There’s something about The Lord of the Rings that attracts all sorts of weirdos, as even I, a Tolkienist of many decades, have to admit.

In America in the 1960s and 1970s it was spaced-out hippies; in Russia 10 years ago it was new age theosophists. And everywhere racists flock to it. The British National party positively enthuses over the tale of elves and hobbits.

The youth section of the neo-Nazi party’s internet site declares it a “must-have book for all BNP supporters” and gives the film this endorsement: “Everyone who is in the slightest bit stirred by the feelings of our racial and national struggle to win back our homeland should go and see it.” Who knows how many members are contributing to record box-office receipts for the latest Rings instalment?

As long ago as 1977, Italian fascists adopted JRR Tolkien. It was then that the Movimento Sociale Italiano ran the first Hobbit Camp for its young supporters. The Italian Tolkien Society was effectively taken over by a prominent member of the party before the MSI metamorphosed into Alleanza Nazionale, a right-wing party in Silvio Berlusconi’s current government. Tolkien’s work remains a focus point of rallies.

At first sight this attitude seems strange. Tolkien himself could not remotely be described as racist.

When in 1938 the German publisher of The Hobbit asked him to confirm his Aryan ancestry he blew his top. He detested Hitler and Nazism because of their betrayal of the “northern” (not Nordic) heritage he loved.

He described attitudes to colour in South Africa as appalling even before the introduction of apartheid. He was a “Little Englander” and did not approve of the British state, let alone the British Empire.

So why is the BNP so keen to embrace him? First, it must be admitted that the Orcs are not Tolkien’s happiest invention. Developed from the goblins of fairy tales, they are just all-purpose nasties — slobbering, ape-like, slitty-eyed — the classic Other whose extermination is a positive duty.

In 1958 Tolkien reviewed a preliminary script for a proposed film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. In a letter of complaint he wondered why the Orcs had been given beaks and feathers.

“The Orcs,” Tolkien writes, “are definitely stated to be corruptions of the ‘human’ forms seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”

It doesn’t take too much imagination to see how this can be identified with any racial group you want to hate (though Tolkien is careful to add that the Orcs were “degraded and repulsive versions” of those Mongol peoples who would be least attractive to European sensibilities).

For those looking for racial overtones, the fact that the enemy is the Dark Lord and lives in the Black Land — and his most feared servants are the Black Riders — just completes the picture.

But the struggle is all too often depicted as the good guys against absolute evil. More dominant in my view is Tolkien’s “northern” heroic ethic. Tolkien had a profound love of the old German poem Hildebrandslied, the Icelandic sagas and English epics such as Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon, in which a band of warrior comrades make a last stand against overwhelming odds.

Much is made of macho comradeship in these works and this, with other elements of the warrior ethic, was imported into The Lord of the Rings. As is often noted, there are not many women in this book. Instead, there’s a lot of male bonding — some so intense as to verge on the homoerotic, with communal baths and hobbits running naked on the grass.

When it comes to Aryan ideals, though, admittedly there are elements in the Rings that would hold considerable appeal for those who believe in a blood-and-soil racist nationalism.

The Fellowship of the Ring, for example, consists of nine sturdy chaps from northern and western lands, five of whom are pretty heroic, labouring to overcome the alien. In the book, however, none is blond. What’s more, the Orcs exhibit a similar sense of tough-guy bonding. As Professor Tom Shippey, a Tolkien scholar, has pointed out, their ethos sometimes seems that of lads in a rugby club.

More extreme, perhaps, is the matter of bloodlines. The Men of Gondor, the “high men”, are descended from the Numenoreans, the mightiest of men, and have over the centuries declined from that exalted state — presumably in part because their blood has been mixed with that of inferior men. When the genealogical line runs true, as it does in Aragorn’s descent, the glory of the ancient Lords of the West is born again.

But for every Tolkien episode that talks to the extremists and racists, another does not fit or even contradicts their theories. For instance, the warrior ethic takes one only so far. There may be few women but their roles are crucial.

And above all, the main theme of the book is that of renunciation, transience and mortality. Frodo’s task is to destroy the ring of power, but in that heroic act he is diminished. Galadriel renounces the ring and loses control of her land. The elves leave their home and depart over the sea. In Tolkien’s phrase, most characters are “fighting the long defeat”.

Tolkien’s popularity lies in part in the many different ways in which his writing can be interpreted. To quote another fantasy writer, Ursula LeGuin: “No ideologues are going to be happy with Tolkien unless they manage it by misreading him.”

David Doughan is a Tolkien Society member