A look at why The Lord of the Rings trilogy continues to surface in American culture.

By Jordan Fouts

From the geeks crowded around a table pitting an elf's wit against an orc's might, to the college professor nearly as dusty as the books cluttering his office, to the most tie-dyed-in-the-wool flower child crying for peace, anyone who's been influenced by the age-old tale of good vs. evil owes something to a stodgy old Catholic scholar at Oxford by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The canon of works Tolkien produced in his lifetime, especially the series exploring the three ages of Middle-earth, is at the seat of the modern fantasy genre. "The Lord of the Rings" has been synonymous with myth and fantasy for a good part of the past century, and the tales told over the course of more than a dozen books are the stuff of modern legend. Many people have at least a passing acquaintance with the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo, the good wizard Gandalf and their nemesis, the corrupt Sauron. Stories of quests, epic battles, loves, losses and entire lifetimes unfold throughout the series. The books appeal to a diverse audience and lend themselves to different levels of appreciation. They serve as fodder for everything from academic study—a few universities have structured classes around them—to mass-market paraphernalia.

"The Lord of the Rings" was indoctrinated into American popular culture after pirated copies of the British release found their way across the Atlantic in the mid-1960s. The series first took hold on college campuses, where students embraced it during the counter-culture period. The result was the free love and drug culture became attracted to the work of an old-fashioned British college professor – “I’m sure he thought it was pretty weird,” says Simon Morgan-Russell, assistant chair of the English department.

Hippies dug The Lord of the Rings for a number of reasons. They adopted “Frodo lives” as a catchphrase of the times, declaring it with bumper stickers and graffiti alongside slogans like, “Make love, not war” and “Visualize world peace.” The stories became a staple of the developing popular culture market.

"It was buttons and T-shirt kind of stuff," says Shawn Wilbur, owner of Pauper’s Books. Even today, a search at an online auction site reveals HOW MANY (HUNDREDS?) posters, toys and other collector’s items, and sales of Tolkien’s books remain stronger in the United States than in their native England. The series’ popularity has come in waves, often coinciding with releases of later books furthering the Middle-earth mythos, like “The Silmarillion.”

The emergence of a new wave can be seen, related to the upcoming release of film versions of the initial written trilogy. Movie theaters, bookstores and hobby shops were gearing up long before the first installment is set to grace the screens this December. New editions of the books and new toys are being made, besides items like miniature roleplaying games – appropriate, since Wilbur accredits the series with helping to launch that type of gaming.
Teaser posters appeared in theaters a few months ago; the Cla-Zel Theater gets at least three people a week asking for them since they were put up, says Penny Munger, the general manager. “(The movie) will definitely do well,” she says. “There are too many Tolkien fans for it not to.”

Among reasons for the books’ initial popularity, Wilbur says, is a general revival of the fantasy genre in the 1960s and 1970s. The Lord of the Rings both rode the wave and encouraged its swell: New works were produced, while old ones were rediscovered. “A tremendous amount of stuff had been forgotten and was dredged up because people read Tolkien and wanted to know what else was out there,” he says. “Books saw a market in science fiction and fantasy, and for them, it was enormously successful for a long time. Some are still capitalizing on it.”

Environmental issues found in the series are another reason it appealed to students at the time. “Tolkien was a proto-environmentalist before it was in fashion. He loved trees and the English countryside, and it comes out in the descriptions in his books,” Morgan-Russell says. Tolkien gives an idyllic image of pre-World War II England, with its values and governmental system, and glorifies the lush medieval landscape.

Perhaps more notable is the books’ relation to the period’s political climate. In the wake of World War II, with the Cold War underway, the nuclear age was ushering in new fears. There was "the threat of the world being covered in darkness," much like Sauron’s shadowy throne land of Mordor, says Tom Wymer, chair of the English department.

The setting in which Tolkien wrote the series—during both world wars, watching Hitler’s rise to power—had a clear influence on the work, Morgan-Russell says. "The writer is a part of the culture, he's influenced by it,” he says. “So it's no surprise to me that it was written at a time of social injustice...the story of righteousness vs. a dark lord…can be read as an expression of anxiety in the Second World War."

"A recurring theme in literature is the fear of a coming apocalypse,” Wymer says. “Times of great threat, such as the initiation of the nuclear age, inspire a sense of the possibility of fundamental changes. They force us to look at the world in a radically different way, and fear the major loss of some of the things we most value." But apocalypse is used as something avoidable, he points out. The books suggest that some hope remains. "Much is lost in the struggle (against Sauron), but much is preserved,” Wymer says. “It's the end of the Third Age of Middle-earth -- but it's not the end of Middle-earth."

Though the temptation is strong to suggest that Sauron personifies Hitler and the rings signify nuclear warfare, Tolkien did not really intend his fiction to be allegorical. “Tolkien meant his work to be pure fantasy,” Morgan-Russell says. “He meant nothing other than what he wrote—you’re not meant to be read between the line.”

This, Wymer says, lends strength to the series’ longevity. “Someone like Tolkien thinks more in terms of history,” he says. “The nice thing with those kinds of stories is the authors know better than to make connections too strongly to a specific historical event—the kinds of concerns they deal with are perennial, they keep coming up.” and so are dealt with in a more general way. “That’s why it continues to live. You can fill in your own dark threat for Mordor.”
Meanwhile, the way the series displays the scholar in Tolkien is what appeals to the erudite, Morgan-Russell says. The Oxford professor’s background was in Anglo-Saxon studies, which included ancient and medieval literature and languages. Like M.C. Escher using mathematical principles to craft pictures of seeming impossibility, Tolkien used his “scholarly acumen to structure the text. There are many things underlying which you may not recognize (unless) you look closer.” Tolkien constructed his worlds so richly that reading The Lord of the Rings gives one the sense of a very well-established, multi-layered, almost historical account of ancient lands and races.

“There were certainly plenty of people before Tolkien, but I’m not sure there’s ever been another world as completely realized as his,” Wilbur says. Tolkien began constructing his works by creating the three-tiered realm of Over-heaven, Middle-earth and Underworld. He conceived an entire mythology from creation-up, complete with deities and legends. He details the origin of each race, giving the evolution of its language and culture, Wilbur says.

"Tolkien believed he had to create the whole genealogy of a character before you could understand the character himself," says Bruce Edwards, English professor and associate dean of distance learning. “You could say Tolkien’s world is well-populated.”

Edwards points to the devotees who “know the complete history; it’s essential to their enjoyment. Tolkien feeds that comprehensiveness.”

The tongues of Middle-earth’s races perhaps best illustrate Tolkien’s scholarly background. Drawing from his translation experience, the scholar formed the written and spoken forms of entire languages and their etymologies for his works. He based their words and pronunciation on the roots of existing languages, and took the names of people and places in his works from the language he created. Tolkien’s fabricated languages show a strong sense of grammatical structure, showing he didn’t just make them up, Morgan-Russell says.

Today, books, tutorials and clubs on such fabricated tongues as Qyenya and Sindaran can be found, studied as diligently as ancient Greek or Latin. Wilbur remembers knowing such a devotee, a girl in upstate New York who used elvish runes for much of what she wrote.

Tolkien’s work has often been imitated, but, many insist, never rivaled. “One reason the books stand out and endure is their depth,” Morgan-Russell says. “There’s a level of complexity in Tolkien’s work that crosses boundaries others don’t.”