LOTR and critizisms of being "a hippie book" - please help

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Lorien
As some of you are aware, when LOTR first appeared on USA university campuses in the 1960's, it was mis-appropriated by the hippie subculture, who totally didn't understand the books or just twisted them to mean whatever they *chose* for them to mean (I.e. "Pipe-weed is obviously marijuana" when Tolkien states in the opening "it's a nicotine plant, I just thought the word "tobacco" seemed out of place in Middle-earth")

The biggest of these is that MANY of them, I mean it was treated as common knowledge amongst fans for some time due to the hippies, that "Sauron is an allegory for the Vietnam draft, it's about Vietnam"

THat's just because the hippies were afraid of being drafted and morally were opposed to the draft; this doesn't change the fact that the book was written by a World War I vetern, before and during World War II, years before escalations in Indo-China, and was written by a British man not an American.

It couldn't *possibly* be about Vietnam, or the draft.

So what I need help with is, I'm explaining how fandoms get misinterpreted to someone else, and it would help if anyone could find those exact negative reviews like the New York Times one from the 60's or whatever where the reviewer said "ugh, LOTR is about hippies holding teddy bears and singing" etc.

My point being, that there are rowdy groups in every fandom, but you can't judge the series based on the fringe elements: specifically, "Star Trek" isn't about Kirk/Spock fanfiction, Harry Potter isn't about Harry/Draco slash fiction, and LOTR isn't "about" Orlando Bloom looking pretty. That kind of thing.

You see the problem is....***when did we shift from the hippies thinking it was about Vietnam? I mean, for a long time, that *was* the accepted, popular opinion in the united states. And it took a long time to convince everyone "dude its not about that, it's not about the trippy Rankin/Bass movie, it's not about the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins".

"American fans appreciate the books in a way that I do not", "the deplorable cultus" etc. etc.

but....it's TRUTHINESS, really: if everyone in the USA that read it in the 1960's (I know I'm generalizing) thought it was "about" that stuff, they were wrong, but refused to admit they were wrong and enough other wrong people agreed with them that they pointed to that consensus as proof of how correct their views were.

When did that "generally accepted opinion that its about Vietnam" fall out of favor? The 1980's or something? *HOW* did we make the shift?


Basically for other fandoms, how to make the shift to "it's not about your fangirly fanfiction, stop saying the *primary* story is about your fanfiction"
 
I only knew about the "Ring = atomic bomb" and "Sauron = Hitler" theories but you never know, I guess.

Sauron is the Vietnam draft ? I wonder what those hippies were smoking when they were reading LOTR ...
 
you may have looked here already
but in the google news archives you can keyword search within year limits. (1937 to 1973)
the resulting articles alas are pay per view but when the item you are looking for is only a single sentence out of an article - the free synopsis showing the key word is often all you need.

when I did this search (keyword tolkien hippie) I came across this book review for someone else that said.

Hers is the sort of pilgrimage 21-year-old girls from middle-class Anglo-American homes embarked upon in the late 1960s, involving swamis in India and communes in Morocco, with Tolkien as an all-sufficient Baedeker of the soul.

time magazine Dec. 3 1973
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,908253,00.html
 
Although I know and vaguely remember (I was a kid) that LotR was big with college kids and teenagers in the late 1960s, I have never before heard the allegorical interpretation (Sauron = the Pentagon/draft/Vietnam War) that you mention as common knowledge among American fans at that time.

Along with looking for evidence of when this interpretation faded, I should think you would want to find some written evidence of it in the first place.

However, remember that just because Tolkien didn't know about Vietnam when he wrote the book in the 1940s, that doesn't mean his book is not in part a parable about the destructive power of the modern war machine. He was irked (see his Foreword the Second Edition) to be told that LotR was about World War II, since he thought it was about, if any war, World War I. Yet critics have expounded on his denial, crediting him with more insight than he himself claimed, by positioning him as a "20th century writer" who wrote about all the terrible hyper-industrialized and depersonalized wars of this century. From this point of view, your hippies are welcome to clasp LotR to their particular 20th century war.
 
Being a (Grateful) Deadhead but just liking their music & not their life style, I hear some of the kookiest stuff you can imagine.

On a certain site I visit, I often that Tom Bombadil was a hippy........

Go figure.

What's the use of trying to fight city hall?
You're not going to change any minds.

Let's face it, the last thing JRR Tolkien was writing about was the Hippy counter=culture movement almost twenty years before it happened.
 
right here on TORN. We've had many people compare Sauron and the Ring to certain current political figures and events over the last several years.

