I‘ve never made a secret that I do a lot of reading. Indeed, I’ve done rather the opposite, and there’ve been a few times that I’ve done it to such excess as has prompted people to punch me in the face. I’ve also not made a secret that I’ve read Tolkien and that I’ve read about Tolkien; it shows up in many entries to this webspace, but perhaps most emphatically here, here, here, and here. I’ve got other stuff I’m doing on the subject, as well; I’ll discuss that more later. It should come as no surprise, then, that when I saw “Tolkien’s Deplorable Cultus” by Robert T. Tally, Jr., pop up on one of my social media feeds, I was interested, and I read it. And, given my history of such things, it should not be a surprise that I feel the need to engage with the piece by responding to it.

Tally’s central argument is that Tolkien’s Legendarium is amenable to a Marxist reading that can be used to at least partially counteract the vocal hypercapitalist / neofascist actors and their supporters that are appropriating the Legendarium and, by extension, fantasy literature as a genre. For him, “Fantasy is fundamentally the literature of alterity, a means of empowering the imagination to think of the world differently,” and that a Marxist reading of Tolkien’s work and the genre for which that work is the dominant, guiding example has value in “exposing its ideological limits while also limning its potential for helping us to imagine radical alternatives.” Although some might have problems with Tally’s specific framing, I think he is correct; the text does stand multiple interpretations, fantasy is necessarily concerned with alterity and thus inherently offers access to other ways of thinking (and perhaps being), and pointing out the limitations of a thing does not preclude identifying and making good use of its potentials.

Tally does well to note the limitations of his proposed reading, commenting at some length on popular and academic receptions of Tolkien’s work as reinforcing hierarchies along racial and what might well be called ethnic lines. I am not sure that the associated contention that fantasy literature at large is thus received is accurate–and Tally also voices some frustration of it in a list of fantasy authors whose politics are decidedly out of step with such a world-view–although it is certainly the case that a great many fantasy authors echo, follow, emulate, or parrot Tolkien to a greater or lesser extent, such that the Tolkienian tradition of fantasy literature remains dominant in English-language texts. (It might in others, as well, but I am not sufficiently proficient in other languages to look into it at this point. It might also be argued that I’m not sufficiently proficient in English to know what I’m talking about, although I think it would be a harder case to make.) Tally also does well to point out those features of Tolkien’s writings that seem to animate vocal hypercapitalist / neofascist actors and their supporters in their seizing upon the Legendarium as support for their own positions, even if there are places in the article where I’d be comforted by seeing some more specific citations. And, on a more personal note, I do appreciate Tally’s identification of the inconsistencies in the actors’ stated positions, the ways in which what they claim to value fails to align with what they act as if they value; none of us is completely consistent, especially over time, but there are levels and levels of irony.

(As an aside, I do not like the citations provided. The information’s fine, so far as I can tell; I just like to have citations where I can see them. But that’s more an issue of the platform than the person standing on it; I’ve commented on such things before.)

Correspondences or resonances with other readings I have done come to mind as I further consider Tally’s article. For example, when Tally remarks on the seeming reliance of the vocal hypercapitalist / neofascist actors and their supporters on Jackson’s films for their understanding of Tolkien’s works, I was put in mind of Sturtevant’s Middle Ages in Popular Imagination. I also found myself in mind of a number of pieces by Helen Young when reading Tally’s discussion of the embedded racial hierarchies at work in Tolkien, including but not limited to commentaries early on in Travels in Genre and Medievalism. The series “Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages” on The Public Medievalist also came to mind for me (partly because of overlaps, I admit). I understand well that a journal article can only take in so much at a time, however.

I think I will have some use for Tally’s piece in some work of my own that I’m doing (again, I’ll talk more about it later). I think I may have some use for his ideas in other work that I’m doing; given my predilections, I have to wonder how Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings or Soldier Son works (and I am going to get to those, I promise) would work under such an interpretive rubric. As with so many other things, though, that’s a “someday” project. I’ve got more than enough to do right now, and there’s never as much time to do it as might be best.

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