I’m a bit of a Tolkien nerd. I’ve read the books (including the Silmarillion at least six times), watched the movies and consumed hours and hours of Tolkien related commentary some of which I agree with and some with which I don’t. I love deep dives into Tolkien’s legendarium especially the background information about Tolkien’s created world that has come to light following Professor Tolkien’s death in the early 1970’s.
Because I, along with many many others, have a reasonably competent background knowledge of Tolkien’s legendarium gathered from movies and books, means memes based on Tolkien’s works or interpretations of them tend to get big audiences. This is especially the case since Peter Jackson’s movie version of Lord of the Rings became a cultural event and are movies that have stayed in the public’s mind for many years now.
On the subject of Tolkien memes there’s a brilliantly done set of them being put out by an X account called ‘The Daily Gondor’. What lifts many of these memes is the visual format and choice of wording that mocks left leaning and left infiltrated mainstream media such as Buzzfeed (which becomes Barad-dur feed) and the Guardian newspaper which uses the Daily Gondor title but in the Guardian’s graphic style. These memes are especially cutting when they mock the graphic style and wording of the UK’s Guardian newspaper.
For those who do not know of this publication, the Guardian was once a great newspaper in the classically liberal mode. It had a good reputation for accuracy but was quite clearly even in the 1980’s a more liberal minded paper than The Times, The Daily Telegraph or many of the ‘red top’ tabloid newspapers. The Guardian once did brilliant stories that others might not touch or at least not cover in any empathetic way, a good example of this is, at least in my view, their coverage of the AIDS crisis Unfortunately that part of the life of the Guardian is over and it is now the house organ of the extremely out of touch middle class left. The paper is now dominated by the obsessions of this class. It’s been a promoter, especially in its comment pages, of top down multiculturalism, open borders, identity politics of various sorts, the trans phenomenon, anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, a skewed class based interpretation of women’s rights and so much similar stuff. For my American readers to find an analogy to the Guardian, just imagine what the very worst, extreme and out of touch with both people and reality Democrats would publish if they had control of a newspaper and you can have some concept of what the Guardian has become.
The Daily Gondor skits are exactly how the narrative of the Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s greater legendarium would have been reported by heavily out of touch and biased media outlets such as The Guardian and Buzzfeed. What’s also interesting about these memes is that they also contain grains of truth in them. The mainstream media have for a very long time brushed aside public concerns about migration levels and types along with the bad behaviour of some migrants or the impact of migration on services and UK culture. On so many occasions when these issues have been raised by ordinary Britons, the response from the leftist leaning part of mainstream media has been to scream ‘bigot’ or ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobe’ or ‘transphobe’ or ‘homophobe’ at their often working class interlocutors or to play down issues such as crime and disorder. The Guardian is indeed the home of the middle class leftist, who lives in a relatively nice part of London, who tells those trapped in the more skanky parts of the capital that ‘everything in London is fine, there’s little crime and that his daughter doesn’t fear assault on the street’. The view of London from those trapped in the more skanky bits is I can assure you very different from that of the Guardian Londoner who lives relatively remote from trouble. The way the Daily Gondor uses Tolkien’s imagery to satirise a press that didn’t listen to the public or its concerns when maybe they should have done is very well done.
Here are a few screenshots of some of the great many Tolkien memes mocking the mainstream media that can be found on The Daily Gondor. You can find the Daily Gondor at the following address: https://x.com/DailyGondor It’s well worth a visit.
