Word: sauron
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 Lord of Mordor, for instance, who has already sent his dread black Ring-wraiths coursing through Middle-earth to seize it. The only hope for peace lies with poor Frodo. He must journey to the very heart of darkness, to Mount Doom in Mordor, and drop the ring...
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...
...praise of friendship) to Beowulf. Then, with such popularity, the story was denounced as escapist fantasy, its success owlishly attributed to "irrational adulation" and "nonliterary cultural and social phenomena." Attempts to straitjacket Tolkien's story as contemporary allegory were updated too. In the '50s, critics averred, Sauron was really Joseph Stalin and fumbling, heroic Frodo was the West...