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On October 30 2025, the Department of Homeland Security in the United States posted a Tolkien meme. It pictured Merry Brandybuck - one of J.R.R. Tolkien's four hobbit protagonists in The Lord of the Rings - speaking to another hobbit Pippin at the climax of The Two Towers, the second of Peter Jackson's film adaptations.

Merry, the older and wiser of the duo, is trying to persuade Pippin not to return home to the Shire. He wants Pippin to join him in persuading the tree-shepherding Ents to join the climactic battle against the forces of the wizard Saruman.

Beneath Merry's ominous warning ("There won't be a Shire, Pippin") are written the words "JOIN.ICE.GOV".

The post and the flood of Tolkien-themed anti-immigration memes that followed are symptomatic of a larger trend: the use of Tolkien, especially his heroic good-versus-evil imagery, in the rhetoric of the New Right.

Such rhetoric is prominent among influential figures from Silicon Valley, such as Elon Musk, whose influence can be felt in the ICE meme, US vice-president J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel, whose surveillance company Palantir is named after Tolkien's "seeing stones", the palantiri.

Tolkien, as recent commentators insist, would hardly have enjoyed such uses of his work. But are these readings of Tolkien really misreadings - readings without foundation in The Lord of the Rings?

The Homeland Security meme has no counterpart in Tolkien's book. In the book, the Ents are not recalcitrant. Unlike the Ents in Jackson's film, they decide to intervene in the war on their own, after a long process of careful deliberation.

The book's ending does, however, confront the scenario Merry fears in the film. The Shire is taken over by a hostile force.

The episode - presented in the The Lord of the Rings' penultimate chapter, The Scouring of the Shire - has an anti-totalitarian edge. A band of "ruffians" (human outsiders) and their hobbit collaborators have taken over the Shire. They institute rules and curfews. They describe their activities (stealing, burning and knocking down houses) in an Orwellian vocabulary of "gathering and sharing" and "fair distribution" - meaning "they got it and we didn't".

Scholarly interpretations emphasise the internal nature of this threat. In David M. Waito's account, the "pressures of conformity" in the Shire at the start of the book reemerge in this concluding episode. The same hunger for power the adventurers learnt to resist in Mordor was always present in the Shire.

Hobbit collaborators such as Ted Sandyman and Lotho Sackville-Baggins, are suspicious of nonconformists - a category which includes our hero, Lotho's cousin Frodo Baggins.

Lotho - the instigator of the takeover - starts as a capitalist mogul. "Seems he wanted to own everything himself and then order other folk about," says the elderly hobbit Gaffer Gamgee.

The danger of power - the desire to "order other folk about" - is a central concern for Tolkien. In 1943, he wrote to his son about his "political opinions", saying they "lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control)".

Tolkien's deep suspicion of power can be found throughout his work, but especially in the Shire's utopian social system. The only proper government official is the Mayor of the Shire, but "almost his only duty was to preside at banquets".

Silicon Valley readings of Tolkien take account of his anarchic utopianism, which has affinities with its suspicion of government regulation.

This, according to Peter Thiel, is the reason he named Palantir Industries after Tolkien's palantiri. The company's surveillance and data-management technology should not fall into the wrong hands - the hands, in the words of Palantir's website, of "powerful institutions".

Tolkien's readers are first introduced to the palantiri by Aragorn (the king who returns in The Return of the King). Aragorn's description of the stones is echoed in standard explanations of the name Palantir Industries. A palantir is "dangerous indeed", but "not to all". As the rightful king, Aragorn may claim one (and he does).

Aragorn can be read as a "redemptive" hero, set apart in his ability to safely wield power. For Thiel and other tech giants, it is individual entrepreneurs - not governments - who should control new technologies.

The book's seeing stones, however, were made long before they were used by the kings of Gondor. The wizard Gandalf provides a deeper history than Aragorn, telling us that

the palantiri came from beyond Westernesse, from Eldamar. The Noldor made them. Fanor himself, maybe, wrought them, in days so long ago that the time cannot be measured in years.

Tolkien's posthumously published book The Silmarillion recounts the legends behind The Lord of the Rings, including that of the elves known as the Noldor. But the Noldorin craftsman Fanor is no more the "good" hero of The Silmarillion than Hamlet is the "good" hero of Shakespeare's tragedy.

Fanor is a tragic hero. His fatal flaw is his love of invention. In The Silmarillion, he creates gems containing divine light, the silmarils. This instigates the symbolic fall of the elves: the Noldor's exile from their homeland Eldamar.

Fanor's fall is prefaced by two mistakes. First, he neglects the restraining influence of his wife, Nerdanel. Though she is also skilled in invention, she wants "to understand minds rather than to master them".

Second, he becomes secretive and possessive, isolating himself from all but a close network of kin.

The same errors - isolation and secrecy - are repeated in The Lord of the Rings by wielders of Fanor's other invention, the palantiri. First, a line of kings in Gondor sit alone in "aged halls", "secret chambers" and "high cold towers", and so die out. Second, Saruman keeps the stone he finds "secret, for his own profit". Third, Denethor, the steward of Gondor, who inherits the palantir from its dead kings, keeps it secret and is driven to proud despair.

The philosophy of Silicon Valley is that of popular fantasy war games. It interprets the world as a fight, in the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, between "(unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil".

For Thiel's heterodox Christianity, "biblical revelation" highlights the "madness of crowds", who seek to kill and drive out their messianic saviours.

We find the opposite message in Tolkien. The users of magic objects - symbolically, for Tolkien, the "Machine" - bring about destruction by wielding their power in secret, without accountability.

For Thiel, those who oppose technological advancement are evil. In a recent interview, he describes the threat of the Antichrist. The Antichrist is not "some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world", he said. It is far more likely to be those who say, "we need to stop science, we need to just say 'stop' to this". If we listen to such calls, according to Thiel, we will fall prey to the totalitarian world state, the Armageddon.

Apocalyptic language is a hallmark of Tolkien's moral universe too - something Thiel's Lord of the Rings themed company names take up. Yet for Tolkien the purpose of apocalyptic language is to cast light on ourselves.

Tolkien defines the danger of the Machine as "all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) ... with the corrupted motive of dominating". Evil, he claimed, can spring from "an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others - speedily and according to the benefactors' own plans".

Thus, The Lord of the Rings ends with the evil of Mordor brought into the home the hobbits thought was safe. "Yes, this is Mordor, Sam," says Frodo, speaking of the Shire, "just one of its works. Saruman was doing its work all the time, even when he thought he was working for himself."

For Tolkien, any place can become "Mordor", when the desire to benefit others turns into the will to dominate them.

So does Silicon Valley misread Tolkien?

There is a messianic undertone to the notion that private companies are the best pair of hands for dangerous technology - and there is a messianism to Tolkien. But his apparently black-and-white moral world has always provoked misinterpretation.

W.H. Auden, who otherwise admired The Lord of the Rings, thought Tolkien's depiction of absolute evil in the orcs plays into "our deplorable tendency ... to identify our cause with Good and that of our enemies with Evil".

It is easy to call our enemies the orcs and ourselves the heroes. But this is not the way Tolkien wished his works to be read. In The Lord of the Rings, good and evil are pictured as absolute in order to cast light on their character. Goodness is humble and ordinary. It does not seek power over others - though it will stand up for them when they are in need.

Evil is competitive and secretive. It seeks to control others. In Mordor, we see the endpoint of the unrestrained pursuit of power for our own ends - even heroic pursuit of ends we think will benefit the world.