With Ohio Senator JD Vance officially confirmed as former President Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election, multiple mainstream media outlets are voicing concern that his longtime fascination with J.R.R Tolkien’s seminal fantasy trilogy Lord of the Rings is indicative of far-right ideologies.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow raised the first objection to Vance’s literary proclivities on the third day of the Republican National Convention when Vance provided the closing speech for the evening. During her coverage of the event, Maddow noted that both Vance and Republican megadonor Peter Thiel, who previously mentored Vance before he entered politics, are fond of naming companies after things from Lord of the Rings.
“Lord of the Rings is a sort of favorite cosmos for naming things and cultural references for a lot of far-right and alt-right figures, both in Europe and the United States. Peter Thiel names all these things after Tolkien figures in places like his company Palantir, for example,” Maddow said.
“Like his mentor, like Peter Thiel, who had given him all his jobs in the world, Mr. Vance also when he founded his own venture capital firm with help from Peter Thiel, named it after a Lord of the Rings thing. He called it Narya, N-A-R-Y-A, which you can remember because it’s ‘Aryan,’ but you move the ‘N’ to the front,” she continued. “Apparently that word has something to do with elves and rings from the Lord of the Rings series, I don’t know.”
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Despite Maddow’s attempts to link the word Narya to the racial category Aryan, fans of Tolkien lore were quick to point out that the term refers to the Ring of Fire worn by the wizard Gandalf. The magical item grants its wielder resistance to the weariness of time and evokes hope and courage in others. Vance’s own Narya is a venture capital firm based in his home state of Ohio—and neither the company nor the magical ring bears any affiliation with White supremacy.
POLITICO likewise hit on Vance’s appreciation for Lord of the Rings, describing how the first Millennial vice-presidential candidate grew up during the height of popularity for Peter Jackson’s early 2000s film adaptations of the books.
If you really want to understand J.D. Vance’s politics, you’ll need to crack open a little-known work called The Lord of the Rings. https://t.co/Wv1vkwDlY5
— POLITICO (@politico) July 19, 2024
The outlet cites Vance’s 2021 appearance on the “Grounded” podcast with Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), during which the two lawmakers discussed their favorite authors.
“I’m a big Lord of the Rings guy, and I think, not realizing it at the time, but a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up,” Vance said, also giving a mention to one of Tolkien’s most famous literary colleagues. “Big fan of C.S. Lewis — really sort of like that era of English writers. I think they were really interesting. They were grappling, in part because of World War II, with just very big problems.”
According to POLITICO, “Vance’s love of Lord of the Rings is of a piece with rightward nationalists abroad.” However, “his fandom also is in tension with some of Tolkien’s ideas about how nation-states should approach the outside world.”
As conservative writer Rod Dreher, a personal friend of the senator, told the outlet, Vance “is thinking broadly about how all must join in the great struggle against darkness — there is no avoiding the struggle — and how God can use the humble and the lowborn to do great things.”
“Think about it: Who would have imagined that sad, scared little Ohio boy living in a wreck of a family would have come through it all, and risen to the gates of supreme political power?” he said. “What might God be doing with him? JD Vance might be Frodo of the Hollers, a veritable hillbilly hobbit.”
Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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