Literary Hub » Is Peter Thiel a “bad fan” of LOTR?

Who is Peter Thiel, really? Maverick, or monster? Little is known about the eccentric billionaire manipulating our world from assorted bunkers, but what we can say for sure is that the man was once a boy. And as some of you may have already inferred from the name of his company, Palantir, that boy was obsessed with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Though famously circumspect, Thiel is pretty open about his nerdy past. Besides Palantir, he’s owned several other companies named in homage to LOTR, including Mithril Capital, Valar Ventures, Lembas Capital, and Rivendell One LLC. In 2023, he told The Atlantic he’s read the series at least a dozen times.

And according to Max Chafkin, author of the exhaustive Thiel biography, The Contrarian, his senior yearbook quote was this, from The Hobbit: “The greatest adventure is what lies ahead. Today and tomorrow are yet to be said. The chances, the changes, are all yours to make. The mold of your life is in your hands to break.”

All well and whatever, as cultivated eccentricities go. But as Matthew Sitman pointed out on a recent episode of “Know Your Enemy,” a podcast that analyzes right wing bigwigs from a leftie perspective, this exact quote was not from the book The Hobbit. It was from the 1977 animated cartoon.

Given: everyone coasts a bit senior year, but this error is a curious one for a super-famous-super-fan to have on record. And it makes a nice brick in the rising wall of theory that suggests Thiel has not actually read Tolkien’s books. Or at least not as carefully as he claims.

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It’s concerning enough that one of the world’s most powerful men has modeled his empire on a children’s fantasy series. But what does it mean if he’s gotten it all wrong?

Emily Nussbaum coined the term “bad fan” in a series of 2014 essays. Writing about the phenom of fans who seem to deliberately miss the point of a subversive or satirical text—like, say, the dudes who call Walter White an unironic “badass”—Nussbaum observed that sometimes our love for a thing can override our critical faculties. Which could well be the case here.

Thiel could adore the battle scenes and the poise of the elves so much that he stays blind to Tolkien’s critique of fascism. After all, that big spider is very cool.

According to The Informed Alarmist, an anonymous Substack with Cassandric overtones, it may be as simple as that. For—wizards of middling order notwithstanding—the moral universe of Middle Earth is fairly black and white.

The greedy are bad guys, the humble are good. And companies like Palantir and Mithril are easily classified on this axis. The Alarmist suggests that Thiel’s works reflect “Saruman’s hubris,” a “Dwarf-like lust for minerals,” and misplaced “confidence in the inevitable greatness of the Men of the West,” á la Denethor, the doomed steward of Gondor.

The fact that Thiel can be easily compared to the series’ obvious villains suggests he doesn’t share Tolkien’s worldview. And to my eyes, the man does most resemble Saruman, the evil wizard who allies himself with the evil King. (And cuts down ancient forests for an unwanted industrial revolution. And sells personal data to an undemocratic secret police force…)

What does stretch credulity is the fact that such a figure would align himself with the losers on purpose. Because—spoiler alert—the baddies fail.

We could say Thiel is a bad fan, a bad reader, and a bad guy, and just leave it at that. But there is another possibility. Maybe we’re reading Middle Earth wrong.

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Last winter in Dissent, Gerry Canavan, who teaches a class on Tolkien at Marquette University, considered Lord of the Rings from a bird’s eye view.

Enlisting none but the OG critical theorist Fredric Jameson—who once called Tolkien’s world one of “reactionary nostalgia”—Canavan noted that Middle Earth is “immersed in racism (the superiority of the fair and noble elves, the inferiority of the brutish, mongrel orcs), colonialism and imperialism (the return of the king means the restoration of empire), and deeply retrograde sexism (with a core cast of characters that is overwhelmingly male).

There is also a generalized suspicion of democracy, cities, modernization, progress, cultural relativism, and materialism in favor of monarchism, agrarianism, stasis, fantasies of good versus evil, and a traditionalism that at times borders on religious fundamentalism. ..The Lord of the Rings is a series obsessed with ruins, bloodlines, the divine right of aristocrats, and a sense of history as a tragic, endless fall from grace.

By these lights, it does make sense that conservatives with kingly aspirations—men like Thiel, and his fellow Tolkien-lover/protege, JD Vance—would gravitate toward the series. Which is not to lay blame on the author so much as the fantasy genre itself, which so often deals in restoration.

So, maybe the man can close read. But I, another determined super-fan, can still share my leftist rebuttal. Samwise Gamgee is a working class hero. The ent revolution is green-coded. Éowyn is a feminist. And the whole series is anti-war.

But this is to circle both the problem and the appeal of a black and white moral universe: if it always comes down to baddie vs. goodie, we can crush out complication. What I can’t use, I must ignore. There’s a war on, after all.

Though Canavan considers “the dreaded possibility that Vance and his ilk are right about Tolkien,” he also makes a case for the series’ endurance. After all, the book cannot choose how it’s interpreted. And those beloved characters supposedly “spend the next century trying to figure out just what the War of the Ring actually meant.”

The fallible hobbits and wizards join history; so must Peter. So must we.

I guess it’s as Tolkien himself never said. “The chances, the changes, are all ours to make.”