1968 was not a good year. War, assassination, political violence and creeping fascism fell over the land like a gloomy shadow. It was however, a very good year to read J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for the first time.
I had first come across the epic trilogy in 1965 as a high school senior when I saw it listed as a favorite of 60's college students. Later some of my pals formed a band called Middle Earth and passed out business cards with the word "Hobbit" displayed prominently.
The bassplayer in the band had a hippie-style VW bus named "The Traveling Slum". On the windshield visor was a button that read "Frodo Lives".
But despite my travels with the Middle Earth band members in the Traveling Slum, I still had not read the book that had given birth to their name--- until the summer of 1968.
Lord of the Rings is an epic trilogy that traces the history of the Wars of the Ring. Its main character Frodo must battle his way into the very realm of the Dark Lord Sauron to destroy a Ring of Power before Sauron finds it, puts it on, and brings the entire world of Middle Earth under his tyranny.
Frodo is a hobbit, a small hairy footed fellow who would rather stay in his bucolic village and enjoy fine beer and friendship. Instead he must brave a world of wizards, orcs, elves, nazguls, goblins, warriors, kings and assorted monsters to save Middle Earth from slavery and death.
After many student protests before the squat fortress-like federal buildings of my native Washington DC, it was easy for me to imagine the area around the White House as the center of some dark malevolent power. With Richard Nixon on the rise, SE Asia and American cities in flames, Frodo's terrifying journey to free Middle Earth didn't read like an exotic fairytale.
To achieve his quest, he needed an alliance of elves, dwarves, humans, ents and wizards...an alliance has fractious as any Students for a Democratic Society meeting I had ever attended.
For me, Lord of the Rings was not just a tale of an imaginary distant age, it was also a literary exploration of the 20th century--- the bloodiest century of warfare in human history.
Tolkien himself had served in the British Army in WWI and had fought in the 1916 Battle of the Somme which cost 1 million casualties in a wasteland of corpses, mud and barbed wire. Only 1 of Tolkien's close friends survived the terrible carnage of the Great War.
As a British college professor, he witnessed the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930's, watched as his native country came under the German Blitz and then was bled dry by World War II. That of course was followed by the Cold War and the threat of total nuclear annihilation.
On his quest to destroy the Ring of Power, Frodo is accompanied by his gardener Samwise Gamgee and a creature called Gollum. Gollum is a hobbit driven mad by the power of the ring and turned into a pathetic yet extremely dangerous psychopath whom Sam and Frodo must trust. Gollum is the only one who knows the secret entrance to Sauron's realm of Mordor where the ring can be cast into the fire and destroyed.
As the seemingly weak and powerless hobbits get closer to the terrors of Morder, they prove to have inner resources that had eluded the more powerful denizens of Middle Earth. For radical students who often felt alone and isolated in American society, it was a powerful message of hope.
But there is a deep and terrible sadness that pervades the entire trilogy.
The bright and shining civilization of the elves will come to an end because the magic power of their three Rings will fade with the destruction of the One Ring. Even as the elves join forces to battle the evil of Sauron, they know that winning the war can only result in their permanent exile from Middle Earth. Hope will not prevail without sacrifice.
The Ring of Power had ruined so many who tried to wield its power. Frodo only had to look at Gollum to see what he himself would become if he tried to wield the Ring rather than destroy it.
When I thought about the 20th century and how many social movements had been wrecked by power-seeking and how many people had started out as liberators and had become tyrants, Lord of the Rings seemed all too real. As Gandalf the wizard liked to remind people, even Sauron himself was not always a force for evil.
When Frodo finally arrives at Mount Doom to destroy the ring, he succumbs to the temptation to wield its power and the Ring is finally destroyed because Gollum bites off Frodo's finger to win back the Ring for himself.
In his mad psychotic joy, Gollum dances too close to the edge of the volcanic fire and falls in, destroying the Ring and ending Sauron's rule of terror.
Tolkien knew war intimately and knew that some warriors can never really come home again. Frodo returns to his quiet life in the Shire, but war and the Ring of Power have irrevocably changed him. Haunted by nightmares and deep emotional pain, he can no longer stay in Middle Earth and must join the Elves in exile.
As I saw friends and acquaintances return from the Vietnam War, some of whom could never truly come "Home", the anguish of Frodo seemed all too similar to life in wartime America. Today I see the same thing as soldiers come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, some shattered in body and some deeply wounded in spirit. Naively I had thought that after Vietnam, we would never again see such human tragedy in this nation. Yeah, right.
At one point in the story, Frodo lashes out in anger against Gollum and declares that he deserves death. Gandalf then delivers one of the many lines from Lord of the Rings that still haunt me:
"[Gollum deserves death?] I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
Last winter I watched the DVD version of Lord of the Rings with my college-age daughter and her close friend Emily. There is one part of the story when the Ents (Guardians of the Forest) descend upon the Sauron's wizard ally Saruman. Ents are not easily angered, but Saruman has burned forests of Middle Earth to feed his weapons factories and laid waste to the land with poison and pollution.
The Ents (giant tree-like creatures themselves) use their own powers to defeat Saruman. In one climactic scene, they open the dam that powers Saruman's weapons factory and flood the fires of his infernal machines with the healing waters of the river.
As I watched, I thought of my old University of Maryland friend and affinity group sister-in-struggle, the late Judi Bari. Judi had been an anti-war and labor militant who never backed down in the fight for justice. She went on to spend much of her life trying to save the forests of North America. She would have loved watching the Ents hurl boulders at Saruman's fortress and cheered the smashing of his dam which finally drowns his delusions of glory. Judi died of breast cancer in 1997 after being seriously injured by a terrorist bomb, yet she kept fighting for her beliefs all the way to the very end of life. Hope dies last as Studs Terkel reminds us.
As student radicals, we were constantly challenged to "put our bodies on the line" to stop the madness that was engulfing the America of the 1960's. It was easy to become discouraged and fall into despair as so many of our efforts went down in defeat.
The film version of Lord of the Rings came out in the darkest days of the Bush years, a very good time to introduce Tolkien's vision to those who had not read the books. A very good time because a lot of people had fallen into the same kind of despair that had cast a dark shadow across the idealism of the 1960's.
But now as then these words from Tolkien provide much needed inspiration:
Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me, I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide, all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
Hope in dark times? A certain Senator from South Side Chicago has made that the centerpiece of his own quest for a better world. Like the Fellowship of the Ring, yes, I think we can.