Elon Musk Really Doesn’t Get ‘The Lord of the Rings’

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels—and the associated “legendarium” of characters, histories, myths, maps, and constructed languages—have served as a bedrock of so-called “nerd culture” since their publication in the mid-1950s.

With its clear-cut characterizations, and (more-or-less) cleanly delineated lines between Good and Evil, Tolkien’s imagined Middle-earth—a vast and geographically variegated realm teeming with elves, dwarves, wizards, dragons, orcs, and halflings—can…