On 22 September, Italian actor Pino Insegno (who dubbed Viggo Mortensen in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy) introduced Giorgia Meloni before she closed the right-wing coalition’s electoral campaign in Rome by adapting Aragorn’s speech from The Return of the King. A very uncomfortable feeling touched all Italian Tolkienites who do not identify with the post-fascist appropriation of the British author.

The history of this appropriation by the Italian far-right started in the 1970s. The Lord of The Rings was first translated into Italian in 1971. In the context of the Years of Lead, the ‘grandfather’ of Brothers of Italy, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), joined in with the efforts of the rising Nouvelle Droite, the New Right cultural and political movement, and spotted in the traditionalist elements of Tolkien’s work a source of cultural and political inspiration, leading to the launch of the first Hobbit Camp in 1977. This experience also led to the launch of reviews like Èowyn, named after the princess of Rohan, by the women activists of the MSI.

‘Everyone can love Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings is one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century,’ argues Loredana Lipperini, author and radio presenter of the literature programme Fahrenheit on Radio 3, at the national broadcaster RAI. ‘We are stuck in a literary-speaking Marxist critique that finds itself pushing back on anything that does not adhere to realism. A great part of that critique, for Italian intellectuals, is the view that all Fantastic literature, from fantasy to horror to sci-fi, is either something for children or something belonging to the Right.’ Biography also has a part in how these works have been received. Tolkien was a Catholic, and a discreet supporter of Francisco Franco’s Nationalist front in the Spanish Civil War—but also someone who refused to have his work translated in German under the Third Reich, when the publisher Rütten & Loening asked him to certify his Aryan ancestry and to confirm he had no Jewish origins.

As Lipperini underlines, there has been a generational shift in terms of literary critique on the Left, as the work and research of authors like Wu Ming 4 proves. But how did a story about different races coming together despite their differences against a common enemy, with an unlikely hero, Frodo Baggins, who loves his pints of beer, getting stoned with his pipe-weed, and the peace of nature, get turned into a symbol of far-right and racist narratives?

The reception of Tolkien has been very different from country to country, something echoed by Craig Franson, Associate Professor teaching British literature, drama, and writing at La Salle University in Philadelphia, and co-host of the podcast American ID. ‘In Britain in the 1980s there was a really strong critique, also a little earlier with Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson and some others, who saw Tolkien in that way (as a fascist or a cryptofascist). But in the United States there was a different view of Tolkien, partly because he came out in the 60s in this big hippy moment and so got adopted by the hippies in 1965,’ explains Franson. ‘The period from 1965 to 1971 is his real pop culture moment, and then over the next five or ten years, he dips in popularity and disappears again from the public sphere.’

The watershed moment came with the release of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Fellowship of the Rings premiered in December 2001, and this Tolkienite adaptation was intertwined with the political and cultural conversation at the height of the war on terror. The Tolkien pop culture global momentum in the US also opened the way, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for interest in Tolkien’s work from the US far-right, expressed through websites like the hate site Stormfront, as Franson explains. ‘Stormfront conversations started talking all about the war in the Middle East and Jewish conspiracies, and they developed, portraying Jews as the Nazgûl and calling people of colour Orcs. This was developed on Stormfront, and over time became a norm across social media, so when Breitbart was launched in 2007, it was full of that language.’

The recent racist backlash experienced by Rings of Power actors Ismael Cruz Cordova, Sophie Nomvete, Lenny Henry, and Cynthia Addai-Robinson finds its roots there and it goes, in fact, way beyond the concept of toxic fandom. Franson draws a parallel between the US alt-right and Giorgia Meloni. ‘For me, the real top line of the story is that fascist activists are once again using popular culture to create big recruitment drives, and it works for them every time. Meloni is kind of the poster child for this: she was the person that they imagined; she is like the best-case scenario that the people who put together Hobbit Camp imagined in the first place.

‘She was a kid who loved Tolkien, who dressed up in Hobbit clothes and went to schools to recruit people to fascism, and she did that having been born during the terrorism waves [of the 1970s]. There were over 1,000 people killed during the Years of Lead, mostly by far-right terrorism, including the Bologna massacre in 1980 [85 dead, 200 wounded, the greatest massacre of civilians in Italy since World War II]. In the wake of all of that violence, she thought it was a good idea to join a neo-fascist movement and dress up like a Hobbit and go to schools to recruit.’ Another point stressed by Franson is how little these far-right fans and figures have changed their strategies—to keep non-Christians, queer people, and people of colour out of ‘their’ Middle-Earth.

Part of the success of the far-right in keeping a kind of cultural hegemony over the fantastic genre is also due, according to Silvia Costantino, editor at the Italian book publisher Effequ, to the confusing melting pot of fantasy themes and influences, which tend to throw Tolkien, Michael Ende (Brothers of Italy’s national gathering is called ‘Atreju’, after the central character in The Neverending Story), and Norse myths all into the same cauldron. As Constantino points out, ‘there is the element of tradition, with the Hobbit Camps, the Éowyn magazine… It’s quite easy to understand why Giorgia Meloni ended up reading The Lord of the Rings and interpreting it in that way. Then there’s the element of the feminine figure. The character of Éowyn features strong revolutionary elements.’

Tolkien’s works can be seen as a blank canvas. Through an internationalist lens it’s possible to see different races coming together; for the far-right, Orcs and Southrons are the fictional targets of their vile racism. Regardless, the far-right takeover of Tolkien and the fantastic has continued for too long. It’s time for a fairer, greener, more equal journey into the fantastic.