Bruce Ramsey / Times editorial columnist
The implicit conservatism of 'Lord of the Rings'

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John Rhys-Davies, the actor who plays the dwarf Gimli in "Lord of the Rings," was in Seattle the other day. Rhys-Davies, a Welshman, had said "Rings" speaks to the defense of the West and its values. This outburst of political incorrectness delighted the folks at Seattle's Discovery Institute, who invited him here to do it again.

And he did. At Town Hall, he recalled his father saying in the 1950s that the next great war would be with Islam: "I want to go back and say to him, 'You were right.' "

I take a different meaning, less concrete and perhaps less obvious.

J.R.R. Tolkien's saga is set in the imaginary world of Middle-earth. It begins with the finding of a Ring of Power. The Ring cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of its maker, a malign power who would use it to dominate all of Middle-earth.

When "Rings" came out in the mid-1950s, some took it as an allegory of World War II, with the Ring standing for the atomic bomb. Tolkien denied it; his book is not a political commentary like George Orwell's "Animal Farm," in which one of the pigs might have been named Trotsky.

But "Rings" does reflect its author's politics in a general way. The Ring offers power over people. That is political power. The bearers of the Ring do not wield this power for some social good, or even their own defense. They decide to destroy it.

Hostility to political power as such is an old view, and was held by the American founders. In a letter to his son in 1943, Tolkien identified with the most radical form of that view: "My political beliefs lean more and more to Anarchy... ," he wrote. "The most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."

That volcanic word, "anarchy," combined with Tolkien's obvious distaste for mechanized industry, seems to associate him with the black-masked WTO window-smashers. But Tolkien was no revolutionary. If he could not live under zero government — and he could not — he said he would choose a king "whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways or race-horses."

The creatures created in Tolkien's image were the Hobbits. As Brian Rosebury notes in his book "Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon" (Palgrave, 2003), the Hobbit homeland is anarchistic in that it has "virtually no government apart from an elected mayor whose main duty is to preside at banquets." But it is a Tory anarchism. The Hobbits are property-owning farmers. They are rustics, wary of out-landish foreigners. They smoke pipes, drink ale and eat stew.

The Hobbits who undertake the quest are not assigned to do it, and officially they represent no one. It is their choice. In Tolkien's world, writes Discovery fellow John West Jr. in "Celebrating Middle Earth" (Inkling, 2002), "We have genuine moments of moral freedom, and those moments are critical for determining our individual destinies."

"Lord of the Rings" is an implicitly conservative book (which is a big reason why the fellows at Discovery like it). There is no overt religion in it, but its author was Catholic and wrote to a priest that he considered it a Catholic book. He infused his story with themes of perseverance, loyalty, sacrifice, redemption, mercy and hope. The book has not a molecule of moral relativism in it, and one would be hard-pressed to find any satire, cynicism or irony. It is fantasy that takes itself seriously.

All of this puts it outside the mainstream of modern English literature, a source from which Tolkien said he had "not been nourished." No matter; a book inspired by a love of Old English and the Norse sagas has sold more than 100 million copies and now replicates that success in film.

The Marxists and deconstructionists of English Lit may ignore "Lord of the Rings," and a few of them denounce it as racist (the marauding Uruk-hai in Peter Jackson's movies have dark skin anddreadlocks), but it remains one of the great stories.

How to apply it to current events is a different thing. Sauron as Osama, Saddam as Saruman and Aragorn as —

Enough. It is not "Animal Farm."

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com

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