A new Literary Hub essay by Brittany Allen asks whether Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel is a “bad fan” of Tolkien. Thiel has named his companies after Middle-earth landmarks—Palantir, Mithril Capital, Valar Ventures—and claims to have read The Lord of the Rings at least a dozen times. But Allen questions whether Thiel’s appropriation of the Legendarium reflects genuine understanding—or profound misreading.
The essay’s argument: Thiel loves the battles and elven poise while staying blind to Tolkien’s critique of power and industrialization. In Tolkien’s moral universe, Allen writes, Thiel’s ventures resemble “Saruman’s hubris” more than the Fellowship’s humility.
But Allen is herself committing the very sin of hubris she’s diagnosing in Thiel.
The “bad fan” concept—borrowed from critic Emily Nussbaum—presupposes that there is a correct political reading of Tolkien, and that the essayist happens to hold it. That’s not scholarship. That’s gatekeeping dressed up as literary criticism.
Tolkien himself explicitly rejected anyone—from any direction—claiming his work meant what they thought it meant. In Letter 131, he wrote: “I dislike Allegory in all its manifestations.” In Letter 211, he pushed back against readers who saw the Ring as representing nuclear weapons. He would have been equally skeptical of a progressive literary critic claiming to know the “correct” politics of Middle-earth.
The Professor was a Catholic, a conservative, a medievalist, and a man deeply suspicious of modernity and industrialism. His politics don’t map neatly onto anyone’s preferred framework—left or right. And he would likely have been uncomfortable with anyone drafting his mythology into political service. But that’s exactly what the Literary Hub essay does from the other direction: using Tolkien’s authority to delegitimize a political opponent.
The appropriate response to someone finding meaning in Tolkien you disagree with is not to declare them a “bad fan.” It’s to engage with the text. Tolkien’s work is mythic in scale precisely because it speaks to people across the political spectrum. Samwise is a working-class hero. The Ents’ revolution is environmentalist. Éowyn breaks gender norms. The saga is profoundly anti-war. But it’s also about restoration, bloodlines, and divine kingship. The text contains multitudes.
The real hubris here isn’t Thiel’s fandom. It’s the critic’s certainty that she holds the correct interpretation—and that anyone who disagrees is reading it wrong.
As Allen herself concludes: “the book cannot choose how it’s interpreted.” She’s right. And that includes her own reading.
