The Fellowship of the Ring

1,317 words

At one minute past midnight on Wednesday, December 19th, 2001, I was one of hundreds of people assembled in several sold-out theaters to see the Atlanta opening of Lord of the Rings. I was astonished that hundreds of people had gathered to watch a three-hour movie starting after midnight. Surely most of these people had to be at their jobs the next morning! But, judging from their reactions as they streamed out, none of them were disappointed.

The audience was overwhelmingly White and young. The sexes were equally represented. I was impressed with how many attractive, healthy, confident people were there. Some Tolkien fanatics were dressed in costumes. There was a real feeling of community and a lot of good-natured chatter. Apparent strangers struck up conversations about the books and their expectations for the film.

But when the movie started, the whole audience sat in rapt silence. There was no fidgeting, no whispering, and not a lot of crinkling and crunching. There were some tears and sniffles later, but they were no distraction, as I was crying too. I have never experienced such a civilized and attentive audience. This is a tribute to the film.
Lord of the Rings is one of the finest movies I have ever seen. I urge every White nationalist to see it.

I need not comment on the details of the plot. Suffice it to say that it illustrates the most serious of all themes: The fight of good against evil — in the world and in the individual soul. It has been years since I read the novels, but the film told the story as far as I remember it. One purist complained about some departures from writ. But by the end he was sold nonetheless. Still, I pitied him, because, in my ignorance and forgetfulness, I was capable of enjoying the movie without reservation. (My attachment to writ prevented me from appreciating the greatness of David Lynch’s version of Dune until years after its release.)

I found myself moved to tears in many places. Not just because of sad events in the story, but because this movie is such a magnificent epitome of the greatness of our race and civilization that it underscores all that we have lost. The novels epitomize our Nordic myths. The Gothic and Celtic and Nordic sets and costumes epitomize Northern European architecture and decorative arts. The actors epitomize the beauties of the different varieties of our race, from the elegantly Nordic (but slightly androgynous) Elves played by Cate Blanchett, Liv Tyler, Hugo Weaving, and Orlando Bloom — to the spare, wizened Wizards played by Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee — to the magnificently brave and virile Humans played by Viggo Mortensen and Sean Bean — to the more squat and four-square types, the Dwarves (played by John Rhys-Davies) and the Hobbits (played by Elijah Wood, Ian Holm, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd, and Dominic Monaghan). I can’t recall a movie with more pairs of luminous blue-eyes (Elijah Wood’s and Cate Blanchett’s in particular). The movie itself, so magnificently directed by Peter Jackson, gives you a glimpse of what our cinema could have been like were it not controlled by an alien and hostile race. One cannot, of course, avoid involving these parasites in the production of a film, but the content of Lord of the Rings is entirely devoid of their corrupting ideas and influence.

Another outstanding feature of this film are the magnificent landscapes of New Zealand. No wonder the English coveted this land so much. They arrived at the other end of the Earth to find a land that encompasses all the different climates and landscapes of Northern Europe and the British Isles.

I suspect that the destroyers of our race and civilization will sell this movie as a multiculturalist, multiracialist fable — a parable of how the different races of the Fellowship can work together for a common goal. There is even a hint of miscegenation. But I do not think that this is a proper interpretation.

Here is my hypothesis. The different races of Tolkien’s Fellowship, like those of Wagner’s Ring and the myths on which both Tolkien and Wagner draw, represent different aspects of the human soul. The Elves and Wizards appear to correspond to aspects of the higher cognitive faculties of the soul. The Elves are intuitive, wise, and self-conscious. The Wizards do not embody wisdom, but technical-instrumental rationality that can be used either for good or ill, wisdom or folly. The Humans correspond to the spirited, warlike, competitive, and honorable part of the soul. The Dwarves correspond to the appetitive part of the soul, the producer-consumer. (The Dwarves are initially dismissed as allies in the quest because they are materialistic and self-centered rather than idealistic and concerned with higher goods.) The Hobbits appear to correspond to childlike innocence and naivete, which opens them to the wisdom of nature, characteristics they share with Siegfried.

The dynamics of the Ring Fellowship are thus an allegory for the dynamics of the soul. The great moral and existential question of Tolkien and Wagner — and of Plato and ultimately the whole Indo-European mythological tradition — is: What is the proper ordering of the soul, the proper fellowship of its parts?

If the races of the Fellowship represent different aspects of the European racial soul, what are we to make of the other races in the story? The chief villain is the Dark Lord Sauron, a devil — perhaps the Devil — who seeks to rule the world with the Ring of Power, a golden band forged in the furnaces of Mount Doom. As in Wagner, the Ring represents technology, the primal forces of nature transformed into a tool of human power, enslaving the higher aspects of the human soul (reason, honor) to the lower (greed, fear). The Dark Lord’s empire is Capitalism. The quest of the Fellowship is to destroy the Ring, to return its power to nature, to liberate the higher faculties of the soul from the thrall of the lower, to liberate nature from technological mastery, to annihilate Capitalism.

The servants of the Dark Lord are the wizard Saruman, the nine Ringwraiths (former kings of men), the Orcs, and the Uruk-Hai. Saruman and the Ringwraiths are traitorous members of the races of the Fellowship. But who are the Orcs, the hideous, greedy, treacherous, squat, squabbling servants of the Dark Lord, who feast like maggots on the corpse of murdered nature, who swarm like cockroaches through the bowels of the Earth? They are Tolkien’s equivalent of Wagner’s Niebelungen, who are an allegorical representation of the Jews. And then there are the Uruk-Hai — the tall, muscular, aggressive, stupid, black-skinned soldiers of the Dark Lord — spawned and gestated in mud, and unleashed by Sauron and the Orcs to enslave and exterminate the fair races of the Fellowship.

As my companion and I drove away into the sprawling urban hell of Atlanta, I wondered aloud: “How can people watch a movie like that and then return to this without feeling profoundly alienated? How can they see such magnificent natural landscapes and such beautiful, organic buildings — and then feel at home in this tacky, plastic cityscape? How can they see such serious, noble, idealistic people — and then watch Friends and Will and Grace? How can they see such magnificent specimens of the White race — and then contentedly rub elbows with Negroes, Mestizos, and Jews?”

If more people took Tolkien’s world to heart, this world would be finished.
Thus it is a veritable miracle that this movie was made in today’s culture. The Orcs will surely recognize the threat it poses. But there is nothing they can do now to prevent the rest of the trilogy from being made and released, for Peter Jackson made all three films at the same time!

See this movie for a glimpse, here and now, of the kind of White culture we are working to create in the future.

VNN, December 20, 2001