What you're complaining of is something that I think has followed LOTR from the beginning. Tolkien has said that he didn't write LOTR as an allegory with people and events in LOTR representing specific people or events in the Primary World. He said he preferred applicability. He explored themes and dynamics which are so core to human existence that they are universal. Things like the lure and effects of power, the fear of death, mercy, courage, and so on....in fact, the very themes that draw so many of us to the story are so applicable to events in any time and place that it is easy to draw connections and parallels. That's natural.

Some people mistake applicability for allegory and start claiming specific representations of people and events. They're wrong. However, Tolkien himself drew parallels between his story and current events; for instance, in his letters he would refer to the industrialization of the countryside or political squabbles as "orcish" behavior. He was not saying that orcs represented those people specifically, or that they were like orcs in every way and thoroughly evil, but merely that those people were behaving in a manner that he had written the orcs to demonstrate. In that sense, orcs may represent any and all people who behave in an ugly and destructive fashion, but none of them specifically.

People (hippies or otherwise) who take LOTR as an allegory are feeling the power of Tolkien's approach without fully understanding it, and so they fall into the error of claiming a narrow correspondence instead of a wider one. Every era has their own people and events to compare LOTR to. But Sauron isn't Vietnam. Or Hitler. Or Stalin. Or Saddam Hussein. Or Idi Amin. In fact, he's all of them, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they are him - to exactly the extent that they act like him, and no more. In the same way, anything that promises a great deal of power can be compared to the Ring.

I don't know that it is really possible to talk people out of their favorite interpretations. The comparisons have always gone on and always will go on as long as people are reading LOTR, because Tolkien succeeded in making his Secondary World applicable to the Primary World without being a mirror image of it.
 
I think there's a reference to something like that in Lin Carter's "A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings" -- it came out in the late 60's, so if you wanted some hippy references that might be a place to look.

IIRC, Carter quotes a famous woman author who was not very thrilled with Tolkien and his fans -- I can't recall the author, but I do think there was some kind of reference along the lines you are thinking of.

Anybody have the book handy or have a better memory than me on this source?
 
I have never heard the Lord of the Rings compared to the Vietnam War, not even in an anecdotal sense. If anything, LotR became popular on 1960's college campuses because it was not the Vietnam War. The story was escapist fantasy, and the War of the Ring represented everything that the Vietnam War did not. There was honor and friendship, no muddled propaganda dirtying the water, and no napalming of civilians by the supposed 'good guys'. Having first read the books in the early 70's, I never once considered pipeweed to be pot, but I certainly yearned to live in Middle-earth, as opposed to white-color, middle-class suburbia. I hated the uptight, class-conscious, love thy neighbor as long as he looks just like you attitude. In the 60's there was a yearning to escape the rigid and priggish moralizing of the 50's, and LotR offered a glimpse of freedom. Sorry, you've got the context all wrong.
 
and I discovered LotR in 1971... and I have to say the only thing I heard of or witnessed about the supposed wild fandom driven to hold LotR up as a banner were a few "Frodo Lives" on the walls of public areas.

I think that if you took anything that was "current trend", you find the slant of the stories to make it sound like it was a mass movement. I think there were some campuses and clutches of groups in, say, Haight Ashbury and the like would have really drawn attention; but it doesn't speak for me and my reasons for loving the story. I had many schoolmates that went off to the war, and there were a lot of dangerous things going on. You could be drafted at the age of 18, but you couldn't vote or drink until you were 21; the race riots were seriously terrifying... as I witness first-hand in 1967; the War in itself was endless and ripping the nation apart. So to have Tolkien's story come along when it did spoke to what was going on so much. I took solace in the hopefulness, the loyalties, the bravery and courage to keep going when all seemed lost. That family, friends and home were more important than power and ultimate rule.

LotR celebrated the simple and pure things that we should cling to, protect, and cherish as we pass a world of peace on to our children and our children's children.

Some waved their burning bras and draft cards in the air as they marched in protest... but Tolkien's work and world wasn't one of the rallying banners, in my experience.
 
That is, for those people who choose to apply the lessons in LOTR to that subject, it is utterly applicable (nice word, Silverlode) in that way.

Just like it is applicable for the Vietnam hawk who saw Sauron as Communism, the peace-niks as the Nazgul and Frodo's journey as one-man-soldier's attempt to combat Communism in the face of public derision.

