Lord of the Rings is one of most popular fantasy universes, with adaptations being made regularly to this day. Some of these recent adaptations are said to make Tolkien roll in his grave. Two Middle-earth games by Monolith are (on the other hand) considered very good, but they constitute a profound departure from the philosophical leitmotifs of the original work.
Tolkien once remarked that the prime motive of his fiction was “the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in the real world,” and the truth he had in mind was broadly Catholic philosophical vision of creation, freedom and destiny. Shadow of Mordor, for all its affectionate quotation of Middle-earth geography, reverses that vision in many parts..
Start with the central question: how is evil defeated? For Thomism, and therefore for Tolkien, evil is not a substance to be out-gunned but a privation healed by humility cooperating with hidden Providence. Frodo’s quest succeeds precisely because he does not try to master the Ring; he renounces self-assertion, and the deed is completed by mercies he never planned—Bilbo’s pity, Gollum’s obsession, the Ring’s own treachery. The Monolith games replace that pattern with the oldest temptation in the book: acquire a bigger stick. Talion and Celebrimbor do not renounce power; they incubate it. They forge a second Ring, raise a private orc army and set out to dominate Sauron the way Sauron dominated others. Power is treated as a neutral tool that merely needs better, more enlightened decision center.
Tolkien’s virtue ethics warns that the means chosen sculpt the moral identity of the chooser. Every “instrument of iniquity” leaves a deposit on the will. Boromir, Saruman, even Frodo at the Crack of Doom learn that one cannot touch pitch and remain unstained. The gameplay, ingenious as it is, insulates the player from that cost. You brand minds, explode heads, raise the dead—yet the mechanics reward ever-greater coercion with loot and orc promotions. Talion’s groaned one-liners supply the aesthetic of tragedy without its metaphysical weight; the gameplay loop still high-fives you for creative cruelty.
Then there is the status of orcs. Tolkien presents orcs as creatures so totally given over to malice that they have become metaphysically irredeemable. You may pity them, but you cannot parley with them any more than you can reform a cancer. But you can do it in Shadow of Mordor, thanks to Celebrimor’s brainwashing powers, which turns some of them into career-minded middle managers. Ratbag, Bruz and the rest are comic, sympathetic, even plausibly liberal subjects: they have career ladders, grievances, quirky personalities.
Behind that shift lies a different anthropology. Tolkien sees the self as oriented towards virtue and vocation; even the mighty define their greatness by renunciation. Gandalf and Galadriel measure their power by the temptation they refuse. Boromir falls tempted by the Ring, but he repents, dying in the defence of halfwings. The game gives us the modern liberal self: a sovereign will that merely needs better instruments. Celebrimbor is an aspiring director of orcs shopping for seed funding; Talion is the wearable tech that keeps him alive. Freedom is re-defined as the capacity to rewrite the world so that it serves my life-plan, not as the liberty to align oneself with an order that precedes choice.
Politically, Tolkien calls legitimate rule “ministerial,” patterned on the servant-king Aragorn who spends decades labouring in the wilds before he claims the crown. The Bright-Lord project is the exact opposite: install the right artefact, manage the orc-HR system, and history will bend.
. Where Tolkien sees original sin as a permanent drag on every earthly blueprint, the game sees only an engineering problem. Patch the security flaws in Ring 2.0 and the millennium can be brought in by Tuesday.
“Bright” here could be a pun that summarizes it (planned or not). It sounds close to “Wraith-Lord” (with obviously villainish connotation to the Witch-King), it references not only the wraith’s visible form, but also the feature of being smart or enlightened, and it resonates with “might” and “right”.
Finally, there is the question of hope. Tolkien coined the term “eucatastrophe” for the providential turn that breaks the logic of might-makes-right. History is not a linear arms race but a drama moving toward a joy that no human calculus could engineer. Shadow of Mordor ends by promising Ring 3.0. Evil is not transformed; it is out-updated. The post-credit teaser is the perfect liberal-eschatological image: progress as iterative upgrade, ascension as better firmware.
So the philosophical distance between Tolkien and the games is not a matter of lore fidelity—whether Elves swear in Quenya or the timeline allows Minas Ithil to fall yet. It is the deeper divergence between a classical cosmos in which power is safe only in the hands that refuse it, and a late-modern liberal cosmos in which power is the neutral prerequisite of any project of the self. One imagines history held open by grace, the other imagines history closed by technique. One teaches that the means stain the end, the other that the end justifies the patch notes. One ends with the quiet hymn of the hobbits singing on the quays of the Grey Havens, the other with a wraith promising that version 3.0 will definitely not corrupt the user. Tolkien could call that the oldest temptation of all: “non serviam” rejection of moral reality presented as pragmatism, pursued over and over with a stubbornness worthy of his close relative Feanor.
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