The Seeing Stones, Part 1
Peter Thiel has a vision
Last week I wrote about one of the foundations of formalism, or the New Criticism, in which contextuality and historicism are seen as fallacies within literary theory. This week I want to start a multi-part series that is soaked in cultural context, to see if literary analysis can bring insight to the moment, or vice versa. This is part of a project to test my own theoretical agnosticism: will I consistently use what works, or will I prove the argument that theory is an ideological prison?
Few things are more “of the moment” than Peter Thiel’s influence on men who are more well known to the public than he is, for instance Elon Musk and J.D. Vance. Thiel is a complicated figure, but in this series I plan to examine only one small manifestation of his thinking: his choice to use the names Anduril, Mithril, Velar, and Palantir for his various business ventures. These are all names from J.R.R. Tolkien’s (hereafter JRRT) expanded mythology in which the adventures of The Lord of the Rings (LotR) take place. I say expanded because even when they appear directly in the novel, they are often shorthand for a larger history of the First and Second Ages that JRRT explored in works like The Silmarillion and unpublished and unfinished pieces. For readers (or moviegoers) who do not engage with that history, much of this will sound odd. Deep dives into JRRT’s lingustic and cultural world-building is heavy stuff. However, limiting engagement to the single LotR story arc leaves many unanswered questions about, certainly, two of these four named entities.
I have read LotR probably ten times as often as I have seen the movies, so do not trust me if I say “this was/wasn’t in the movies” because the one overrides the other in my memory. I have read several shorter works of Thiel’s, but only two chapters of his book with David O. Sachs, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Imbalance on Campus, published in 1996. I read those for a purpose far removed from any considerations of literary theory and very far away from JRRT, doing post-grad in adult and post-secondary education.1
I do want to quickly summarize what I have drawn from my reading of and research into Thiel.
He is primarily a venture capitalist/tech startup guy, but because of concerns raised by his Stanford undergraduate experience, leading to The Diversity Myth, his writing and speech often move beyond a business vision into a vision of an evolving American, and perhaps global, view.
He is often grouped with the kind of Silicon Valley tech thinkers who are flirting with, if not outright advocating for, a move away from traditional liberal democracy towards a more dynamic2 technological future where aggressively innovative action will create a new social, political, and economic order. I do not consider myself in any way equipped to describe that order. I do understand that initial steps towards it involve actively tearing down the slow, discursive, consensus-based processes we have lived with for at least two centuries, and, in the university, for far longer.
Thiel is deeply interested in eschatology — the “end-point” or final purpose of humanity and its works. In “Against Edenism” (2015), he argues that allowing nature to reign unfettered is anti-Christian and will prevent a technological utopia in which “the forces of chaos and nature can and will be mastered.” He is disappointed (but not surprised) that Hollywood will not make a movie in which “a Luddite, an environmental extremist, or an FDA regulator is the arch-villain.” Untrammelled nature will lead to chaos; dynamic action - even of the Faustian model! - leads to the New City of God. This may help explain why Musk is rushing to Mars to outrace the “heat death foretold by the second law of thermodynamics.”3
Eschatology exists in JRRT’s thought too, but in a slower, more passive manner. Gandalf commonly voices this vision; he reminds us that the world as we knew it will soon be no more, either way a single battle or entire war goes; he speaks of the passing of the Ages as something both universal and deeply personal. The whole world enters the Fourth Age at the end of LotR not because of cosmic dynamism but because a king, himself relatively unknown, makes small personal changes: a blade reforged, a betrothal realized, a white tree replanted. Others make slow passage to quiet ends: to the sea, to the West.
In “Against Edenism,” Thiel looks for the kind of upheaval that turns the existing world into the New Heaven and New Earth promised in Revelation 21. Here, in fact, is the largest different between the writers many Christian thinkers will join at the hip: JRRT and C.S. Lewis. The Narnia chronicles end in a literal inversion of physics; the world turns inside out and New Narnia — the real world as Narnia — appears. One can practically hear the glory streaming from the heavens when this occurs. Contrast this with Galadriel’s clear-eyed eschatological acceptance: “I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel” (LotR, Book 2, Chapter 7) or Sam’s matter-of-fact, “Well, I’m back” (Book 6, Chapter 9).
In short, JRRT’s characters ride cosmic history, hanging on to personal morality and deep grief. Thiel plans to drive it. Yet he chose unmistakable, explicit LotR language for the ventures he believes will be his dynamos. Why? To what do they actually allude?
We might note here that Thiel’s earliest venture, PayPal, does not have an even remotely allusory name, and it has become the most conventional of tools, firmly absorbed in the traditional and supposedly moribund American economic model.
Let’s begin, then, with Anduril, the only one of the four names that exists entirely in the story arc of LotR. Not that it doesn’t have history, but the name Anduril is not connected to that history. It is the name Aragorn, the future king, gives to the reforged sword he has inherited as a shattered birthright, broken in the defeat of Sauron when Aragorn’s ancestor, Elendil, died in victory. The book does not even narrate the reforging; we hear after the fact that the elvish smiths have done their work and that Argorn has “called it Anduril, Flame of the West” (Book 2, Chapter 3).
