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At Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, rooms recently devoted to an exhibition of Picasso drawings now hold more curious relics: a 19th-century travel trunk emblazoned “M. Tolkien”; dictionaries of old English dialects; a paper-strewn writer’s desk and colourful drawings of hobbits, elves, orcs. There is even a “Lord of the Rings” pinball machine.
These objects are not an installation by an avant-garde conceptual artist, but rather part of a reverential homage to British writer JRR Tolkien from his adoring fans in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government, which sees his fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings, as an allegory for their own political ideology.
“Tolkien is an authentic and sincere conservative,” says culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano, who was behind the show, days before Meloni, activists from her Brothers of Italy party and ministers attended the opening. “He wanted to project the values of humanity, the spirit of sacrifice of the small against the Dark Lord.”
Tolkien, a tweedy Oxford don, famously disliked efforts to interpret Frodo’s quest to destroy the One Ring as a comment on real-world current affairs. Yet the Italian far-right — with whom Meloni cut her political teeth — sees in the epic tale a metaphor for its own battle to defend Italy’s culture against menacing outside forces, from migrants to Eurocrats in Brussels to international market forces.
“There is a fight going on in this globalised society between those like me — for whom people are citizens with rights and duties — and those who consider men as mere bar codes, consumers that have to stay passive towards the world,” Sangiuliano says.
Meloni has called The Lord of the Rings a “sacred text”, and her autobiography recounts how as a young member of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) — founded by Benito Mussolini’s surviving allies after the second world war — she and fellow activists dressed up as hobbits, elves and other characters to perform at children’s parties, as a form of both entertainment and outreach.
“For them [the activists], it is a representation of this clash between the simple and pure world that they long for, and the modern wasted world that we live in now — the world of globalisation, hypercapitalism, and racial and cultural mixing,” says Daniele Albertazzi, a politics professor at the University of Surrey.
The fantasy epic was published in Italy in the 1970s by a conservative publisher — with a preface by a philosopher admired in hard-right circles — after more established, left-leaning houses passed on a manuscript they deemed unlikely to resonate with ordinary Italians.
Young MSI activists, eager for a new vocabulary to discuss their ideas without reference to the discredited Mussolini, saw the story of the humble hobbits defending their idyllic shire from menacing outsiders as a symbol of their own struggle for legitimacy and influence. Such was the movement’s identification with the series that their political retreats in the 1970s and 1980s were called “Camp Hobbit”.
Entering politics in the 1990s, Meloni, whose favourite character is Frodo’s loyal companion Samwise Gamgee, attended weekly political discussion convened by “call of the horn of Boromir,” and sang folk songs about “the peoples and homelands” of Europe with a group called “The Fellowship of the Ring”.
Though Tolkien is still a far-right icon in the country today, not all his Italian fans share such views, which are also not represented in the exhibition. “A lot of people are using Tolkien for their own purposes,” says Giuseppe Pezzini, an Oxford university classics professor, who was a consultant for the exhibit. “Tolkien has a very fluid notion of identity. The idea is that you walk together even if you disagree with each other.”
Visiting the exhibition, which itself steers clear of politics, filmmaker Giorgio Clemente also scoffed at the idea that Tolkien advocated the defence of traditions against external influences, noting that in the tale creatures of all kinds work together for the mission’s success.
“Tolkien is without political colour,” he said. “It’s just a message of universality, of coexistence of all the possible races in the world.”