FOR MOST LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy fans, hobbits are the portly folk of Middle-earth who live in homes carved out of hillsides in “the Shire’’ and spend their lives smoking pipe-weed, singing songs and drinking ale. But some influential real-life people see hobbit life in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth—free from government intervention and overreach—as close to societal perfection.
Paypal co-founder and early Trump ally Peter Thiel, for instance, spent his teenage years reading and rereading The Lord of the. Palantir Technologies, the multibillion dollar data mining and surveillance firm he cofounded, gets its name from“palantiri,” indestructible “seeing stones” in Tolkien’s books; its Palo Alto offices are known informally as “the Shire.” Other Thiel companies have Tolkien-inspired names like Valar Ventures and Rivendell One LLC.
