange duality I spoke to in my post is perhaps best embodied in the person of Tolkien himself.

The Political Paradox of J.R.R. Tolkien

A committed Catholic of a Paleoconservative disposition, Tolkien was suspicious of calls for “progress” for the sake of progress, or secular assaults on the sacralized aspects of life.

But Tolkien also had a deep suspicion of mechanized, industrial capital and the men who wielded it.

During the Spanish Civil War, Tolkien’s support for Franco’s Nationalists stemmed from his devout Catholicism and concern over a spree of anti-clerical violence perpetrated by Republican forces. His perspective was influenced by reports of the burning of churches and the slaying of clergy, leading him to view Franco as a defender of the Catholic Faith against secular and communist threats.

In contrast, Tolkien’s lifelong friend C.S. Lewis opposed the Francoist coup, demonstrating a more critical stance towards authoritarianism. This particular divergence highlights that Tolkien’s moral stances on political matters were not always wholly consistent nor thoroughly considered.

Occasionally, they reflected what might be described as a default reactionary character. It is for this reason, among others, that I personally believe C.S. Lewis exceeds Tolkien both in depth and in nuance in most matters of moral clarity.

But that is more a reflection of Lewis’ deeply empathetic and subtle approach to questions of morality than Tolkien’s lack of moral clarity.

Tolkien was a Catholic, and Catholics in England were, as a rule, Francoists and anticommunists. This set did not bother to differentiate between ‘communisms,’ preferring to lump an astonishing range of Leftist ideas and movements into sort of collective Red Menace. Communism, for them, represented a dangerous sort of anticlerical secularism and Franco’s forces, a restoration of sacred tradition, albeit through illegal force. It was a relatively simple binary, and one drawn more along religious lines than political ones.

But that is not to say that Tolkien was very sympathetic to fascism.

Tolkien lived through both World Wars, fighting in the first, and vehemently opposing the forces that provoked the second. As most German—and many British—conservatives flocked to Hitler’s banner, Tolkien expressed his outright disgust for the man and the Nazis’ bastardization of the Nordic myths.

In his letters, he referred to Hitler as a “ruddy little ignoramus” whom he held responsible for “ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit… which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”1

He expressed intense personal revulsion towards the race science of the Nazis that was derivative from a prevalent–and very modern–form of Scientific Racism, which itself ran contrary to the teachings of the Church.

Even in peacetime, he notably castigated the German publishers of The Hobbit after they inquired as to his Aryan origin:

I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian… But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.2

Tolkien’s own views on race will likely never fully be known. He faced criticism for his depictions of orcs and the nativist sentiments of many of his characters, as well as a noticeable undertone of cultural supremacy–at least regarding the complex notions of “East” and “West”–which can be found within his work.

But taken as a whole, Tolkien’s fiction truly does seem to be about a group of characters from different races and backgrounds triumphing over long-held prejudices and uniting to resist the forces that seek to enslave them all.

Moreover, in both his fiction and private correspondence, Tolkien reveals a countercultural reverence for human dignity and equality, rooted in that sacred unity of Image-bearers instilled in him by his Catholic faith. This was often in contrast to the prevailing sentiments of his time and place.

Tolkien and Anarchy

Given my description of Tolkien as a “Catholic Paeloconservative,” it might come as a surprise that, on at least one occasion, he expressed sentiments highly sympathetic to Anarchism.

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs),” he wrote to his son Christopher, in a wartime letter from 1943.3 “Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence [sic] to write it with a capital “G” or so as to refer to people.”

He simultaneously expressed to his son a preference for a kind of “unconstitutional Monarchy,” while admitting that was a fraught proposition.

Tolkien envisioned a king who was largely unconcerned with the daily affairs of his subjects, but had the power to sack scheming bureaucrats and ruled not over a Leviathan state, but an “inanimate realm” that had “neither power, rights, nor mind.” His reason for this was simple:

The most improper job of any man, even saints… is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.4

In this single letter, Tolkien—perhaps unwittingly—expresses the Anarchist’s philosophical opposition to the notion of unjustified hierarchies, if not the concept of hierarchy itself.

He does so while affirming a sentimental affection for a kind of medieval kingship that was neither overbearing nor particularly powerful.

Tolkien understood that a monarch should not be the pinnacle of a sprawling state apparatus, but rather the embodiment of an “inanimate realm,” of which he is as much organic product as governor.

