The thing about The Return of the King is that the king, well, returns. 

Despite his professed love for J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, David French seems to have missed this aspect of Tolkien’s conclusion to The Lord of the Rings. Writing for The New York Times, French grandly declares that “the proper interpretation of [Tolkien’s] work has geopolitical implications.” The impetus for his assertion is that the left has noticed that Tolkien’s books are popular on the right, especially among younger, post-liberal types. French is eager to show that these “New Right” Tolkien fans who “embrace[] state power as a means of fighting and winning the culture war” are “getting Tolkien wrong, and the way in which they are getting Tolkien wrong matters for all of us.”

French is correct that Tolkien’s tales are not just for the right. The Lord of the Rings is an exciting and deep story that has inspired and resonated with people from conservative intellectual Russell Kirk to rock stars such as Led Zeppelin and Rush. Tolkien’s stories do have deep themes that can be drawn out and analyzed, and French is eager to do so to use them as ammunition against Tolkien-loving conservative adversaries. But his efforts miss the mark.

He mistakenly equates the temptation of the Ring with power, asserting, “Throughout the story the ring calls out to the heroes, speaking to their hearts, telling them that only by claiming power can they defeat power. In a very real way, the will to power is the true enemy in Tolkien’s work. The identity of the villain … is less relevant than grasping after power.” French is not the first to equate the Ring with power, and the claim suits his argument — Don’t you see, the post-liberals who want to use government power in the culture war are just like the villains in the story? — but it is a false and lazy claim. 

It is untenable to equate the Ring simply with power. Tolkien did not write a story about why power is evil but about why domination is evil. To understand Tolkien, it is essential to distinguish between the two.

For example, at the end of the story, Aragorn does not renounce power and wander off into the wilderness to smoke pipeweed. He claims the throne and with it the power that is rightfully his — and he does so with none of the reluctance that Peter Jackson added to the film adaptation. Likewise, characters such as Gandalf and Galadriel do not renounce power as such — indeed, they have and use great power — but they do renounce a certain sort and use of power. 

What they reject is the domination that makes people into thralls and slaves. This evil, totalizing power is seen in how Sauron’s armies of orcs and monsters hesitate when their master’s will turns away from them and then collapse when he is defeated as the Ring is destroyed. The Dark Lord’s monstrous minions have been subsumed by his will, with only the evil men in his service appearing to have retained any real free will of their own.

The essence of domination is the attempt to elevate oneself to a godlike position and then impose one’s will to the point of obliterating the personhood of others. This is the sort of power the Ring offers and why it cannot be used for good, even by those who otherwise possess and deploy great power of their own.

Tolkien’s distinction between power and domination is clearly seen in God (known in Tolkien’s work as Eru Ilúvatar) being the ultimate power in Tolkien’s stories. God is, to be sure, only dimly seen in The Lord of the Rings but is explicitly present in the The Silmarillion, which French has read (and which Tolkien had wanted to publish alongside The Lord of the Rings). To simply say that power as such is evil and should be renounced would be blasphemy, implying that God is evil.

Tolkien invented a world with a Creator God, under whom there are many legitimate powers, from angels (Valar and Maiar) to kings with a divine right to rule, such as Aragorn. French appeals to this ordered cosmos in his insistence that we trust in more than ourselves, writing, “Here’s where Tolkien’s Christian faith is most evident. We are to reject the will to power because our triumph does not depend on our strength.” This is true but carries with it a multitude of implications that French has not reckoned with. 

After all, we can trust in something beyond our own strength only if there is something beyond our own strength. We can resist the call to do evil only if we can tell the difference between good and evil. Thus, Tolkien presents not only a world with a Creator but also a world with natural law, in which men (and elves and hobbits) are capable of discerning right from wrong and are accountable for their choices even without specific divine revelation. 

If this is also true of our world — and Tolkien certainly believed it was — then it is a vindication of the New Right Tolkien lovers whom French disdains. There is an intelligible moral order to our world too, even if we sometimes apprehend it imperfectly and partially. Furthermore, there are legitimate powers that have a duty to enforce this moral order, encouraging good and punishing evil. There are prudential limits, of course, due to human finitude and fallibility, but French does not want to debate where they should be, preferring instead to try to disqualify his opponents by accusing them of craving power (which, as Tolkien lovers, we are all supposed to agree is bad).

But French misunderstands Tolkien. Indeed, if anyone is disqualified on Tolkien’s terms, it is those such as French who reject natural law and the legitimate power of governments to make and enforce laws in accord with it. Unlike French, Tolkien did not urge us to embrace a relativistic legal pluralism that cannot distinguish between good and evil, beautiful and ugly, God and Satan. 

Put simply, Aragorn would not have tolerated Uruk-hai story hour.