Frodo Baggins… the Fascist? Using and Abusing Middle-Earth in Giorgia Meloni’s Italy

Giorgia Meloni is Italy’s first female prime minister and its furthest-right political leader since the fall of Italian Fascism. She is also a widely-noted enthusiast of JRR Tolkien’s fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings, even going so far as to cosplay as a hobbit during her youth. This talk explores the complicated relationship between Tolkien’s fantasy, extremist politics in Italy, and English-language news media. On the surface, the attachment of nationalist Italians to the highly-English Lord of the Rings may seem incongruous or inappropriate. For this reason, the surprising self-identification of far-right political figures with small and inoffensive hobbits provides a fruitful opportunity to think both about contemporary politics and medievalism (the appropriation of medieval symbols and images in contemporary culture).

About the Speaker: Jeffrey Miner is an historian of late medieval Europe. His current book project, Public Debt and Civic Culture in Fourteenth-Century Genoa, examines the accidental invention of permanent public indebtedness by medieval Italians. It considers how the fourteenth-century explosion of public indebtedness in Genoa inflected both private and public life, drawing on a wide variety of methodologies and sources including financial records, legal privileges, sermons and poetry. The subject of this talk is the result of an unexpected encounter between studying medieval history and modern medievalism: the study of how moderns apply medieval models to contemporary needs, or take inspiration from the arts and customs of the Middle Ages.

RSVP HERE