Two decades after "The Return of the King," we still remember Aragorn's warning about US militarism

J.R.R. Tolkien foresaw that his intentions would always be misunderstood. He addressed that concern in the 1966 second edition release of “The Lord of the Rings” via a new foreword clarifying his “prime motive” being “the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.”

He did not intend for the story to hold any inner meaning or “message,” calling it neither allegorical nor topical. “. . . I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence,” Tolkien added. “I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

Tolkien was a realist, so in the same way that he wrote his trilogy and “The Hobbit” without much expectation that it would be read by many, let alone become a seminal work of literature, he probably didn't assume anyone would read this explanation. In his estimation, it may be enough that it exists to contradict future generations' misguided aggressors from claiming his heroes – elves, dwarves and men led by Aragorn, son of Arathorn, represented them.

Whether Viggo Mortensen had Tolkien’s words on his mind during the press junket for the 2002 release of “The Two Towers,” the second movie in Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth adventure series, is unclear. But his stance on America’s post-9/11 military response to terrorists destroying the Twin Towers in New York and attacking the Pentagon was plain. Mortensen wore a t-shirt on which he wrote “No More Blood for Oil” during the “Two Towers” press junket, stoking furor amid the conservative right and, well, a lot of other people. Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States gave rise to a strain of nationalism that viewed questioning the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the escalating probability of war in Iraq as un-American.

When “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” hit theaters on Dec. 10, 2001 – three months after the deadliest strike on American soil since Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor – some Americans cast themselves as versions of Mortensen’s hero and “terrorists” as the orcs, goblins and Uruk-hai. (That word is in quotes because depending on who was invoking it, it could refer to Al Qaeda, the Taliban or if the person is an Islamophobe, generic brown people from some Eastern land.)

Mortensen’s statement shirt was his way of pushing back against that in 2002, provided an interviewer asked him about it. Charlie Rose did on the Dec. 3, 2002 episode of his show, where Mortensen was joined by Jackson and co-star Elijah Wood.

“You're obviously making a political statement with your t-shirt,” Rose said.

“I wouldn't normally,” Mortensen replied, explaining that it’s a reaction to seeing the attempt to view the movies as allegories for the United States’ role in the world at that time.

“If you're going to compare them, then you should get it right,” the actor said, “. . . I don't think that ‘The Two Towers’ or Tolkien's writing or Peter's work or our work has anything to do with the United States' foreign ventures at this time. And it upsets me to hear that in a way. And it upsets me even more that questioning what's going on right now, what the United States is doing, is considered treasonous really: ‘How dare you say that? How un-American of you.’"

By the time “The Return of the King” came out one year after that, the U.S. had expanded its military operations to Iraq, sending in ground troops in March 2003 with President George W. Bush claiming “Mission Accomplished” in May. This was a folly, we know now, although U.S. forces would capture deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13, days before the final ‘Lord of the Rings” film hit theaters.  

Leading up to that moment and afterward were many civilian bombings and insurgent attacks killing American troops. Americans, meanwhile, were more divided on their views of the conflict, with even centrists starting to see the truth in the point Mortensen made to Rose and others.

“I don't think that the civilians on the ground in those countries look at us in the way that maybe Europeans did at the end of World War II, waving flags in the streets,” Mortenson told Rose. “I think that they see the U.S. government as Saruman.”

Meeting “The Return of the King” 20 years later with those words echoing in our memory is a sobering way to mark an anniversary, which we officially passed on Sunday. Jackson’s movies ushered in a new era of mining fantasy properties, with Amazon spending a fortune to corner the market on all things Tolkien. In the wake of “Game of Thrones'” global success, along with Marvel’s neoliberal might-makes-right fantasies and the “Star Wars” resurgence and expansion, Tolkien’s story of outnumbered champions of light somehow triumphing over darkness seems simpler. This is as he may have wanted, one supposes.

Still, as he said, one can’t help applying to circumstances the story lays out to what we’re living through today. Tolkien viewed unchecked power as dangerous in anyone’s hands — hence our witnessing Gandalf, Galadriel and Aragorn be tested by the One Ring’s temptation. Our current president and everyone before him would have failed.

This is another point Tolkien makes in his foreword, explaining that his legendary war bears no resemblance to World War II, which many assumed he was allegorizing despite his soul-scarring experience fighting in the First World War. If that were the case, he explained, the Ring would not have been destroyed but seized and used against Sauron and all his allies while Saruman would have forged his own ring and challenged the new dominant power.

“In that conflict,” Tolkien concludes, “both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.” 

Mortensen viewed some version of that at play in the world of 2002, and eventually 2003. “The people who are terrified at Helms Deep, who are outnumbered in this incredible violence and desire to control — to destroy — the people of Rohan and the rest of the free peoples of Middle-earth, and to control their wills, to control their infrastructure — or destroy it — that's what we're doing in these countries,” he said. “That's really what we're doing, unfortunately. I'm not saying to anyone, to you, or to you, or to you: ‘This is what you should believe.’ I'm just saying, why not ask the question: ‘Why are we doing this?’"

“The Return of the King” opens with a sequence explaining how Smeagol (Andy Serkis) is seduced by the ring and twisted into a shrunken, scraping husk called Gollum. Fundamentally that character’s story is not one of redemption but pity for the smaller beings that corruption perverts and crushes in its quest for dominance. And his creator would warn us against viewing him as representative of anything.

But one can never resist viewing the symmetry in a tale like this regardless, which Tolkien acknowledged linking applicability to the reader’s will. Middle-earth’s defenders rout Sauron’s forces when they march on Gondor's seat of power Minas Tirith, by banding together and calling on ancestral spirits to save them. The few that are left after that depleting battle march on Mordor’s gates, ready to die, only to be saved when the darkness collapses around them, destroyed as Sauron’s power dies with the Ring. The good guy are left standing unopposed on a small sliver of land.

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There are many ways to cast modern geopolitical equivalents to these characters, which we’d caution against and cannot be helped. Not in the way that, say, an artist in 2023 could prevent their art from being misappropriated for uses that contradict the beliefs they purport to hold.

“The Return of the King” and the rest of Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy are part of film culture’s marrow, mimicked and built upon by other filmmakers that came after, similarly to the way that Tolkien provided modern fantasy’s architecture. It’s inspirational for many reasons, and frequently emotionally and politically co-opted for the wrong ones.

But as Mortensen said in 2003 when another interviewer asked what audiences should expect from “The Return of the King,” “It is a story about something simple, but difficult to find: compassion . . . Merely by treating the people around you with respect and compassion, you are already doing a big step.”

He continued, “Sauron or the American government, or the English government, or the Danish government, it doesn’t matter, they want you to feel as if you could not control anything. The film’s message is that a small person can change everything. Even if in 20 years the special effects will seem outdated, people will still feel that there is a certain integrity and dedication in the story.”

That’s a truth many can agree on. The rest is beyond the artists’ control, no matter what they insist.