by Victor Davis Hanson
J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision of a declining Gondor offers a warning for the troubled West—but also a message of hope that renewal remains possible.
The Despair and Hope of J. R. R. Tolkien
The novelist J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) repeatedly insisted that his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings, written from 1937 to 1949, was not allegorical.
But some scholars have argued otherwise, detecting contemporary, 20th-century influences in his storytelling.
Tolkien fought at the nightmarish Battle of the Somme in World War I. He witnessed the slaughter of the youth of Europe in the trenches that lived with him the rest of his life. In the 1930s, he despaired over both the rise of the godless Communist Soviet Union and the transformation of a once-enlightened Germany into a monstrous fascist regime.
Tolkien, a devout Catholic, was dismayed not only by the growing power of these totalitarian empires but also by the West’s urbanized industrialism and secularized modernism on the eve of World War II. In middle age, he lived through the even greater slaughter of World War II. Adding to his concerns, he finished his novel at the height of Soviet expansionism, as the Cold War began and nuclear weapons emerged.
The catastrophic decades of the 1930s and 1940s not only shaped his overall worldview but plausibly helped inspire at least some of the most dramatic elements of his novel.
In The Lord of the Rings, Gondor’s capital, Minas Tirith, is the most hallowed city of men. It remains renowned for its indomitable stone walls, its age-old defense of the west from the evil of Mordor on its eastern border, and the legacy of its great kings, who long ago galvanized alliances of free peoples to thwart totalitarian evil.
But all that is now in the past.
Gondor’s once-majestic line of kings died out long ago. The population is in steady decline. Gondor’s former greatness survives only in ancient statues and songs. Gone are the hardy people of legend who once built that shining city on a hill.
Internal conflict and bickering have long since shattered the kingdom’s strength. Gondor is surrounded by a growing sea of enemies. Stewards bent on appeasement and lacking real legitimacy are mere placeholders for the old kings.
In sum, Gondor seems like a fictional version of the decaying 15th-century Byzantine Empire, an outpost of the West about to be buried by the onslaught of Ottoman jihadism.
In the novel, an outnumbered Gondor is fighting a seemingly hopeless war for its very existence–and the survival of the West itself. Its salvation hinges in part on the aid of the rough-and-tumble riders of Rohan, supposedly less sophisticated and less civilized men who remain vigorous and defiant, sworn to save a declining Gondor.
(In perhaps similar fashion, Churchill in the early years of World War II saw “the New World” of the upstart United States as coming to the rescue of the beleaguered, war-torn Old World of Europe.)
A Pandora’s Box of Western Ills
So, is the West now a teetering modern Gondor?
It too faces both an external threat from a rising communist China of 1.4 billion people that seeks global domination and internal apostasy from a new, nihilistic, anti-Western alliance of socialism and Islamism.
Western borders, with the recent exception of those of the United States, are mostly shattered.
Immigrants and their children together account for more than 30 percent of the population in many Western countries. Thousands of young people from immigrant neighborhoods are currently rioting in the streets of France—attacking churches, indigenous French passersby, and anyone who challenges them. The same sort of violence, once sporadic, now threatens to sweep Europe.
Modern France has never quite recovered from its soldiers’ heroic, blood-soaked victory at Verdun—“Ils ne passeront pas”—which stopped the Kaiser’s assault over a century ago. And after two world wars, an exhausted, postcolonial France gave birth to poststructuralism and postmodernism, which postulate that eternal truths are relative and bothersome historical facts are mere social constructs.
Millions, mostly from the Islamic world, have flooded Europe’s borders in search of security, prosperity, and freedom—but rarely do they seek to become European. Instead, far too many reject integration and assimilation. They treat their magnanimous hosts as naïve, weak, unarmed, infertile, godless—and deserving of replacement by them and their religion.
These immigrants would certainly answer our initial question in the affirmative: they see that the entire European continent is becoming something like a teetering fifteenth-century Constantinople, soon to implode under its own decadence amid a sea of enemies.
Politically allied with these immigrant Islamists are Europe’s homegrown hard Left and radical environmentalists. The latter are responsible for such suicidal policies as shutting down Germany’s nuclear power program during the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to say nothing of opposing wider access to air conditioning despite estimates of tens of thousands of heat-related deaths across Europe.
An ossifying Europe is belatedly rearming to meet the Russian threat in the east—but largely in response to the intense pressure and vehement remonstrations of Donald Trump, who is publicly reviled even as his earlier warnings to a virtually unarmed Europe are privately acknowledged as prescient. Yet, after years of pacifism, the military readiness of NATO’s European members remains underwhelming.
The postmodernism and globalism, or faux cosmopolitanism, of Western elites dictate that, in the crumbling West, the very ideas of “defense” and “deterrence” are as archaic as borders. A national military is deemed at odds with the morally superior collectivist peacekeeping role of the United Nations and its corrupt affiliated international agencies.
Culturally, Europe also seems bent on confirming its critics’ charges of decline and decadence. European affluence and leisure have created a culture of cynicism, if not nihilism—with new generations mocking Europe’s illustrious past, ridiculing its legacy, and rejecting the entire Western tradition—its singular art, music, monuments, literature, history, and values.
Fewer than half of all Britons now report being proud of their country and its history, and the figures are even worse for young people. But after decades of this sort of nihilism, even Europeans are finding it hard to discover new sins of their ancestors for which to apologize.
