Tolkien Would Hate This | Ranger of the Realms

Every so often a comment appears under one of my videos saying some version of the same thing: Tolkien would hate this. He despised machines. He wrote an entire mythology against them. And here I am, making videos about his world with AI.

I don't really know what Tolkien would think. He died in 1973. Anyone who thinks they know how he'd feel about technology that didn't exist in his lifetime is guessing. Also, Tolkien wasn't a guy whose opinions were safe to guess. He was often stubborn and contradictory, and he surprised the people who knew him best.

But the comments keep coming, so I figured I'd go back and read what he actually said.

But first, quick reminder of why Ranger of the Realms exists...

This project intersects two things I got really interested in. The tech shift going on in the world right now, and the amazing world of Tolkien's legendarium. I get fascinated with creatives and when I began digging into Tolkien it was hard to stop digging. It started as a way to answer my own questions, and it grew into something I didn't really plan: a catalogue of work about the legendarium, made with tools that let one person do what used to take a team. The part that surprised me is how creative the work turned out to be. Choosing what to cover, deciding what an episode argues, rejecting the generic image for the right one, iterating on a script until it sounds how I want. I've written before about what separates craft from slop, and I won't repeat it here. The short version is that I build systems and make decisions. For lack of a better term, the decisions are the art.

Now I'm motivated learning. About Tolkien and about these systems. With Tolkien I'm self-educating and by sharing what I build, I'm hoping I bring people closer to a world Tolkien spent his whole life building. Whether the way I do it would offend him is a tough question to answer.

Most of the commenters mention Tolkien's reference of "the Machine". In a long letter to the publisher Milton Waldman in 1951, he summarized his entire mythology and said that "all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine." Then he defined the term:

By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents — or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.

So that's an interesting definition. Certainly made me pause for a moment to think. Machinery barely enters into it. The Machine, for Tolkien, describes two failures of the maker. The first is reaching for apparatus instead of growing your own powers, letting the device stand in for the self (that sounds like AI!). The second is the greater evil: taking real talent and pointing it at domination, at bulldozing the world, at coercing other wills. Saruman is the portrait. Treebeard says he has "a mind of metal and wheels," and the rest of the sentence is the crux of it: he does not care for growing things, except as they serve him for the moment.

Tolkien owned tools. He wrote his mythology on typewriters and once said that his dream was "of suddenly finding myself rich enough to have an electric typewriter built to my specifications, to type the Fëanorian script." So he clearly didn't hate devices. He hated what people become when the device is the point, and other people are the material.

There are a couple of examples from The Silmarillion that seem fitting here.

Aulë, the smith of the Valar, got tired waiting for the Children of Ilúvatar to awaken, so he made his own. In secret, breaking all his boss's rules, he shaped the Dwarves. When Ilúvatar caught him, Aulë didn't defend the work. He admitted he was wrong and said he just wanted "things other than I am, to love and to teach them." Then he went nuts and lifted his hammer to destroy the dwarves he made. But because his motive was love rather than lordship, and because he admitted guilt when caught, he was forgiven. The Dwarves were given life. They're still there at the end of the Third Age, singing about Durin.

Fëanor is the same story told the opposite way. The greatest maker in the history of Arda, and his demise had nothing to do with his tools. He couldn't let go of what he'd made. He wouldn't give in to grief, to counsel, or to the gods themselves. The things he made from love, the Silmarils, became an oath, then a war.

The difference between those two makers isn't craft. It's what the making was for, and what each of them did when he was told no.

So, yeah, these examples are pretty convenient for me. It's not that easy though...

There's another side to Tolkien in the letters. He raged at a 1958 film treatment of The Lord of the Rings. It wasn't because it used cameras. It was because it was careless. The writer had skimmed the book and mangled what he found. Tolkien also despised Disney. He wrote to his son during the war that "labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour," a line aimed straight at people like me, who will tell you the tools save labor. Most scholars will say his hatred of the machine was broader than motive. It's a hatred of the whole industrial way of being in the world. Maybe they're right. In the same 1951 letter, Tolkien wrote that he wanted his mythology to "leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." Then actual other hands showed up, and he discovered how much it hurt to watch someone handle his world carelessly.

So I have loose opinions here. But when I look at it, there's a common theme in letters discussing the machine. Tolkien was never upset with the instrument. He was upset by carelessness with the thing he loved.

Let me romanticize what I'm doing for a moment. Tolkien is encouraging us to make for the love of the thing, not appetite for what the thing can get you. Coerce no one. I make a video and it sits there and people choose to watch it or they don't. Keep your own hands and your own voice in the work, because the device is not allowed to become the self (I use AI tools, but there's no 'AI autopilot'). When you're corrected, own it: viewers catch my errors, and the errors get fixed, and I've come to think of that correction as part of the craft rather than an embarrassment to it. Above all, be careful with the story, because carelessness is the one sin that runs through everything he wrote on the subject. I'm doing the best I can.

Some days I think I pass those tests. Some days I don't, and I fix it, and that's the job. A little better each day.

Would Tolkien approve? I have no idea. He was hard to please. But somewhere in me is the hope that the man who dreamed of a typewriter that could type Elvish would at least have been curious.