Right-Wing Rings of Power

Libertarian tech moguls and conservative politicians have taken inspiration from The Lord of The Rings. Did J.R.R. Tolkien have a free-market message?

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FOR MOST LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy fans, hobbits are the portly folk of Middle-earth who live in homes carved out of hillsides in "the Shire" and spend their lives smoking pipe-weed, singing songs and drinking ale. But some influential real-life people see hobbit life in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth free from government intervention and overreach as close to societal perfection.

Paypal co-founder and early Trump ally Peter Thiel, for instance, spent his teenage years reading HFELD and rereading The Lord of the Rings. Palantir Technologies, the multibillion dollar data mining and surveillance firm he cofounded, gets its name from "palantiri," indestructible "seeing stones" in Tolkien's books; its Palo Alto offices are known informally as "the Shire." Other Thiel companies have Tolkien-inspired names like Valar Ventures and Rivendell One LLC.

Andy Ellis, an information security expert at the cloud security firm Orca Security and himself a lifelong Tolkien fan, says, "I've always thought Palantir was the most foolish name for a company." In Tolkien's books, the palantiri corrupt nearly all who use them. When the good wizard Saruman uses one to spy on the peoples of Middle-earth, he is drawn in by its power and ensnared by the Dark Lord Sauron, who uses the seeing stone to get the wise man to serve him.