One in four European pregnancies ends in abortion. In Western Europe, France alone nearly matches the United States’ dismal fertility rate of 1.7, while the other shrinking and aging European Union countries have a much lower rate of 1.3.
The great universities of Europe are crumbling under low admission standards, a dearth of funding, and a preference for profitable international students—quite apart from the pernicious effects of destructive leftist and postmodern ideologies on academia. (Their American counterparts, needless to say, are nearly as bad.)
The West’s New World is also in crisis. Canada may be the furthest gone of all Western nations. Forty-five percent of its population consists of first- or second-generation immigrants. Many newcomers also reject the now-reviled idea of the melting pot there too.
Canada’s defenses are laughable: the vast, continent-sized country can put a mere 82 aging fighter jets in the air. It is kept afloat only by the $32 trillion economy and huge military of neighboring America—a nation the left-wing globalist Canadian government increasingly despises and targets with whipped-up nationalist hatred.
Canada’s “assisted suicide” program accounts for more than 5 percent of all Canadian deaths. Recent Canadian per capita GDP growth has often been among the weakest in the industrialized world. Canada has refused to fully use its abundant natural resources, such as oil, natural gas, timber, and minerals.
Nor has the rot spared the United States. During Joe Biden’s tenure, millions of aliens illegally crossed the American border and entered without any vetting. Crime was rampant. The military fell 40,000 recruits short of its recruiting goals. We were told that there were at least three genders, that biological males have a natural right to compete in girls’ sports, that theft under $950 is not really theft, that racial identity must be essential, rather than incidental, to American citizenship, and that our renowned Founding Fathers were fatally flawed, if not downright evil.
The Democratic Party has been transmogrified into an Islamist-sympathizing, socialist Jacobin movement. It is intent on rejecting America’s past while remaking its present into something the Founders would find abhorrent.
While the First Amendment has so far mercifully spared us the hate-speech prosecutions seen in Europe, America suffers as much as Europe from a new precivilizational and self-hating racialism. Under the Marxist-inspired framework of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the majority-white populations of Europe and the United States are mindlessly and indiscriminately damned as oppressors. In contrast, anyone claiming nonwhite status ipso facto can instantly become an oppressed victim—with supposedly legitimate demands for recompense in hiring, promotion, and admissions.
The ancient bane of antisemitism—for centuries a reliable symptom of a society’s inner sickness—has resurfaced even in the United States. This time, it is fueled by the DEI lobby, socialists, and Islamists. The socialists hate the material success and influence of supposed Jewish cabals. The Islamists both despise and envy the astounding economic and military rise of an ascendant Israel.
On American campuses, crowds of homegrown leftists and foreign students from the Middle East chant “From the River to the Sea,” dreaming of the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel, a mere 80 years after the Holocaust. Few immigrants and visitors from the Middle East can explain why they fled the homelands they now long for. Yet after finding safety, freedom, and prosperity from their magnanimous hosts in the West, they seem to hate them even more.
An equally unhinged, albeit smaller, right-wing American cohort all but welcomes the implosion of the current West as a supposedly deserved fate for its decadence and other assorted sins. The podcaster Tucker Carlson argues that the West was culpable or stupid, or both, for fighting against Hitler and his Nazis in World War II and currently opposing Putin’s Russia. He believes that Britain might have been better off had Hitler conquered it—revealing his ignorance of Nazi aggrandizement and doctrine as well as Hitler’s postwar plans for a conquered Western Europe (let alone for Europe’s eastern lands and the surviving Jews).
Hope Springs Eternal
And yet, as in Tolkien’s world, hope persists.
Even as maladies fly out of Pandora’s box, hope remains, silent and forgotten, at the bottom.
Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has at least introduced some genuinely conservative reforms. Conservative and traditional political movements are sweeping both Latin America and Europe.
America is staging a true counterrevolution, intended not only to stop socialism, Islamism, pacifism, globalism, and nihilist postmodernism but also to restore the economic, technological, military, and political preeminence of Western civilization. Some Europeans, Canadians, and Australians are beginning to voice fears that the West will end unless they, too, undertake a restoration.
Again, J. R. R. Tolkien was no fatalist.
At the end of his epic, the inherently sensible common people of Middle-earth band together on the eve of the apocalypse and rise up under new or invigorated leaders who embody the ancient values needed to thwart their societies’ inner decay, Sauron’s external threat, and the internal apostasy of his henchman Saruman. Middle-earth is changed, but not lost to evil.
So, Gondor is saved at the last minute by Rohan, by its long-lost future king, and by forgotten ordinary people—the hobbits—all of whom rise to the occasion.
Tolkien’s ultimate optimism may yet prove prescient today.
Millions of the forgotten and despised in Europe and the rest of the West are slowly recognizing that open borders and mass, unvetted immigration from culturally alien societies are a prescription for national suicide.
They are belatedly learning about the true agendas and methods of communist China. They are beginning to agree that the war waged by socialists and communists on capitalism, fossil fuels, the military, law enforcement, and meritocracy is tantamount to collective self-destruction.
A younger generation is beginning to take pride in Western civilization rather than apologize for it, and to rediscover its strength.
And so perhaps it will agree with Tolkien that in the end, Gondor is to be saved.
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/06/are-we-becoming-gondor/