Just like the addict who see's their recovery in Frodo's step-by-step seemingly-hopeless trudge to finally gaining peace.

Just like the lessons of LOTR are applicable for each person who stands and fights (by fighting, or not fighting, or donating, or speaking out, or...) for what they think is right even if the odds seem stacked against them.

To me, there is no sense of trying to include or dis-include some group who believe that LOTR speaks to them in some way. If it speaks to them, it speaks to them. None of us, even the author, can deny them that.

Notta
 
Tolkien: A look behind the Lord of the Rings, by Lin Carter. 1969.

And I probably haven't read it since the early 70s, when I bought it. It has plot summaries, notes on Tolkien's predecessors in fantasy, such as Spenser and Lord Dunsany, as well as his predecessors in sagas and chansons de geste.

Carter's introduction mentions the wave of interest in LotR that occurred in the late 60s, and how the "psychedelic-poster-and-button set (who came along after the book did) adopted it with little goat-cries of bliss".

His chapter "The Trilogy---Satire or Allegory", mentions the applicability of the story to the Cold War, equating the Ring itself to nuclear weapons, then adds: "...but then, any action yarn about the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys, such as a Max Brand Western, is capable of similar interpretation, thus reducing the argument to nonsense."

Admittedly, I did a very quick skim here, but I didn't find the reference that weaver is remembering. [unsure]
 
I discovered Tolkien in high school, just as the Vietnam war was ramping up. One of my high school classmates was the student body president at Kent State at the time of the shootings in 1970. It was a difficult time, and yes, Tolkien was a solace. I wouldn't be surprised if some people used LotR as an allegory then, but I don't remember ever hearing that. My friends and I saw LotR as an escape, in the best meaning of the word.
 
There was something I read somewhere about young "flower power" women on college campuses in the 60's getting caught up in Tolkien's fantasy world (teddy bears fit into that somehow) rather than tackling more serious things....the author was a strong feminist, I think, lamenting that the results of all her struggles were women who wanted to be elves rather than professionals. Wish I could come up with who she was!

I thought it was in this book, but I guess not. The timing of its publication seemed right, so it was a good try.

Thanks for checking Lily -- I'll post back here if I can come up with the author!
 
"Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and encountered a tribe of full-grown women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies, and babbling excitedly about hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century. The bad dream has materialized." - Germaine Greer, 1997, in response to Waterstone's UK poll of "Most influential author of the 20th century", which Tolkien won.
 
I kept thinking -- Greer Garson, Graham Greene...so I was close!

Thanks for coming up with the source and posting the entire quote. Considering I cannot remember the names of my kids sometimes, it might have been years before I finally got it right...
 
Germaine Greer was and always will be an angry woman looking for an argument. She is the type of person who is provocative for controversy's sake. Her publicity-seeking antics have, at various times, been labeled as 'simplistic', 'offensive', 'distasteful', 'stupid', 'insensitive', 'disgraceful', 'condescending', 'pathetic', and a 'paedophilic' (for publishing a book of photos of teenage boys with the expressed notion that she considered them 'ravishing') . One notices, however, that none of these negative connotations has ever been hurled at Tolkien. Therefore, one must consider the source.
 
Last night after I'd turned off my computer, it occurred to me that Greer was the source of your quote. I'm not surprised that squire got here before me with the answer, though.

I agree with the other comments -- I'd much rather see Tolkien as an influence than Greer, sympathetic as I am to feminism!
 
'simplistic', 'offensive', 'distasteful', 'stupid', 'insensitive', 'disgraceful', 'condescending', 'pathetic', and 'paedophilic'... none of these negative connotations has ever been hurled at Tolkien.
Click to expand...

Can't tell if you're being ironic, but "simplistic" certainly has been applied by critics of LOTR, as have "offensive", "stupid" and "pathetic".
 
I don't believe I've ever read a serious review of Tolkien's work that included descriptors such as 'stupid' or 'pathetic'; as a matter of fact, such wording usually does not encroach on critical analyses in general, save for the most banal of works. 'Simplistic' perhaps is a word I could see being used in some instances regarding Tolkien's work. In any case, the point was such epithets have been hurled in great salvos in Greer's direction in relation to her crassness and seemingly bottomless need to stir up controversy, not necessarily in regards to her actual printed work, particularly her early feminist pieces, some of which garnered praise in such publications as the New York Times. However, such praise has diminished as her stridency has increased over the years.
 
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