In no small part, the richly imagined and detailed mythology of British writer J.R.R. Tolkien was born of his revulsion towards mechanised warfare and industrialisation, yet today, pieces of it have been appropriated to serve ideologies that advance the same forces.
Ironic names
Recently, a private company, Reflect Orbital, announced plans to launch a satellite called Earendil-1, which it said would reflect sunlight from orbit around the earth towards the ground, in a bid to increase the efficiency of solar cells. Eärendil is a legendary voyager and a bearer of light through the heavens in Tolkien’s cosmology. Even before launch, Reflect’s project has raised questions about governing orbital debris, ownership of reflected energy, and light pollution.
Earlier this year, two other U.S.-based companies — Palantir Technologies and Anduril Industries — expressed interest in participating in U.S. President Donald Trump’s ambitious ‘Golden Dome’ missile defence system. Palantir was founded in 2003 with early backing from the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture arm. Its flagship platform enables predictive policing and counterterrorism analysis. The name comes from palantíri, the “seeing stones” of Tolkien’s legendarium, capable of granting vision across large distances but which are also susceptible to manipulation by the forces of darkness. Anduril, established in 2017, develops autonomous surveillance towers and drone systems for the U.S. Department of Defense. Its name is from Andúril, a sword in Tolkien’s narrative known as “the Flame of the West”.
In Palantir’s case, both the fictional object and the company revolve around the surveying of distant subjects, relying on information asymmetry, and raising questions about who gets to watch and who is watched. In Anduril’s, while the sword in the story is the means by which a single claimant to a great kingdom consolidates power, the company’s systems centralise decision-making about detection and response in algorithmic form. Both make unilateral authority appear politically justified.
Peter Thiel, an early investor in both Palantir and Anduril, has compared the dynamics of modern technology to Tolkien’s portrayal of power. In a 2009 essay, he invoked the tension between the Shire’s stability and Mordor’s will to mastery (the archetypal ‘good’ and ‘bad’ places in the story) as a metaphor for Silicon Valley’s role in reshaping the world. The metaphor has persisted across Thiel-affiliated ventures.
The consequences for how the public engages with Tolkien’s fiction are important. As a veteran of the Battle of the Somme, Tolkien witnessed industrial destruction firsthand, and later reshaped those memories into the ecological ruin spread by Sauron, the dark lord and eponymous antagonist of the The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien believed, as a Catholic, in the sanctity of creation and distrusted any power that ruled through machines and bureaucracy. Today, however, names such as Palantir are entering news cycles through stories about data surveillance, autonomous weapons, and military contractors. Readers who encounter them outside their literary context will thus encounter them first as instruments of control.
Tolkien’s works have long drawn readers from a wide demographic. But when parts of his mythology are appropriated by entities associated with irrational and violent ideologies, the imaginative space those works once provided can become narrow. The names suddenly carry connotations of militarism or technocratic dominance, and the association with certain investors and ideological currents could introduce a new layer of political discomfort.
Academic studies of his corpus have so far examined its relation to myth-making, linguistics, and post-war British culture. Scholars and journalists have also found instances of white-nationalist and neoreactionary circles reinterpreting Tolkien’s mythologies as cultural allegory. In these readings, the struggles of Middle Earth — the world where the The Long of the Rings trilogy is set — are recast as defences of racial or civilisational purity, with the plight of the Shire and Gondor imagined as metaphors for a threatened Western order. By drawing Tolkien’s lexicon into political economies of the 21st century, figures such as Thiel are cloaking coercive technologies in the moral grandeur of epic struggle while implying that their creators, like Tolkien’s heroes, are destined to wield exceptional power responsibly.
A modern habit
These patterns are ultimately part of a broader modern habit of converting mythic materials into corporate or technological lingo. Greek and Norse myths have long served as sources of names for military projects, spacecraft, and digital products — Apollo, Athena, Odin, Thor, etc. Similar trends have emerged in India, where the names of Indic entities are being applied to military, technological, and institutional projects. Even if they aren’t instances of full-blown appropriation in the manner of Tolkien’s lore, they harbour a broader logic of mapping cultural authority onto power. An example is Varunastra, an “autonomous heavyweight anti-submarine torpedo” developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation.
This is a tactic to use the imaginative authority of myth to buttress contemporary instruments of violence, control, and projection. The misfortune, however, is that they are dragging precious pieces of literature down with them.
Published – October 20, 2025 12:25 am IST
