Christopher Tolkien, the now deceased son of the author, stated that the settlement would “allow The Tolkien Trust to properly pursue its charitable objectives."
The Tolkien Trust was founded by Tolkien’s children in the seventies to use some of the income from the estate of the celebrated philologist and author for charitable works. Two generations later, these works appear to have drifted quite far from anything that the conservative scholar might have wished.John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a staunch Catholic, a monarchist and proudly provincial. The Tolkien Trust funds fairly few Catholic and many international human rights causes. Its English charities would often have been best left unfunded considering the great harm that they do to the ‘shires’ of his land.
In 2018 and 2017, the Tolkien Trust sent a total of 80,000 pounds to Asylum Welcome. AW welcomes "asylum seekers, refugees and detainees" coming to Oxford and Oxfordshire. It boasts of its accomplishments in bringing Sudanese, Somalis, and Syrians to Oxford.
The majority of AW migrants come from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea.
AW partners with six Oxford and Oxfordshire "community organizations". Two of them are Syrian, two Somali, and one Sudanese. Its Syrian Resettlement program notes its success in registering Syrian asylum seekers for "benefits". That, in the name of an author who once raged at government taxation.
Not satisfied with bringing Muslim migrants to Oxford, AW also runs services for detained migrants who are due to be removed and claims to have "played an important part in… facilitating their release".
Oxford, like many places in the United Kingdom, that have suffered from mass migration from some of these countries, has experienced its own sex grooming ring scandal. More recently, Salman Ahmad, a Muslim refugee, gang raped a woman in Oxford after only being in the country for four months.
The orcs are about in Oxfordshire.
The Tolkien Trust sent 80,000 pounds to RefuAid which funds Syrian migrants in the UK. RefuAid, among other things, urges supporters to lobby MPs to increase local resettlement numbers. 75,000 pounds were sent to Doctors of the World UK which advocates for helping refugees access the NHS. And pumped another 70,000 into the Koestler Trust which aids prisoners and immigration detainees.
60,000 pounds was sent to La Cimade, which aids thousands of migrants entering France. 50,000 was sent to SOS Mediterranee and 10,000 pounds to Pilotes Voluntaires, which help migrants reach Europe.
The Tolkien Trust not only supports hypothetical, but actual Islamic terrorists by dispatching 190,000 pounds in the last two years to Reprieve. The British group boasts of having “led the fight for access to the men held at Guantánamo" and of having "secured freedom for more than 80 men."
Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's founder, represented among others, Moazzam Begg, who returned to the UK and went on to found CAGE, a pro-terrorist group, and to urge sympathy for Al Qaeda.
CAGE called Jihadi John, the ISIS killer of Britons like David Haines and Alan Henning, a “beautiful man”.
In a tragic irony, the Tolkien Trust is using the proceeds from Lord of the Rings to fund modern day orcs.
After September 11, some found inspiration in the invocation of the battle between good and evil of the films. Unbeknownst to them, the films may have ended up funding that very evil we were fighting.
Using the proceeds of Tolkien’s explorations of Middle Earth, the Tolkien Trust is spending a good deal of money on Muslim charities and on organizations doing a great deal of work in the Middle East.
In the last two years, the Tolkien Trust has sent 41,000 pounds to Basmeh and Zeitooneh, a Syrian refugee charity, 60,000 pounds together in the last two years to the Aladdin Project and Association IMAD, two Muslim dialogue organizations in France, and 300,000 pounds to Medecins du Monde and 400,000 to Medecins Sans Frontihres, the original group, for its work in Libya and Yemen.
While J.R.R. Tolkien was conservative, the Tolkien Trust’s spending on matters unrelated to its founder is similar to any other leftist trust. There’s 10,000 pounds for Greenpeace, 50,000 for Peace Brigades International, which has a history of supporting Marxists, and 110,000 pounds for another anti-war group. Considering Tolkien’s views of the Spanish Civil War, he would not have supported PBI.
This obsession with “international relations and peace building” would have been foreign to him.
There’s plenty of money for criminal charities like the Howard League for Penal Reform, the Shannon Trust, the New Bridge Foundation, and the Prison Phoenix Trust. And for homeless charities. Yet for an organization funded by the work of Tolkien, a devout Christian, it’s striking how few Christian organizations are funded by the Trust.
Last week, I wrote of how the Roddenberry Foundation was exploiting the funds of the Star Trek creator to subsidize Islamists and racists who hate this country, its achievements and its ideals. There is a similar tragedy in the work of another fantastic creator being used to fund agendas he would have loathed.
The Trust is funded by some US copyrights of Lord of the Rings, along with assorted other translations and fragmentary works that Tolkien never chose to publish in his lifetime, but that have been used to feed a demand for Lord of the Rings material. No matter how unpublishable it really might be. And, perversely, those who buy books of Tolkien’s philosophical works and letters are funding the Trust.
J.R.R. Tolkien was profoundly suspicious of power, yet his Trust is used to fund the causes of a Sauronesque leftist political movement that believes in total power over all people for their own good.
"I am not a 'socialist' in any sense - being adverse to 'planning',” Tolkien wrote. “most of all because the 'planners', when they acquire power, become so bad—but I would not say we had to suffer the malice of Sharkey and his Ruffians here. Though the spirit of 'Isengard', if not of Mordor, is always cropping up.”
His Trust has imbibed the spirit of Isengard enough to embrace socialism and what comes with it.
In the Scouring of the Shire, the final struggle of Lord of the Rings, the hobbits return home to discover a devastated socialist landscape with lists of rules and ‘sharers’ collecting all the food, where the native farmers have been intimidated by “squint-eyed and sallow-faced” robbers acting as tax collectors.
If J.R.R. Tolkien were to return today, he would discover that his own Trust is filling the UK with orcs.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
