Middle-earth disinfo campaigns

I accidentally ended up re-reading The Lord of the Rings recently. I started a re-read of Fellowship of the Ring in 2022 for a short piece, and last fall, picked up the audiobook of The Two Towers when I needed something to listen to while between books and ended up going right into the The Return of the King. (I've got Andy Serkis's audiobook edition of The Silmarillion queued up next-ish.)

While reading it, I found another instance of a passage that really stuck with me as an example of how Tolkien was an excellent observer of human nature, and as a result, the books really endure, and I think it gave me a slightly better understanding of the entire work when it comes to how Tolkien saw the world.

In the chapter "The Pyre of Denethor," Gondor's Steward learns that his son Faramir has been gravely wounded in battle, and grief-stricken, decides that he'll die along with him. As Gandalf tries to talk him out of this plan, he discovers that Gondor still possesses a Palantír, and that Denethor has been looking into it:

'Pride and despair!' he cried. 'Didst thou think that the eyes of the White Tower were blind? Nay, I have seen more than thou knowest, Grey Fool. For thy hope is but ignorance. Go then and labour in healing! Go forth and fight! Vanity. For a little space you may triumph on the field, for a day. But against the Power that now arises there is no victory. To this City only the first finger of its hand has yet been stretched. All the East is moving. And even now the wind of thy hope cheats thee and wafts up Anduin a fleet with black sails. The West has failed. It is time for all to depart who would not be slaves?'

There's a little bit of explanation needed here if you aren't familiar with the series. The Palantíri are crystal spheres that allow people to communicate with one another. Here's Gandalf's explanation to Pippin earlier in The Two Towers:

Each palantír replied to each, but all those in Gondor were ever open to the view of Osgiliath. Now it appears that, as the rock of Orthanc has withstood the storms of time, so there the palantír of that tower has remained. But alone it could do nothing but see small images of things far off and days remote. Very useful, no doubt, that was to Saruman; yet it seems that he was not content. Further and further abroad he gazed, until he cast his gaze upon Barad-dûr. Then he was caught! 

One of the stones fell into Sauron's hands, which he used it to communicate with Saruman as he rose to power. There's a notable moment in The Two Towers when Pippin looks into it and is instantly connected to and interrogated by the Dark Lord about their plans. They're powerful devices, and hat struck me re-reading Return of the King was its impact on Denethor.

A critical theme throughout Tolkien's work is the decline of a once-great people, with weak men failing to live up to the lives and stories of their predecessors. Denethor is a good example here: as the Steward of Gondor, he's not the actual king, but someone charged with overseeing the city in the absence of the kingdom's true ruler. He's grown accustomed to his status, and is reluctant to give up that power, especially when it's clear that the true king (Aragorn) is being thrust into a position where he will be able to reclaim the throne and title.

Denethor is described as possessing a brilliant mind, but he's also vain and weak: he's distraught over the death of his favored son Boromir, and while initially extremely dismissive of his other son Faramir, he's pushed to the breaking point when the former is wounded in the defense of the city.

That brings us to Denethor's use of the Palantír: as Sauron grew in power and Gondor came under attack, Denethor began using it to find out more about his enemy, which had disastrous consequences:

'In the days of his wisdom Denethor would not presume to use it to challenge Sauron, knowing the limits of his own strength. But his wisdom failed; and I fear that as the peril of his realm grew he looked in the Stone and was deceived: far too often, I guess, since Boromir departed. He was too great to be subdued to the will of the Dark Power, he saw nonetheless only those things which that Power permitted him to see. The knowledge which he obtained was, doubt-less, often of service to him; yet the vision of the great might of Mordor that was shown to him fed the despair of his heart until it overthrew his mind.

The emphasis there is mine: what really struck me about this passage is that it's so clearly what we'd now call a disinformation campaign.

