{P} eter Thiel says he is a fan of The Lord of the Rings. According to a recent interview in the Atlantic, the enigmatic tech billionaire has read the work “at least ten times.” There is reason to believe, however, that those many readings have not been very careful. Thiel is one of those Silicon Valley types who wishes to live forever. His Atlantic interviewer asked if perhaps this dream traced back to The Lord of the Rings:
Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves. “And then there are sort of all these questions, you know: How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically — I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”
“So why can’t we be elves?” I asked.
Thiel nodded reverently, his expression a blend of hope and chagrin.
“Why can’t we be elves?” he said.
These few sentences contain drastic misinterpretations of the world Tolkien created, specifically about the natures of elves and men, the differences between them, and the consequences of trying to overcome these natures. It is worth examining each in turn and assessing what these misunderstandings might reveal about Thiel.
Fans of only The Lord of the Rings or its film adaptations, which tell the story of a quest to destroy a ring of great power, the One Ring, created by the Dark Lord Sauron in his attempt to rule over the realm of Middle-earth, can be forgiven for being unaware that they represent only part of the vast mythology Tolkien created. That mythology is fleshed out further in other texts, such as The Silmarillion, a kind of “Old Testament” to The Lord of the Rings, as well as letters, appendices, and supplementary works. While one can address Thiel’s errors with recourse to The Lord of the Rings alone, consulting these other sources clarifies his errors.
Thiel is not entirely wrong about one thing, at least: Men and elves have a certain essential similarity. In a letter to Michael Straight, Tolkien wrote, “In fact exterior to my story, Elves and Men are just different aspects of the Humane, and represent the problem of Death as seen by a finite but willing and self-conscious person,” and are “in their incarnate forms kindred.”
But while Thiel is correct that the relationship of men and elves to mortality is a primary distinction between them, he is wrong that this distinction is incidental. It is fundamental. Men in Tolkien’s universe are innately given to death. It is not punishment. That “the children of Men dwell only a short space in the world alive, and are not bound to it” is, rather, a “gift” of Eru Ilúvatar (the all-powerful God in Tolkien’s mythology), Tolkien wrote in The Silmarillion. It is a gift “which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy.” Further, death is terra incognita — what happens to men after their death is unknown to the elves or possibly even to the Valar (the order of beings below Illuvatar in Tolkien’s cosmology). All that is known is that men are not bound to the world.
The elves, by contrast, do have immortality. They “remain until the end of days, and their love of the Earth and all the world is more single and more poignant therefore.” They “die not till the world dies.” As Tolkien explained in a letter, it is their fate “to be immortal, to love the beauty of the world, to bring it to full flower with their gifts of delicacy and perfection, to last while it lasts.” But while this produces some level of bliss for that race, it is hardly without blemish. Their lives are said to grow “ever more sorrowful” and become “a great burden as the ages lengthen, especially in a world in which there is malice and destruction.” It is also the fate of the elves, who came to the world long before men, both to prepare that world for men and then to recede from it for other lands upon man’s arrival.
Some complications to all of this are worth mentioning here. The “default” for elves may be immortality, but they can die if slain or if consumed by grief; if they do die, their spirits nonetheless remain bound to the world, never achieving the release of a true afterlife. And though it is customary for elves to lose none of their vigor, they can fade if they “grow weary of ten thousand centuries.” Tolkien’s legendarium recounts many elves suffering these fates. The fact of elven immortality should also not create the impression of a sinless race. The elves with which the casual viewer or reader is familiar may be noble, equable creatures. But these latter elves are a waning race. Elves, at their race’s florescence, were a greater power — with greater pride. One of the earliest acts of elvish history, the Kinslaying, involved one group of elves slaughtering another. And the oath of elf-smith Fëanor to pursue retribution should anyone deprive him of the Silmarils, his prized creation (the jewels that supply The Silmarillion its title), generated a whole host of tragedies (as well as some triumphs) throughout early elvish history.
Immortality also renders the elves uniquely susceptible to the temptation of forced stagnation. Their ageless knowledge of the world’s beauty amid its change makes them scheme to hold things in place as they themselves are so held. They are prone “to regret the past, and to become unwilling to face change: as if a man were to hate a very long book still going on, and wished to settle down in a favourite chapter.” And they are given “towards a faineant melancholy, burdened with Memory, leading to an attempt to halt Time.” It is not only their immortality that contributes to this temptation but also their memory of the unchanging, perfect lands apart from Middle-earth from which they hail (and to which they will return). Their desire to halt time’s flow is a kind of Edenic enticement. Some of this is done for the good through the elven rings of power (created distinct from Sauron’s influence); we see this in The Lord of the Rings, whose elven realms are preserved by the rings of their stewards.
For all this, however, some elves saw fit to choose mortality. Lúthien and Arwen were motivated by the love of a man (Beren and Aragorn, respectively). And the half-elven Elros (twin brother of Elrond, both offspring of another man-elf union) was given a choice between elvish immortality and mannish finitude and chose the latter. In fairness, his reward was a centuries-long life and the kingship of Númenor, an island of men similarly endowed with longevity. That civilization provides both a counterexample to the notion of man’s impermanence — and a warning. A gift for those men who assisted the elves in an age-ending struggle against Morgoth (a Vala-gone-bad who could be described as “Sauron’s Sauron”), the island of Númenor was one of greatest achievements of any race in all of Tolkien’s legendarium. The Númenóreans were “wise and glorious, and in all things more like to the Firstborn than any other of the kindreds of Men; and they were tall, taller than the tallest of the sons of Middle-earth; and the light of their eyes was like the bright stars.” They became an advanced seafaring race, treated almost as gods by those other men in Middle-earth whom they visited. From one spot on the island, they could espy the land of the Valar. The blessed men would remain prosperous so long as they remained in the good graces of the Valar and elves and never sailed west to the visible, forbidden land.
