Consider The Shire, an idyllic little slice of heaven where plump pumpkins are perched in truncated garden groves to be made into pies, soups, and beers for sculling down The Green Dragon. Here, song and merriment erupt out the door and into the bucolic countryside surrounding, filling the area with a sense of warmth that is both sincere and completely natural. Off to the East, however, the monolithic tower of Isengard looms large over desolated forests, where gross machinery hums to the stampeding goose step of apathetic and unfeeling industrialisation. There’s a certain power to Treebeard undamming the violent forest river as it washes away the fiendish cogs of purported progress and proves that nature will, at the end of the day, always reign supreme.
Cryptocurrencies are not good. They generate significant amounts of non-essential energy and lead to enormous heat emissions from hardware tied to planned obsolescence models that, as a result, needs to be replaced on an alarmingly regular basis. On top of that, they also generate e-waste and encourage people to set up enormous mining rigs – there’s a reason why 30 series GPUs are in such short supply, and it’s not just because of scalpers. Bitcoin mining uses more energy than the entire country of Argentina.
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The reason I’m explaining this is because, as you can likely tell from the previous two paragraphs, the idea of a Tolkien-inspired cryptocurrency is ludicrous. The Professor certainly had his issues, but being a climate change apologist was absolutely not one of them. Tolkien was always a writer who consciously spoke to how essential it is to restore our environment to its proper state. He was abhorred by the whirling cogs of progress, tirelessly spinning to whip up a sickly haze designed to shroud the beauty of the natural world. You look at areas like the aforementioned Shire, Rivendell, Mirkwood, and Fangorn Forest and you immediately become witness to sublimity. On the contrary, the ominous fog of Isengard and Minas Morgul is very clear in its thematic messaging. There’s also a reason places like Osgiliath and the metropolitan Minas Tirith – supposed havens for the good guys – are blown to bits.
Yesterday, a new cryptocurrency called “JRR Token” went viral on Twitter with a Cameo-purchased advertisement from Pippin actor Billy Boyd. Boyd, alongside Ian McKellen and Dominic Monaghan, has always been one of my favourite LOTR cast members off screen – I even wrote a sizable breakdown of his Edge of Night scene in The Return of the King in order to prove its worth as one of the most underappreciated sequences in the entire trilogy. Knowing what I know about Boyd, this seemed out of character. JRR Token later announced that it had bought the ad using Cameo’s business model, meaning that it owned the rights for commercial reuse – thankfully, only for 30 days – even if Boyd didn’t necessarily know what he was involuntarily selling.
That’s not to say Boyd was 100 percent ignorant to crypto – the phrasing just implies that the buyers knew it didn’t matter whether he was on board with a practice that instigates immense environmental pollution or not. After receiving backlash from well-read Tolkien fans, the proprietors of this new crypto strand started to talk about decentralisation, claiming that Saruman represents centralised power while the Fellowship act in pursuit of economic freedom. It’s safe to say that economics wasn't necessarily the most important thing on Tolkien’s mind when he wrote The Lord of the Rings, save for the fact that gross industrialisation and environmental destruction are, in fact, bad. Why employ critical thinking when you can uncharitably wrench themes and thoughts out of their original intention to serve your own commercial interests, though? Why use the name of such a beloved late author in good faith when you can just as easily do so in bad? Such is the state of our sorry and slimy corporatocratic hellscape of a hell-scorched Earth. These lads probably reckon the sinking of Numenor and death of everyone who lived there was a good thing – it’s in service of fighting centralisation, right? Wrong.
On one hand, co-opting the name and legacy of a dead author is hideously unempathetic. On the other, consciously choosing to misread what are supposed to be value systems designed to inspire good is downright disingenuous. I’m not one to say, “This dead person would think this about a thing that never even existed as a concept while they were alive,” but I think anyone with the slightest capacity for reason would be able to rationalise Tolkien’s inevitably intense hatred towards crypto, a money-grubbing, environmentally destructive system that serves no one but the selfishly spacebound nouveau riche. In chapter 18 of The Hobbit, Thorin Oakenshield says, “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” Spoken like a true partisan for death by digital capitalism.
I’ve seen a lot of people express intense disdain towards JRR Token, but I’m not sure many of those same people recognise the sheer extent of the disrespect required to tout it. I don’t blame Billy Boyd for advertising it – if he’s sent a script on Cameo, he reads it, job done. I am currently choosing to believe that he was in the dark about the harm this causes both to the legacy of Tolkien and the world we live in. If this is the case – that Boyd was unwillingly ignorant towards JRR Token’s impact – it makes the entire situation all the more repugnantly exploitative.
My walls are adorned with first editions of Tolkien’s books that were absolutely fiscally irresponsible for me to obtain. I have read through his oeuvre extensively, reaching esoteric appendices designed to texture Middle-earth and going back to read his academic papers on philology and Anglo-Saxon literature. I am, without a shadow of a doubt, extremely and near uniquely well-equipped to speak to why this is wrong and why it’s important to call it out. Co-opting the name of a dead author to sell your dangerously capricious crypto is execrable and inexcusable. Burn JRR Token to the ground before it and everything like it burns us.
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