A figure who was simultaneously war chief and ceremonial head, one who emerges as if naturally from the history, culture, and geography of his native land.

There are analogues for this type of leader in the pages of history, like the ‘play kings’ of Ireland before the Anglo-Norman Conquest, who operated within a political system where power was highly ritualized, contingent, and often checked by local clan structures.

But it is not in the hints found in his letters that we might find the strongest political expression of Tolkien’s imagination, but rather his idyllic description of the Shire in the introduction and opening chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring.

Concerning Hobbits

When the reader of The Lord of the Rings first encounters The Shire, they are introduced to a world of informal hierarchy, agrarian peace, and communal obligation. It is a society that is largely self-governing and suspicious of external meddling.

“The Shire at this time had hardly any ‘government’” writes Tolkien. “Families for the most part managed their own affairs. Growing food and eating it occupied most of their time. In other matters they were, as a rule, generous and not greedy, but contented and moderate, so that estates, farms, workshops, and small trades tended to remain unchanged for generations.”5

What governance there is in the Shire seems minimal and decentralized, with a local chieftain–known as the Thain–serving primarily as a ceremonial leader and stepping into a more active role only during emergencies. As Tolkien writes:

The Thain was the master of the Shire Moot and captain of the Shire Muster and Hobitry in arms; but as muster and moot were only held in times of emergency, which no longer occurred, the Thainship had ceased to be more than a normal dignity.

This structure mirrors the political organization of medieval Iceland, with which Tolkien, the consummate medievalist, would have been intimately familiar.

The Icelandic political structure was dispersed and anarchic, but involved appointed local chieftains, known as goðar, who held authority that was often temporary, largely symbolic, and exercised mainly during times of crisis. Matters of collective importance were resolved communally at the Althing, a decentralized assembly that met yearly to dispense justice and resolve disputes.

Both Shirefolk and Old Norse Icelanders exemplify a form of self-governance that balances communal autonomy with largely ceremonial hierarchical leadership when necessary.

Hobbits have no police force, and their closest analogue largely fulfills the function of modern Park Rangers.6 Most importantly, all the affairs of Hobbits are organized under the assumption that having a King was basically a good idea—so long as he was quite far away, or better yet, long dead.

Yet the hobbits still said of wild folk and wicked things (such as trolls) that they had not heard of the king. For they attributed to the king of old all their essential laws; and usually they kept the laws of free will, because they were The Rules (as they said), both ancient and just.7

Shire Hobbits liked to believe that their way of doing things was based on an ancient system set down long ago by a just king. This mirrors the claims made by many so-called ‘primitive’ societies that their rituals and traditions do not arise from arbitrary force or consensus, but reflect normative behaviors handed down by gods or long-dead hero kings.

While the Hobbits acknowledge a distant kingship in theory, they do not require such a King to govern the affairs of the Shire effectively. By Frodo’s day, Shire Hobbitry had been doing just fine without one for thousands of years. What they required was simply a collective reassurance that their way of doing things was how a good king would like to see things done.

For this reason, Hobbits, like many pre-industrial societies in the real world, ascribe legitimacy to long-held traditions by burying their origin in the mythic, golden past rather than the practical demands of consensus placed upon a decentralized agrarian society.

This feature of Shire-governance reflects Tolkien’s own affection for a kind of idealized Anarcho-Monarchism. The passage above, taken from On the Ordering of the Shire, echoes his wartime letter to Christopher in which Tolkien admits he was drawn simultaneously to the paradoxical poles of Anarchy and Monarchy. It is a political posture that reads as charming, idyllic, perhaps even a little naive.

But such a reading masks a quiet radicalism embedded in Tolkien’s firm conviction that power should be local and communal, and that ‘government,’ insofar as it must exist at all, should be both distant and weak. What’s more, power should not be pursued for its own sake, and those who seek to do so should be met with distrust.

Such a philosophy finds curious resonance in the work of radical Anarchist thinkers who would never be described as ‘conservative.’ Thinkers like the late David Graeber, or perhaps Murray Bookchin, whose philosophy of Libertarian Municipalism offered a similar blueprint for radical democracy rooted in shared, decentralized community rather than conquest or centralized control.

And herein lies the paradox of the Tolkien’s ‘conservative’ political outlook: for all practical purposes, the Shire is effectively an Anarcho-Communist society whose affairs are organized under mutualist principles that would be aligned with Anarchist philosophies like Libertarian Municipalism.

The Quiet Radicalism of Shirefolk