But the Númenóreans did not remain forever in this pious condition. Tolkien recounts that they eventually “began to murmur, at first in their hearts, and then in open words, against the doom of Men” (that is, their eventual mortality) “and most of all against the Ban which forbade them to sail into the West.” They began to fear death and seek its prevention, which created two seemingly paradoxical yet, in fact, related outcomes: They began to worship death, “building great houses for their dead,” all the while “their wise men laboured unceasingly to discover if they might the secret of recalling life, or at the least of the prolonging of Men’s days.” These vain feats availed little except to produce an ever-worldlier attitude among the living, who “turned the more eagerly to pleasure and revelry, desiring ever more goods and more riches.” In time, this spirit led to more strife in the land, to dark cults devoted to Morgoth (replacing the worship of Iluvatar), and, ironically, resulted in ever-shorter lifespans.
Númenórean impiety made them especially vulnerable to the wiles of Sauron, who at one time was a prisoner of the Númenóreans (who in their greatness defeated him), then rose to become a counselor to their last king. Among his many evils, Sauron-as-counselor introduced to that king what Tolkien calls a “Satanic lie”: that the Blessed Lands visible from Númenor are rightly the province of its great men and that the elves were merely trying to deceive them otherwise. “The Valar have possessed themselves of the land where there is no death; and they lie to you concerning it, hiding it as best they may, because of their avarice, and their fear lest the Kings of Men should wrest from them the deathless realm and rule the world in their stead.” Sauron seasoned his trickery with flattery. “And though, doubtless, the gift of life unending is not for all, but only for such as are worthy, being men of might and pride and great lineage” — such as, of course, the king himself. Númenor’s last king heeds this infernal counsel and sails with a mighty fleet to those undying lands. The punishment for men is the Atlantis-esque destruction of Númenor and the diminution of long lifespans for all but a few men.
Númenor’s destruction is only one example of what Thiel describes as “haywire” immortality in Tolkien. In fact, some in the king’s fleet, including the king himself, are thought to be still trapped in a cavern on those lands. But it is not the only example. Those men, some Númenóreans deceived into receiving rings of power under Sauron’s influence, turn into the Ringwraiths, forever thralls to Sauron’s will. The One Ring warps the hobbit-like Sméagol into the stunted creature Gollum. The quest for “longevity,” Tolkien writes, “is the chief bait of Sauron.”
Tolkien was resistant to direct application of his work. He claimed to “dislike allegory in all its manifestations” and asserted that “the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are best guesses from evidence that is inadequate or ambiguous.” Yet he also believed that “myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error).”
So, it might be a bit much to infer that Tolkien viewed any and all attempts to improve human life or health are inherently suspect and that the material progress of the past several centuries that has produced such an outcome is to be rejected. At the same time, it’s unlikely that a man who once mused approvingly about the dynamiting of factories (part-in-parcel to him of the destruction of the natural world and the centralization of power, both modern trends he loathed) would be pleased that tech billionaires are pilfering his work to name their companies.
A more plausible takeaway is that Tolkien was counseling against attempts to defy the Creator’s ordained laws of nature. As his longtime friend C. S. Lewis warned, human efforts to transgress nature end up amounting to the coercion of other men. Sauron, as a malicious agent in Tolkien’s works, catered to the innermost desires of both elves and men, stirring in the former a quest for an unchanging paradise and arousing in the latter a quest for eternal reward on earth. At the root of each temptation was a wish to impose an alien design on the world as created and a concomitant arrogance that such a design could come from created beings rather than their creator. That is, Sauron tempted others with versions of his own vice, described by Tolkien in one letter as the tyrant’s “desire to order all things according to his own wisdom” (a desire Tolkien acknowledges can at least originate with benign intent) and in another as the “use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of developments of the inherent inner powers or talents — or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.” This is what Tolkien advised against.
It is advice Thiel is not heeding. That he would read The Lord of the Rings, described by its author as primarily “about Death and the desire for deathlessness,” and take away from it that mortality is an enemy becomes less surprising when one looks at his other efforts. This is a man who: started a data-surveillance company called Palantir — the name of seeing-stones corrupted to Sauron’s use; who started a venture-capital firm called Mithril — a precious metal used, among other things, to create one elven ring of power; whose protege J. D. Vance (who worked at Mithril) started a firm (in which Thiel invested) named after one of the elven rings of power (Narya); who (to leave The Lord of the Rings for a moment) was inspired by the philosopher and historian René Girard’s theory of mimesis — briefly, that humans are given to a collective pattern of mimicry that can lead to self-destruction if not abated — to invest in Facebook precisely because it appeared set to capitalize on that self-destructive tendency.
The common thread here is a blatant, self-serving instrumentality incapable of distinguishing between the desire for order and the desire for domination, between the good of all and one’s own good. It is a familiar theme in the works of Tolkien. But not for good reasons. If Peter Thiel doesn’t understand that, he should try reading them again — a little more closely this time.