Imaginary Worlds - The Hobbits and The Hippies

Episode Date: September 7, 2016

J.R.R. Tolkien wanted his work to be taken seriously. But his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings was unlike most of great literature of the mid-20th century, which was modernist or tackled the great issues of the day. And wasn't The Hobbit a children's book? The critics wondered, is this sequel supposed to be serious literature for adults? But there was a group of people who took Middle-earth very seriously and pushed this cult classic into the mainstream -- they just weren't the people Tolkien had expected. Wheaton College professor Michael Drout, Gary Lachman ("Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of Aquarius") and Ethan Gilsdorf ("Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks") explain how and why Tolkien became a folk hero to the counter-culture -- whether he liked it or not. ***This is the first in a six-part series on Magic and Fantasy***Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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But John Ronald Ruel Tolkien was such an outlier in the world of academia. There was a lot of nasty, snide Oxford gossip going on for a long time. So it was like, oh, he was a genius, but he ran off the rails and started writing these crazed epics. This is Michael Drought. He teaches the work of Tolkien at Wheaton College. Tolkien had one of the plum jobs at Oxford. So he's the Rawlinson Bosworth professor of Anglo-Saxon. It meant that he had to give a number of lectures, but he had a much lower workload than a lot of other Oxford professors on the understanding that he's going to produce amazing and great scholarship like he had done at the beginning of his career. And he produced very little. And what he produced was weird. Why? Well, for example, he sends off to Essays and Studies this article on the Battle of Malden, except it's not an article. It's a play in blank verse. Now, it's turned out to be one of the most

influential things ever written about the Battle of Malden. But I can't imagine what the editor was thinking when he opened it. It's like, a play? And that was hardly the strangest thing that Professor Tolkien was known for. In 1937, he put out a fantasy novel called The Hobbit. His colleagues were okay with that. I mean, you can't blame the man for wanting to make extra money on the side. But Tolkien had become obsessed, even lost in this imaginary world that he'd created. For 17 years, he sort of kept telling his publishers, I'm working on this sequel, The Hobbit.

And it's really funny to read some of this stuff where, you know, in 1939 or so, he's saying, I think I'll be done by Christmas. And he finished it 16 years later. Tolkien was on a mission. He felt that fantasy had a role to play in modern life because fantasy can give people a sense of comfort and meaning when the world feels chaotic. The writer Ethan Gilsdorf says those ideas came from Tolkien's life. Tolkien himself lived through World War I.

I mean, he was a survivor of World War I. And all of his high school and college buddies, most of them died in the Battle of the Somme and other places in continental Europe. You know, he was haunted, I think, by all that loss. And he lost his own, both his parents. He was orphaned quite young. And that may have had something to do with, you know, his own tendency to fantasize about this other world, other place. to fantasize about this other world, other place. When his magnum opus finally came out in 1954, The Lord of the Rings was so massive,

it had to be split into three separate novels. A lot of people were confused. The Hobbit was seen as a children's book, but this was supposed to be serious-minded literature for adults? They published 3,000 copies of The Fellowship and 3,000 copies of the Two Towers and only 2,500 copies of The Return of the King because they figured that interest would have worn off by then. So this led to, you know, this sort of first start of the great word of mouth campaign about the Lord of the Rings because people went to libraries and things to get The

Return of the King and it wasn't there. Or there was only one copy, and people camped out in front of libraries waiting for them to open. There's some really charming stories by British writers who grew up in the 50s saying, I read the first two over a weekend, and I was at the library door on Monday morning, and the only copy was checked out. Tolkien's friends, like C.S. Lewis, helped with the public relations, hailing Lord of the Rings as a work of genius. But many critics were far from sold. In the 1950s, great literature was supposed to be modernist, grappling with the major issues of the day.

The Lord of the Rings was retro, if not reactionary. As for Tolkien, he was annoyed. These so-called scholars who thumbed their noses at him, he knew their work would be forgotten. The Lord of the Rings will be understood and appreciated on his terms someday. But very soon, a movement of people would gather to hail him as a genius and declare Lord of the Rings to be the great literature of its time. And these people would push this cult classic into the mainstream. The problem is, they were not the right kind of

people. They were people that Tolkien didn't understand or would want to be associated with. They were long-haired, pot-smoking, rock-and-roll-loving hippies. More on that after the break. Gary Lachman is the author of Turn Off Your Mind, The Mystic Sixties, and The Dark Side of Aquarius. Also, fun fact, he was the bassist for the group Blondie. Aquarius. Also, fun fact, he was the bassist for the group Blondie. But back in the 1960s, Gary was a kid growing up in New York City. And the first time he came across Lord of the Rings,

