The high fantasy of The Lord of the Rings was “hobbit-forming,” as T-shirt slogans of the ‘60s and ‘70s put it. “A whole generation of young Americans could lose themselves and their troubles in the intricacies of this triple-decker epic,” said Professor Ralph C Wood, a Tolkien scholar. Middle Earth was a literary escape hatch for a generation haunted by the Vietnam War and the atomic bomb, a return to simple living. Many felt the experience of reading the text itself is akin to an acid trip. According to Wood, “Indeed, the rumour got about – a wish seeking fulfillment, no doubt – that Tolkien had composed The Lord of the Rings under the influence of drugs.”

Also appealing to the burgeoning anti-war, feminist and civil rights movement activists was Tolkien’s political subtext of the ‘little people’, 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 “overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace… in Rivendell.” Those who led the fight against Sauron’s army stood reluctantly, hoping this would be the “War to End All Wars”.

Likewise, Lady Éowyn of Rohan, struggling to overcome the limits of patriarchal society, answered Aragorn’s question, “What do you fear, lady?” with lines that resonated among the second wave feminists of the 1960s: "A cage," Éowyn said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire."

Tolkien’s anti-materialistic worldview, in which he extolled the wonders of growing things and of the ordinary – “stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine", as he put it in his 1947 essay On Fairy-Stories – also dovetailed with the countercultural values. Some hippies built hand-crafted houses, went back to the land to grow organic vegetables, wore simple clothing, ate vegetarian meals and lived communally, all seemingly in keeping with the pleasurable simple life in the Shire. Earth Day, which launched the environmental movement in 1970, with 20 million Americans rallying from coast to coast in a rare show of bipartisanship, aligned with Tolkien’s glorification of nature, clean and pure, and his distaste for the polluting aspects of industrialisation. (This was a professor who rode his bicycle instead of driving a car.)

Mordor matters

Tolkien’s literary world directly inspired some of the most high profile agents of change within the counterculture. Rock bands whose anthems served as a soundtrack for the upending of the establishment clearly read Tolkien’s work. In the 1960s the Beatles envisioned a film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings – Paul as Frodo, Ringo as Sam, George as Gandalf and John as Gollum – that never came to fruition. Pink Floyd’s 1967 song The Gnome featured a little man named Grimble Grumble in a red tunic, and others like him in their homes, who were, like the hobbits, “Eating, sleeping, drinking their wine.”