Abstract
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings entered Anglo-American popular consciousness as an emblem of 1960s, leftist youth culture, but the novel slowly gained currency across the political right. In the U.S., conservative intellectuals published book notes and articles on Tolkien’s writing in their movement’s leading journals, gradually habituating their readers to seeing the once-obscure English fantasist as a canonical writer for American conservatism. The most prominent of these journals was William F. Buckley’s National Review, which recurrently promoted Tolkien’s writing and offered a distinctly partisan interpretation of his texts. This paper offers a partial outline of the conservative Tolkien’s discursive emergence. It identifies the National Review authors who helped reshape Tolkien’s political legacy, and it describes the heuristic they used to make his fiction into a potent political cudgel.
Recommended Citation
Franson, Craig
(2026)
"Getting Tolkien Right: Middle-earth in the National Review,"
Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 24:
Iss.
2, Article 11.
Available at:
https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol24/iss2/11
Comments
This is a lightly edited version of a talk presented at the annual conference of the Popular Culture Association in Washington D.C. on 18 April 2019. I presented the paper with the present title, but it was advertised as “Re-forging the Ring: J.R.R. Tolkien in the Conservative Press, 1965-91.” Thanks to session chair Robin Anne Reid, panelists Kristine Larsen and William Fliss, and the session audience for the insightful conversation that followed.