{"id":5143,"date":"2021-11-25T16:25:56","date_gmt":"2021-11-25T16:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shindig-magazine.com\/?p=5143"},"modified":"2021-11-25T16:41:54","modified_gmt":"2021-11-25T16:41:54","slug":"concerning-hippies-rehab-rattlesnakes-counter-cultural-musings-from-tsptr-dossier-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/?p=5143","title":{"rendered":"Concerning Hippies \u2013 Counter-Cultural musings from TSPTR. Dossier #6"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the sixth of our monthly counter-cultural musings from <\/b>TSPTR<\/a>, we look at the hippie fixation with <\/b>Lord Of The Rings\u00a0<\/em>and Tolkien\u2019s own innate radicalism<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

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In 1978 J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s The Lord Of the Rings<\/i> was brought to the big screen by the anarcho-independent animator Ralph Bakshi. Previously most well-known for his production of Robert Crumb\u2019s Fritz The Cat<\/i>, billed as the world\u2019s first XXX animation, Bakshi interpreted Tolkien\u2019s dark fantasy into a nightmarish rotoscoped acid flashback that pulled no punches. This wasn\u2019t however the first time that Tolkien\u2019s masterwork had found its way into favour with the counterculture.<\/p>\n

During the \u201960s, the church-going Tolkien was bemused to learn that many of his first American fans were pot-smoking, free-loving hippies. These hippies pointed to the novelist\u2019s love for trees and hatred of the ugly side of industrialism as proof of their simpatico outlook.\u00a0Some of the most prominent agents of change in the counterculture \u2014 that is, musicians \u2014 were also fans of Tolkien\u2019s work. The Beatles wanted to film a live action version of the books with The Fab Four as the hobbits.\u00a0Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Genesis, Rush and Pink Floyd all wrote songs involving Tolkien mythology. The words \u201cFrodo Lives\u201d and \u201cGandalf For President!\u201d were spray-painted on walls, printed on shirts and buttons, and shouted through loudspeakers \u2014 memes before memes were a thing. In the UK, a mystical community named Gandalf’s Garden flourished at the end of the \u201960s as part of the London hippie\/underground movement, running a shop and a magazine of the same name. They advocated the spiritual aspect of hippie life and served to connect people in London and around the world who were looking for an alternative to the dreary and destructive realities of industrialization, war, or even the darker aspects of the “turned on” life.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n

\"\"Tolkien has often been dismissed as a hopelessly old-fashioned dead white male conservative, while others have portrayed him as the soft-edged moderate due to his love of nature, however it\u2019s fair to say that Tolkien\u2019s political views were anything but moderate. An early hint of this can be found in the beloved homeland of the Hobbits, the Shire. Its pastoral villages have no department of unmotorised vehicles, no internal revenue service, no government official telling people who may and may not have laying hens in their backyards, no government schools lining up hobbit children in geometric rows to teach regimented behaviour and groupthink, no government-controlled currency, and no political institution even capable of collecting tariffs on foreign goods.\u201cThe Shire at this time had hardly any \u2018government\u2019. Families for the most part managed their own affairs.\u201dDuring Tolkien\u2019s formative years, cars and combustion engines invaded life\u2019s every nook and cranny; mechanics and scientists threw flying contraptions into the sky in order to rain destruction upon people; the tally of the dead neared 100 million from just two global conflicts; the natural resources mined and harvested to feed this combat; the nuclear bomb. These factors powerfully influenced Tolkien\u2019s writing, and his characters deal with deep confusion, a sense of loss, and an unsteady grip in a changing world they no longer understand. Early in his quest to destroy \u201cThe One Ring\u201d, before Frodo truly had any idea of what he had gotten himself into, Frodo asks the lady Goldberry if Tom Bombadil owned the woods they were walking through. She corrects him, saying \u201cThe trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves.\u201d\"\"<\/p>\n

Significantly, Tolkien once described himself as a hobbit \u201cin all but size\u201d, commenting in the same letter that his \u201cpolitical opinions lean more and more to Anarchy\u201d. As he explained, \u201cThe most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.\u201d In the Shire, Tolkien created a society after his own heart, one marked by minimal government, private charity, and a commitment to property rights and the rule of law. This isn\u2019t to say the Shire is without problems. Near the end of the third book, Frodo returns home after a quest to the destroy the corrupting ring of power. To his dismay, a gang of bossy outsiders has infiltrated the Shire, \u201cgatherers and sharers\u2026 going around counting and measuring and taking off to storage\u201d, supposedly \u201cfor fair distribution\u201d, but what becomes of most of it is anyone\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n

Conservatives and progressives alike also have seen in it a pointed critique of the modern, hyper-regulated nanny state. Ugly new buildings are being thrown up, beautiful hobbit homes spoiled. And for all the effort to \u201cspread the wealth around\u201d (to borrow a phrase from a former president), the only thing that seems to be spreading is the gatherers\u2019 power.\u00a0It\u2019s a critique of aesthetically impoverished urban development, to be sure. In fact, the Shire\u2019s joyless regime of bureaucratic rules and suffocating redistribution owed much to the drabness, bleakness and bureaucratic regulation of post-war Britain under the Attlee Labour government.<\/p>\n

There is, in this back-to-basics sort of way, a sense of relatively harmless nostalgia embedded throughout The Lord Of The Rings<\/i>, giving readers in the \u201960s and \u201970s an escape from the strife of their time \u2014 strife that was directly visible on a daily basis for the first time in history, due to the advent of the television and Technicolor. This nostalgia inspired longing for a return to life before strife caused by the divisive lust for resources \u2013 i.e., colonisation, industrialisation, the traditional Western understanding of how the world worked. Yet part of the success and allure of The Lord Of The Rings<\/i> was that it did not let readers off the hook completely; it was not pure escapism. A sense of mission and drive pervades the books, and the ways in which it was relatable to readers in the advent of counterculture movements meant that the causes Tolkien advocated for were easily transposed onto their minds, thus becoming important to them.<\/p>\n

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In Robert Hunter\u2019s recounting of the origins of Greenpeace, The Greenpeace To Amchitka: An Environmental Odyssey<\/i>, he discusses their inaugural environmental protest effort and the journey to Amchitka to protest the nuclear test sites there: \u201cWe are on our way to the dread dark land of Mordor, and Amchitka is Mount Doom\u2026 somehow we have to hurl the Ring of Power into the fire and bring down the whole kingdom of the Dark Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their organisation\u2019s love for Tolkien\u2019s work survives to this day,\u00a0sometimes in the form of amusing advertisements<\/a>, but it wasn\u2019t just Greenpeace who found meaning in The Lord Of The Rings<\/i>. Also appealing to the burgeoning anti-war, feminist and civil rights movement activists was Tolkien\u2019s political subtext of the Hobbits, and their wizard ally, leading a revolution. The military industrial complex targeted by protestors resembled Mordor in its mechanised, impersonal approach to an unpopular war. When he is drafted into bearing the Ring to Mount Doom, Frodo feels an \u201coverwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace\u2026 in Rivendell\u201d. Those who led the fight against Sauron\u2019s army stood reluctantly, hoping this would be the \u201cWar To End All Wars\u201d.<\/p>\n