A key element when it comes to propaganda and disinformation campaigns are that they're a type of storytelling (Check out Annalee Newitz's recent book Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind for a good overview of this.) They're designed to use a bit of truth to spin a story, feeding a population counter-factual information to demoralize a population, making them question or doubt the true nature of the world around them.

That's exactly what Sauron was doing to Denethor, the leader of his greatest foe; feeding him a story of how Mordor was growing in power and that Gondor wouldn't be able to do anything to stop it. It wasn't hard for Sauron to exploit Denethor's pride, ego, and insecurity to lead him astray.

The result was Denethor falling to despair. Pippin notes that he saw how this impacted him after Faramir was wounded: "The Lord went away from the room where Faramir lay; and it was only when he returned that I first thought he was changed, old and broken."

It's a telling moment about just how cunning Sauron is: Denethor wasn't a stupid man, but he did have weaknesses that his enemy could exploit. He had a lot to work with: Gondor was already stressed and in decline: Tolkien shows off a city whose population had cratered, its once-proud buildings fallen into disrepair. By the time the battle rolled around, Sauron's disinformation campaign has done exactly it needed to do: Denethor is barely able to mount a defense of the Minas Tirith.

Sauron's efforts ultimately doesn't work. Denethor commits suicide and the defense of the city falls to Gandalf, Prince Imrahil, the remaining fighters, and some last-minute reinforcements from Rohan and Aragorn. But while the good guys prevail in the end, it's a good illustration from Tolkien that the forces of evil aren't necessarily present just on the battlefield: it's a fight for the hearts and minds of all involved.

Tolkien would have been well aware of how propaganda worked. He was a signal officer in the British Army who served on the front lines in France during the First World War and watched as Nazi Germany rose and threatened Great Britain during the Second World War. Propaganda came into its own during this time, with both sides throwing information weapons at one another to try and destabilize and demoralize their foes.

In a lot of ways, Mordor's rise during the Third Age in Middle-earth feels very much like Tolkien paying attention to Hitler's rise during the 1930s: an evil force that spreads while its foes aren't paying close attention. Tolkien has pushed back on claims that The Lord of the Rings is an allegorical tale of World War II, writing in the foreword to the trilogy that:

"As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches: but its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as the link between it and The Hobbit."

Indeed, Tolkien wrote some large chunks of the story prior to the outbreak of the war. While I think we can take him at his word that he wasn't writing a thinly-veiled narrative about the Second World War, it isn't too much of a stretch to see that the real world had its impact on his legendarium. (I mean, the love story of Beren And Lúthien is inspired by his own relationship with his wife, Edith!)

In a note about W.H. Auden's review of The Return of the King (Number 183 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien), Tolkien reiterated that "the story is not about JRRT at all, and is at no point an attempt to allegorize his experience in life." But he goes on to talk about how he is "historically minded," and that Middle-earth isn't imaginary, but a real place "a little glorified by the enchantment of distance in time."

He explains that he doesn't see his story as characters working to achieve political ends, but of how power affects character. Frodo's journey is one of necessity, not preserving the Shire, while Denethor, he writes "was tainted with mere politics: hence his failure...It had become for him a prime motive to preserve the polity of Gondor, as it was, against another potentate, who had made himself stronger and was to be feared and opposed for that reason rather than because he was ruthless and wicked."

He goes on to talk about how politics can muddy the waters of right and wrong:

"Of course in real life' causes are not clear cut - if only because human tyrants are seldom utterly corrupted into pure manifestations of evil will. As far as I can judge some seem to have been so corrupt, but even they must rule subjects only part of whom are equally corrupt, while many still need to have 'good motives', real or feigned, presented to them. As we see today. Still there are clear cases: e.g. acts of sheer cruel aggression, in which therefore right is from the beginning wholly on one side, whatever evil the resentful suffering of evil may eventually generate in members of the right side. There are also conflicts about important things or ideas. In such cases I am more impressed by the extreme importance of being on the right side, than I am disturbed by the revelation of the jungle of confused motives, private purposes, and individual actions (noble or base) in which the right and the wrong in actual human conflicts are commonly involved. If the conflict really is about things properly called right and wrong, or good and evil, then the rightness or goodness of one side is not proved or established by the claims of either side; it must depend on values and beliefs above and independent of the particular conflict.