It is nearly impossible to parse JRRT without grappling with the capitalized word West. For undergrads, sometimes it’s enough to point to the kind of afterlife into which Osiris, or Helios, sinks at the end of day, or the Far Shore of Buddhism; if East is origin; West is finality. But for JRRT, the West doesn’t only exist outside of Middle-Earth. The Undying Lands do; and they are in the West; but there is a Western geography within Middle-Earth, in the realm of mortal men. Traditionally, the West is the community and culture of the free peoples who oppose Sauron, and especially the men who are the descendants of the earliest mingling of human and Elvish blood, or Dunedain. However, it is a mistake to assume that allergic-to-allegory JRRT is trying to draw a stright line from his West to our world’s West, but that doesn’t seem to stop Thiel’s people. Just last month Palantir hoisted this sign in front of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh:4
In Thiel’s view, “the West” is a birthright inheritance from a culturally and intellectually superior bloodline; one that is constantly under threat by the forces at work in universities like Stanford, in their misguided attempts to prove that cultural diversity has value. Calling his business Anduri is an attempt to invoke the power of a unique blend of nearly superhuman men and immortal elves, passed “through many fathers.” What he seems to have missed is that Anduril does not actually save “the West.” Surely, Aragorn invokes its name and history to rally troops, and it does him good service at battles such as Helm’s Deep, the Pelennor Fields, and at the Black Gate, but it was never decisive; it never glowed or sang or split the skies; it never conferred upon its bearer anything more than the bearer himself had. This is true of much of the martial skill in the novel. The person — hobbit, shield-maiden, eagle, dwarf — is the true instrument of victory; the staff, sword, or axe are tools only.
Mithril, another of Thiel’s company names, is also an Elvish word for the metal called “true silver” in the common tongue. Its most famous manifestation is in the short coat of mail that Frodo wears which turns aside an Orc spear that should have killed him. While powerful, it is not magical; we are told that the metal is innately strong and light and highly prized for armor; it is very rare and incredibly difficult to mine. The coat that Bilbo bequeaths Frodo is, however, something less than a Western birthright. For one thing, it doesn’t legitimately belong to anyone; it’s part of Thorin’s recovered dwarvish treasure held hostage by a dragon; Thorin appropriates it centuries later, and gives it to Bilbo, who leaves it in a museum of curiosities (Maltham, or useless oddities) for decades. Mithril is found only in the Mines of Moria, which becomes the spiritual home of the family of dwarves known as Durin’s folk; they cause untold ruin to themselves and others by continuing to mine it and unleash the Balrog and other monstrosities of the deep. It is priceless, alluring, and deadly. It saves heroes selectively —shortly after the coat saves Frodo, that same unleashed Balrog takes Gandalf — and destroys entire dwarvish families. To valorize Mithril is to celebrate growing rich on blood diamonds.5 Sam, the hobbit Greek chorus, keeps it in its place for us when he refers to it as “Mr. Bilbo’s pretty coat.”
“Valar” is the name given to the race of angels or demigods who are the first production of Illuvatar, the creator of the World, in The Silmarillion. Like the angelic host, they sing; like Milton’s host, they produce from among their ranks the discontented and rebellious one who will be the forebearer and inspiration for the evil doers in the later Ages.
The Valar aren’t particularly powerful, not like Olympic gods, for example, but they are influential on Middle-Earth’s first peoples, elves and dwarves. They interact quite directly and pass on, not birthrights, but lessons. JRRT gives them natural qualities familiar in myth, such as the representation of seasons, or stars, or agriculture; one who was instrumental in making Gandalf into a moral being is Nienna, the Valar who embodies grief and compassion, or “pity.” Again, we can wonder exactly what about the Valar would be inspirational or symbolic to someone like Thiel who isn’t exactly crazy about nature, diurnal cycles, gentle acceptance of death, or empathy.
These examples so far suggest that Thiel’s impulse is towards grandeur — cosmic accomplishment, superior inheritance, unique influence, and constant innovation — but he neglects the implications of the roots of that grand exterior. The earth-shattering sword never shattered evil and instead was itself shattered. The inpenetrable armor leaves ruin in its wake. The cosmic creators and guides embody natural order and the place that death occupies in our hearts and minds.
But perhaps nowhere does Thiel’s vision cross paths with Middle-Earth as poorly as it does in the objects after which he named his most successful and influential business, Palantir.
Next week: A reflection on Stanford and the 90’s: Obstacles of the Third Age.
For reasons which may become obvious, I did not finish that degree. My M.A. is in literature. I thought to make my Ph.D. program social science - education - to supplement the theory with pragmatism, bringing the value of the humanities to a student body. Unlike many current thinkers in these areas, I found the social scientific approach to the work I loved to teach to be much more ideologically hidebound than the literary theory that takes so much heat for its “institutional capture” and less-kind descriptions, including maniacal, insane, nonsense, etc.
A word, along with its noun form dynamism, I encountered constantly in Thiel’s writing and in other writers’ descriptions of his thought.
https://firstthings.com/against-edenism/
https://sfstandard.com/2025/04/18/palantir-woos-elite-college-students-and-theyre-feeling-the-vibe/
This seems like the right time to point out that Elon Musk and David O. Sachs, the co-author of The Diversity Myth, are both South African.