Tolkien’s monarchic anarchism (or anarchic monarchism?)

The only thing I know that J.R.R. Tolkien and Salvador Dalí had in common—or rather, I suppose I should say, the only significant or unexpected thing, since they obviously had all sorts of other things in common: they were male, bipedal, human, rough contemporaries, celebrities, and so on—was that each man on at least one occasion said he was drawn simultaneously towards anarchism and monarchism.

via Anarcho-Monarchism | First Things.

This is well worth reading! Readers of my biography will be familiar with Tolkien’s “politics” as it stands out in this article.

I may want to interact with (and perhaps disagree with) some things in this article, but for the moment, I’ll just commend it as worth reading.

One way in which Tolkien can transform the political imagination, by the way, is to inspire a study of history that reveals the line between “public sector” and “private sector” was not as obvious or self-evident to our ancestors as we seem to think it should be. Royal dynasties inherited political rights and duties as their private possessions.

But more later.

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