There's a lot going on here, but at its core, he's pointing out that the motives of a country/kingdom/ruler can be spun to justify one's motives. He specifically notes that the "rightness of the cause will not justify the actions of its supporters, as individuals, that are morally wicked, and that "though 'propaganda' may seize on them as proofs that their cause was not in fact 'right,' that is not valid."

It's easy to see how the complicated knot of politics and war mongering that led to the rise of both World Wars is present here: how people use stories – and propaganda – to justify their actions and motives, even if what they're doing is objectively bad. Look no further than how Hitler came to power with popular support, or any other time a terrible person ascends to power: it's usually because they've convinced a lot of people to follow them, and it's a powerful example of how leaders can use propaganda to demoralize their enemies – or to motivate their own followers. Tolkien might not have seen LOTR as a retelling of the modern day, but there were certainly things in human nature that he was seeing that were present during his lifetime – and which persist to today.

So, this particular passage about Denethor and the Palantír really stood out to me: it's another instance of where Tolkien seems to have really understood human nature and how we don't change all that much. Middle-earth's Palantír viewings is yesteryear's propaganda campaign is today's disinformation campaign.

Case in point: look at a recent development for online environments. Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Threads, and Instagram) is adjusting its policies towards hate speech towards marginalized groups. It's framed as a tilt back toward a vision of social media where users have the complete freedom to say whatever they want, with the assumption that bad information will be countered with good. This isn't really how this works in the real world: people who're good at gaming and understanding how to stand out from the noise will get heard, and drown out everyone else.

Those policy guard rails helped to keep those tendencies in check, and without them, you have an environment that's ripe for exploitation of bad actors, ranging from political misinformation and propaganda (just look at bad-faith posters who're talking about how the ongoing LA fires are the result of DEI agendas) to whiny fanboys who're upset about any hint of equality or diversity in the latest Star Wars and Lord of the Rings shows to the point where they can dominate any discussion or drive actors off of social media because they've made the environment unbearable.

(Another good book to check out about this is P.W. Singer and Emerson T Brooking's Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media, which I recommend to anyone who spends any amount of time online.)

In a lot of ways, we have a Palantír in front of us most of the time, in the form of our phones, social media feeds, and media, and we're constantly looking into it as a way to understand the world, communicate with folks around the world, and learn about our surroundings. As Denethor discovered, these can be useful tools, but they can also be incredibly seductive and destructive. We can see horrifying images of the destruction in places like Gaza and Ukraine and L.A., but also more subtle things, like watching a handful of funny videos before a social media's algorithm begins pushing videos of crime and violence on you.

It can be a conduit for bad actors to try and push and shape narratives, as we saw during the 2016 and 2020 and 2024 presidential elections: foreign governments nudging some of our more destructive divisions and tendencies to their own ends. These actions don't necessarily have to be as dramatic as a hack or brainwashing: just enough reinforcement to a narrative that makes you question what you're seeing or hearing. Build it up enough, and it's easy to fall into despair and depression at the state of the world.

Like I wrote about corruptibility the other week, I think this is a good example of Tolkien not writing allegory, but just being an astute observer of the world and human nature. People are people, and while we think we're advanced and smart with information at our fingertips, we haven't fundamentally changed all that much, leaving us open to making the same mistakes over and over again.

That's one reason why I've really been impressed all over again with this story and why I think it remains so relevant seven decades after it was published: Tolkien isn't throwing up his hands and pointing out that the world is terrible: he's explaining that there are ways to avoid falling into despair: sticking to one's morals, distinguishing the things that are objectively good and bad in the world, and recognizing how to move on those instincts to do good in the world. It's an inherently optimistic story that serves as an excellent guide for us in the dark times ahead of us.