A few days ago, Michiko Kakutani (I didn’t even know she was still around) had a long piece in the Times on the Silicon Valley power elite’s embrace of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Kakutani expresses repeated puzzlement over Silicon Valley’s besottedness with these texts. Tolkien had a horror of technology and power politics, after all, which is clearly expressed in the trilogy, and his world seems as far away from Silicon Valley as his was from the Norse sagas he drew upon. I find myself puzzled by Kakutani’s puzzlement. It can hardly be a secret that The Lord of the Rings mirrors in many ways Wagner’s Ring Cycle and that Wagner also expressed horror for technology and power politics, […]