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When Donald Trump selected JD Vance as his running mate, he elevated the first millennial who will appear on a presidential ticket. That makes Vance the first politician who came of age during the Iraq War and the Great Recession, an internet native whose political rise coincided with the development of a new group of conservatives what would become the New Right.
But perhaps Vance’s most millennial trait is just how geeky he is about Lord of the Rings. The trilogy of novels has been a longstanding nerd favorite for decades, but it became the center of culture during Vance’s high school years thanks to Peter Jackson’s movies.
Vance himself has pointed to Tolkien’s high fantasy epics as a window into understanding his worldview. In an archived episode of the defunct “Grounded” podcast from 2021 that no longer shows up in podcast feeds, Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, who sat next to Vance in Trump’s friends and family box at the convention Tuesday evening, asked Vance to name his favorite author.
“I would have to say Tolkien,” Vance said. “I’m a big Lord of the Rings guy, and I think, not realizing it at the time, but a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up.” He added of Tolkien’s colleague: “Big fan of C.S. Lewis — really sort of like that era of English writers. I think they were really interesting. They were grappling, in part because of World War II, with just very big problems.”
In the books, the future of civilization rests on the search and eventual destruction of The One Ring. While Frodo and Gollum jostle over the singular ring, true fans know there are a total of 20 rings of power. Vance is apparently among those ranks, as the venture capital firm he founded in 2019 is named Narya, named after one of those other rings that Gandalf wears. Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel similarly named his company Palantir after the crystal ball used by Saruman in Lord of the Rings, and Vance has invested in the defense startup Anduril, named after Aragorn’s sword.
“By the time of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Narya has been entrusted to Gandalf to resist the corrupting influence of evil, preserve the world from decay, and give strength to its wielder,” said Tolkien-head John Shelton, who when not engaging in fantasy literature is policy director for Advancing American Freedom, founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. “Gandalf, unlike the other great powers in Lord of the Rings, cared for the hobbits and other lowly people of Middle-Earth, and so it is unsurprising that Vance would see himself as a kind of Gandalf, caring for the forgotten people of his hometown, keeping a watchful eye on them against the corrupting effects of the world.”
It’s not too surprising that Lord of the Rings made a strong impression on Vance. The three films, released between 2001 and 2003 while he was in high school, grossed $2.9 billion at the box office and earned 28 Academy Award nominations and 17 wins. Luke Burgis, author of a book about René Girard (another of Vance’s intellectual heroes) and Catholic University of America professor, said he suspects “Vance’s appreciation of Tolkien is not unrelated to his conversion to Catholicism in 2019. Of the many ways that Tolkien’s work exemplifies the Catholic imagination, one is the relationship between the visible and the invisible. I think it’s fair to say that Vance believes there is real spiritual evil in this world, and it can become embodied in rites and rituals.” (At a closed-door speech in September 2021, Vance said, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society.)
Vance likely took away from Tolkien “an apocalyptic frame of mind” Burgis told me, a final and all-encompassing battle between good and evil. (A spokesperson for Vance did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
Though he worked on it much of his life, Tolkien wrote the mythology of Middle Earth when he served in the trenches in World War I. After the success of The Hobbit, he began work on a follow-up story in that same world and wrote much of the Rings novels while his home country Britain was fighting in World War II. The books have a definite anti-war streak. In the Two Towers, the second of the trilogy, Tolkien wrote: “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
Vance has said his own time in the Marines deployed in Iraq was formative to his isolationist, dovish approach to foreign policy. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” Vance once recounted. “[I saw] that promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”
But his fandom also is in tension with some of Tolkien’s ideas about how nation-states should approach the outside world. The books are, in many ways, anti-isolationist. Frodo wants to ignore the ill tidings and stay home but eventually realizes that the Shire isn’t untouched by troubles elsewhere (like, say, NATO being pulled into defending Ukraine from Sauron Putin). In the end, Rohan, Gondor, the elves, ents and dwarves, all must band together and end their petty nationalist squabbles. Their lives are, they realize, interconnected.
Vance’s love of Lord of the Rings is of a piece with rightward nationalists abroad. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, used to cosplay as a hobbit. “I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” she has said, though unlike Vance she has supported aid to Ukraine.
Jessica Hooten Wilson, the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University, has taught Tolkien in her courses and spent time with Vance in 2019 at a conference focused on the Catholic writer Walker Percy. She told me Vance may have internalized the message that America, unlike Frodo, is not called to intervene abroad. “I think this is where Tolkien did not want his work called allegory because he didn’t want one way of reading his text,” she said. She added: “I would also hope that whoever is reading the Lord of the Rings and Walker Percy is willing to learn from it rather than to make it say what they want it to say.”
Rick Santorum, the former senator and two-time GOP presidential candidate, is a fellow Tolkien-pilled Catholic but he has different takeaways from Vance. He recounted to me this week how he has read Tolkien to his children. “I always dreamed I would get interviewed about Lord of the Rings,” Santorum told me.
“I’m a huge Tolkien fan,” he continued. “I’m also someone who believes that the message of Tolkien is that evil must be confronted. And so the idea is that well, we can wait until it comes to the Shire, but that is not a very good game plan. You gotta go to Mordor.”
All of this points to intellectual and spiritual tensions Vance still seems to be working out. “He’s been in office a year and a half. He’s never been greatly involved in politics before this,” Santorum said. “I suspect that this is one of the reasons Trump may have picked him: JD is a smart guy but is still a work in progress.”
Those close to Vance say he has been undergoing an awakening since he converted to Catholicism in 2019.
Conservative writer Rod Dreher, who Vance invited to his initiation to the faith in 2019 and was present for his first communion, told me that Vance “is thinking broadly about how all must join in the great struggle against darkness — there is no avoiding the struggle — and how God can use the humble and the lowborn to do great things.”
“Think about it: Who would have imagined that sad, scared little Ohio boy living in a wreck of a family would have come through it all, and risen to the gates of supreme political power? What might God be doing with him? J.D. Vance might be Frodo of the Hollers, a veritable hillbilly hobbit.”
