Word: tolkien
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...strangest thing about it is, we've been here before. It all started with a little-known Oxford professor whose specialty was the West Midland dialect of Middle English. Beginning with The Hobbit, a story he invented in the early 1930s to amuse his children, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's novels first became merely popular and then turned into a phenomenon. When a pirate paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings was published in the U.S. in 1965, it and other versions sold more than a million copies within a year. GANDALF FOR PRESIDENT buttons appeared on wide late...
...funny thing," says Simon Tolkien, grandson of J.R.R. and author of the forthcoming novel Final Witness, "was that he was most famous on your side of the Atlantic. I think the English establishment was slightly suspicious of him." In fact, Tolkien found all the fuss distasteful. "Many young Americans are involved in the stories in a way that I'm not," he once remarked about his fans--or as he called them, "my deplorable cultus." He wondered what Americans saw in his long, deeply Anglophilic and, let's be frank, overwritten epic. But the Rings had struck a chord...
Like a sleepy Balrog in the depths of Moria, fantasy fever is stirring again. In 1997, voters in a bbc poll named The Lord of the Rings the greatest book of the 20th century. In 1999, Amazon.com customers chose it as the greatest book of the millennium. The Tolkien revival began when the Internet bubble was bursting, the market for consumer electronics was nosediving like Harry Potter chasing the Golden Snitch, and America's long summer romance with technology was fizzling. "Change and technology are so pervasive a part of daily life that for the most part there...
...appeal of fantasy goes deeper than mere nostalgic Luddism. Tolkien, a veteran of the British nightmare at the Somme in World War I, is a poet of war, and we are a nation in need of a good, clear war story. At a time when Americans are wandering deeper into a nebulous conflict against a faceless enemy, Tolkien gives us the war we wish we were fighting--a struggle with a foe whose face we can see, who fights out on the open battlefield, far removed from innocent civilians. In Middle-earth, unlike the Middle East, you can tell...
...worry about all these strapping men poking each other with sharpened phallic symbols? After all, on the political correctness meter The Lord of the Rings is radioactive. Where are the women? Peter Jackson filled out Liv Tyler's role for the movies (it's much less prominent in Tolkien's version), but the Fellowship is still as much a boys' club as Augusta National. And whiter too. Don't let all the heartwarming Elf-Dwarf bonding between Legolas and Gimli fool you. The only people with dark skin in Middle-earth are the Orcs...