he was reading Marvel Comics. At the time, you know, they were very hip. They were very contemporary. Their heroes were set in New York. You know, they weren't set in imaginary cities like Metropolis or Gotham. And so, you know, things that were happening at the time would turn up in the comics. And in them, they would put in these signs sometimes saying Frodo lives. And I had no idea what that was. Pretty soon, young Gary learned that hippies were going to protest with buttons that said Frodo lives. They were driving around in vans with bumper stickers that said Gandalf for President. So how on Middle Earth did this ever happen? Well, it all started with a guy named Don Wolheim. In the early 60s,

he was running a publishing company called Ace Books, which put out cheap paperbacks. He mostly focused on sci-fi, but he was very excited about Lord of the Rings and he wanted to publish it in the United States. There was only one problem. He didn't own the rights. At the time, the copyright law was such that you could print in the U.S. a paperback edition of books published in England or overseas and pay no royalties at all. And Ace Paperbacks is like, hey, we'll just print it. So Tolkien hears about these paperbacks,

which are full of misprints, and he's losing money. His publisher in England told him the only way to stop Ace Books was to put out a new official version of Lord of the Rings in the U.S. with minor changes to the story. The only problem is you can't exactly tell J.R.R. Tolkien to dash off a new version of Lord of the Rings. He hemmed and hawed and again took his time and took forever and just did all the stuff other than what he was needed to do.

And a really long time went by before he finally did what was necessary. But by that time, the Ace edition had sold like over 100,000 copies. So that's how Lord of the Rings became a hot commodity in college campuses in the 60s. The trickier question is why? Now, Gary Lachman thinks that Tolkien's ideas were falling on fertile ground because the newly emerging counterculture was interested in all things mystical. And that had started with the publication of another book from Europe called The Mourning of the Magicians.

Out of the blue, it had become a bestseller in France and then subsequently did so in its English editions. And it's a real hodgepodge of a book, and a great deal of it is inaccurate. But it was the first book to kind of throw together in this kind of assortment of strange things, this interest in the occult and UFOs and alchemy and a variety of different kind of like X-file sort of things. It just sparked a whole new spirit.

It's as if everything was in black and white and suddenly it was in technicolor. And Lord of the Rings totally fit into that mystical groove. Tolkien's world opened up this kind of early New Age kind of universe, in the sense of the sacredness of the earth, the sacredness of the Shire. There's another popular theory, which Tolkien was asked about in a TV interview. There is a temptation to read into the book a kind of allegory of the H-POM. What is said somewhere in the book is that the One Ring is a power so enormous that even if a good man were

to use it against a bad, it would corrupt the good man. But that is a thing which other people have arrived, other views that other people arrived at long before H-POM was invented. Also, I may say that I began building the stories of the Dark Lord when I was an undergraduate. They were already on a bad stage during the first war. The H-1 hadn't been heard of. I actually found an article from 1968 called The Hobbit and the Hippie from a magazine called Modern Age. The authors were at their wits end trying to figure out Tolkien mania. They thought The Lord of the Rings was a conservative story about good fighting evil. I mean, Frodo doesn't tell Gandalf to buzz off because he doesn't trust anyone over the age of 30. Aragorn doesn't

declare that he's a conscientious objector and refuse to fight the orcs. In the end, the authors conclude, quote, the hippies and their bizarre search for values in the modern world have enthusiastically taken up a book with a view of the universe and a creature's place in it, which is distinctly opposed to prevailing philosophies. Michael Drout disagrees. I mean, on the one hand, you can say what people do now. Oh, it celebrates war.

Look, all the great heroes are warriors. But on the other, you can say what the counterculture people opposed the Vietnam War said was this celebrates the bucolic life of the hobbits. The good guys are not warriors and killers, but people who just want peace and safety and kindness. There's an environmental ethic that's way ahead of its time. And the one thing that I think really appealed to the counterculture was that the bad guys were those who eliminated individuality. They were those who crushed the individual. They wore uniforms. They all looked the same. They followed orders. Whereas some of the good guys are like that in Gondor or something. Most of the good guys in the Lord of the Rings are not big on following orders at all. Well, also, though, there's a strong there's a whole sense of the fellowship as well, that we're stronger together, that it's not just sort of the, you know, Western style of rugged individualism. Yes, I would agree, except the difference is that it's all voluntary. Right. Yes, I would agree, except the difference is that it's all voluntary, right? I mean, even when Elrond does the official, like, the charge to the Fellowship, the thing is that only the ring bearer has a charge on him, and that's to go take the ring to Mordor.

