Word: frodo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...amplitude, the Tolkien story embraces both pipe and slippers and Armageddon. Hence the saga's surge in popularity during the 1960s, when so many people craved the conviction that the Apocalypse rested in their hands. The hobbit Frodo Baggins is an ordinary creature with hairy toes suddenly charged with a task that will decide the battle between good and evil in his world. This elemental quest is what the whole fantasy boils down to and percolates up from. Bakshi tries to strike the same balance between the personal and universal, but in a fraction of the time at Tolkien...
...Frodo Baggins...
That sentence, spoken reluctantly by a curious, home-loving small creature with furry feet and a preposterous name, is slightly enigmatic. But some 10 million passionate readers round the world will instantly recognize it as the real beginning of one of the great fairy tale quests in modern literature. Frodo is a Hobbit, three feet or so tall. The ring is magic and dangerous. It renders the good and weak who wear it invisible, but it provides both the power and the itch to dominate the world to any bad and overweening personage who may possess it. Sauron, the Dark...
Middle-earth is very nearly as large as the United States east of the Mississippi. Frodo and some true-hearted companions endure Ringwraiths and Barrow-wights, hordes of Ores, who are Sauron's shock troops, and much cloak-and-daggering. When Frodo triumphs, finally, and destroys the ring, it is only with the perverse collaboration of Gollum, a pitiably evil creature with froglike feet who sounds a bit like Oliver Twist's Fagin and is one of the memorable minor characters in English literature...
...readership spread from a handful of literate Anglophiles who savored The Lord of the Rings much as they do Grahame's The Wind in the Willows or T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone, to hundreds of thousands of U.S. college kids who made Frodo a national figure and turned the lore of Middle-earth into a way of life. In 1966, the first paperback edition of the three volumes of the Ring sold close to 500,000 copies in the U.S. Scholars and critics had at first admired his books, while tracing down literary influences that...