Everyone else is there as a voluntary companion, and you can leave, you can stay. And then a few other pieces of it are sort of like the – in the Fellowship, everybody has a different skill, and they contribute each according to his ability. I mean, if that doesn't describe a hippie commune, I don't know what is. And the hobbits like to sit around and smoke pipe weed. Michael says another reason why the hippies felt a kinship with Tolkien, they were both equally disenchanted with modern life, especially commercialism and materialism. Tolkien, he liked a few pieces of modernity, you know, like electric lights and running water and things like that. But on the other hand, you know, he had been young enough and poor enough to know that you didn't actually need

a lot of those things. And Tolkien, at the very beginning, he had bought a car and it was family stories. He just crashed into stuff all the time there's like multiple stories of tolkien just you know ran over a fruit stand or something like that because he wasn't paying attention and he got rid of it and the rest of his life he used his bicycle to get to you know from his house to to oxford and stuff so he kind of lived that semi- pre-modern life, you know, that that 1880s to 1910 or so life. And I think that that appealed. I mean, again, the hippies didn't. Well, some of them lived in tents and so forth, but they didn't reject, you know, electric

light and running water completely. But it was the idea of all the other stuff. Now, Tolkien did not have an issue with the politics of the counterculture in terms of the Vietnam War or civil rights. The mismatch is that Tolkien was a strict Roman Catholic. I mean, one of the reasons why he and C.S. Lewis had a falling out is because Tolkien disapproved of Lewis's marriage to a divorcee, an American divorcee at that. No, he's very persnickety. Gary Lachman. He was very fussy and fastidious.

And the whole idea that these long-haired, sort of ill-clad, marijuana-smoking hippies were funding a very comfortable retirement for him, as it were, in a way was you know ironic ethan gilsdorf he called his fans in probably not a very um charitable moment he said uh my deplorable cultist he says uh many young americans are involved in the stories in a way that i'm not you know i mean he stories about people calling him calling his house at three in the morning because they didn't understand the time change.

And I think he was both flattered by it and in the end, like just frustrated by the volume of things like fan art that people sent to his house or fan fiction. It was just like, I wish these people would stop annoying me. His characters were ending up in rock songs. I mean, the first time I heard about Lord of the Rings, I was listening to Led Zeppelin, wondering who Gollum was. Who stole a girl from me in the darkest depths of Mordor. I mean, like worst use of Lord of the Rings imagery ever. But Gollum and the evil war crept up and slipped away with her. The Beatles even tried to make a Lord of the Rings movie with John as Gollum, Paul as Frodo, Ringo as Sam and George as Gandalf. Tolkien himself put a stop to the project.

He didn't put a stop to it so much because it was the Beatles or anything. He put a stop to the script. Huh. So somebody, I can't remember the name of it, had written a script and it drove Tolkien up a tree. Because they hop on an eagle every time they want to get somewhere. He's like, Dad, it ruins the whole plot.

Like, you know, why not fly to Mount Doom on the first day and we're done? Which would have been amazing. That's my precious. I think he wants your ring. He can't have it. Hey, lads, why don't we just jump on an eagle and fly to Mount Doom? Apologies to anyone living in England right now for those terrible accents. I get out, but I've been walking around all week saying that. terrible accents. I get out, but I've been walking around all week saying that.

Normally, we think of Star Trek as the beginning of modern fandom, but it really all started here. And today, we can put this behavior into context, but from Tolkien's perspective, it looked like the counterculture was creating some kind of cult around his work. But I think what bothered Tolkien the most was that the hippies were derailing his larger aim. He wanted his work to be taken seriously in literary circles and academia. There's no question that even all of my struggles to be able to teach Lord of the Rings,

teach Tolkien, to do scholarship on Tolkien, the people in the way were the academics who had sort of come of age in the 60s. They just had no respect for it. You know, it's childish, it's poorly written, it's retrograde, it's been shown, why are you wasting your time? You know, students can't learn anything from that and so forth. Those people are retired or dead. And so it doesn't matter. And in fact, the funny thing, I was on a dissertation committee, and it was clear to me from looking at the candidate's resume, he was a real hardcore medievalist,

but he was presenting himself as a Tolkienist so he can get a job. And I had to do the opposite. Of course, we all know why The Lord of the Rings is so popular. Today's college students grew up on Peter Jackson's films, which probably wouldn't have happened without the grassroots Tolkien mania of the 1960s and 70s. There's also another parallel. These movies came out during a time of deep anxiety and uncertainty. These movies came out during a time of deep anxiety and uncertainty. I remember in the months after September 11th,

seeing a newspaper ad for The Fellowship of the Ring with a picture of Frodo and Gandalf, under a quote that I thought about a lot. I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you. Gary Lachman says,

Tolkien was proven right again, even posthumously. When our world feels chaotic or scary, we need fantasy to give us a sense of meaning and purpose. It not only serves a kind of therapeutic function in the way that it heals kind of wounds

or it helps deal with a sense of uncertainty. I think you can say in a Jungian sense, it embodies these kind of archetypes that are there and need kind of recognizable containers for them, psychological, perhaps spiritual. And that's why I am kicking off Season 3 of Imaginary Worlds with a six-part series on magic and fantasy.

This week's episode featured original music by Phantom Fauna and Sono Sanctus. Special thanks to Ethan Gilsdorf, Gary Lachman, and Michael Durout. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. I tweeted E. Malinsky. You can like the show on Facebook, leave a comment on iTunes, which would be nice, or support the show on Patreon. There's a donate button on my website, imaginaryworldspodcast.org.