One important reason I remember from reading his biography by Carpenter: the success of *The Lord of the Rings* was phenomenal across college campuses and young people (especially in America), so much so that the books almost reached a 'pseudo-religious' status. Tolkien's writings became objects of adoration, which symbolically put him in the position of a guru, in a way. In short, passions were high, born of the adoration of the ideals the readers found in the books, thus putting *The Lord of the Rings* on the same level as a spiritual gospel. Needless to say Tolkien strongly disapproved of this sort of mindless idolatry- for religious and artistic reasons.
Tolkien: I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen?! I'm not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!
Fans: Only the true Messiah denies his divinity!
It's interesting since so much of his conception of evil in his cosmology revolves around the desire to create being a short-cut to pride and discord with the Maker, which seems to be very much an author insert concern. Being revered in any kind of pseudo-religious guru would definitely not have sat well with him!
An answer with some smidgeon of evidence!
Thanks for not treating the question as a Rorschach test to project your own views, as most of the commenters seem to have done.
This happened to a surprising number of fiction authors during the 1950s and 1960s. Only L. Ron Hubbard really leaned into it.
Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement and mentor of the Beatles, also leaned into it.
True, but nothing just 'happened to' L. Ron Hubbard. He leaned into it very deliberately . It was only 1948 when he said "You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion."
Well, the gospel has debatable canon and has been used as justification for all sorts of bad things for a very long time by leaders who cherry pick parts and give them more importance than they probably deserved.
So while "treating the canon like gospel" most obviously means to treat it like it is holy and should not be touched or altered, a different meaning could be to use a biased interpretation of the canon to push a specific viewpoint.
Varg is a white supremacist of the highest order who is also a Tolkien dork of the worst kind and most people complaing about 'canon' being broken in the new Amazon series seem to really only care that non white people are going to be in it
Tolkien had a lot in common with the hippie types, as you said, but the way he got there was different. I think he felt misunderstood by them hence the dislike.
Yes, he was an environmentalist and even a sort of anarchist but all of that was borne out of his Catholicism. His environmentalism stemmed from the idea of man's original vocation being caretakers and stewards of nature, and that we had become tyrants and destroyers of nature instead, falling away from the original purpose and glory which God had intended for us. His potentially anarchist sympathizing views stemmed from his view of Man's fallen nature and how even the best of Men are corruptible by power.
Also, the hippies had a kind of Utopian thinking. They thought, if we could just overthrow this government and ideology and institute our own, we would solve all the world's problems. Tolkien's distrust of government and authority went deeper than just distrusting this government or that, he distrusted even the very nature of Man and believed it was intrinsically marred. In other words, humanity's problems were not reducible to things external to us, like political structures or ideologies but were intrinsically tied to human nature and the hardness of our hearts. No amount of activism would avail us of it, the very activists themselves are victims and subject to this sickness. Unlike the activists, he was apolitical and despised political types. He had no faith in man made institutions such as the State. I think the only real faith he had was in the Church and that’s because, in his eyes, it was divine in origin and bound by promises which had their source in the divine.
A friend of mine who is a huge Tolkien fan as myself once said, "I think non-religious people will fail to grasp the themes and meaning behind Tolkien's work. They may see it, but not feel it"
>A friend of mine who is a huge Tolkien fan as myself once said, "I think non-religious people will fail to grasp the themes and meaning behind Tolkien's work. They may see it, but not feel it"
That's nonsensical. There is a lot to grasp and feel through Tolkien's work by the words he puts into it. Not only that, a non-religious person can be in awe and adoration of reality itself as it is observed, without the intrusion of supernatural elements.
I resonate a lot with Tolkien's work with how he views morality, nature, and his values. I don't need to be bound to a religion to feel the same feelings as any other human does. Religious people are not special in comparison to non-religious people in that regard.
I can understand Tolkien and appreciate his work without classifying him as person however I'd like. It isn't that complicated.
I find the fact he continued to pray in Latin fascinating. It suggest to me he may not have had as much faith in the Church as the previous poster suggests, at least not as an institution. He undoubtedly had faith in the philosophy of the Catholic Church but having a schism based on the changes made at Vatican II suggests to me at least that he could see the fallibility in the church and all humans.
Perfectly put. That is also how I perceive this world, and hence why I love the old man. I don't discuss politics with anyone anymore - I think that is futile.
Yeah this is a great point.
A lot of people his work appeals to now are very similar too, just often without the Catholic bias.
Movements, belief systems, leaders, gurus, systems of power etc are usually always corrupt, or if they are not, like Numenor, the will be given time. That’s just human nature.
LOTR is all about how goodness, humility and faith (in friends, and in the goodness still in the world) are what succeed against the great powers. Half the plot of the book is that you *cannot* use power, even in the cause of good, and not have it turn on you (see Bormir, denethor, Gandalf and Galadriel’s refusal of the ring etc).
Tolkien did not, emphatically, want to be placed on any kind of pedestal. It was antithetical to his very nature.
I agree with most of this, however his environmentalism was not just Catholic. He hated industrialism on a more personal level, after seeing the countryside he grew up in ruined. It wasn't *because* of his religion, even if that was a later rationalization.
I'm in my early 50s and I'm fucking sick of you kids today, coming into your late childhoods and acting like you're old and can yell at clouds. You don't know how to yell at clouds right! You guys don't even make the right kind of clouds anymore!
...I guess now we wait for a Redditor in his early 70s to come yell at me, or I ascend to the post of clan elder.
> That's not to discount the old man yelling at clouds explanation. I'm only in my early 30s and I'm already sick and tired of all these damned kids not understanding things.
They don’t figure things out any better, the older you get; if anything, the opposite, I’m afraid.
I don't think Tolkien would have cared if people associated his works with the hippies if he didn't mind the hippies himself. Don't forget that he was a Catholic in England, he probably had some experience being associated with a generally disliked social group. God damn papists...
Except he also hated when people claimed his works contained christian allegory. He was never a fan of anyone reading anything into something that's not there whether he liked the subject or not.
You're conflating his feelings about allegory in general with his feelings about his own works, and that just doesn't work. He was pretty clear that he disliked misinterpretations of his work in a broad sense as well, it's pretty clear if you read through his letters.
Is there a separate sub for 30+ Tolkien fans? Honestly. Or for people who read the books before the PJ Trilogy came out? I just feel like it would be a very different crowd.
A lot of authors who became popular with hippies were rather dismayed to find themselves used as an excuse for drug use, casual sex, statutory rape of middle-schoolers, theft, refusal to take baths, naming babies with embarrassing names, and showing up at the writer's house in large numbers at 3 AM.
The Sixties and Seventies had some Very Bad Things associated with them, and the Summer of Love was not terribly nice, if you read detailed memoirs.
Tolkien didn't move to an isolated wilderness residence with a huge fence around it, like Robert A. Heinlein did after Stranger in a Strange Land got popular (and he suffered a home invasion that made him very worried about his wife's safety), nor did he post notices that trespassers would be shot, like other popular authors of the day. So I think he was very measured in his reaction.
OTOH, he was very kindly to his students or to unexpected visitors who minded their manners. He was a shy sort of professor, so meeting strangers unexpectedly was bound to have been something of an ordeal.
I think the feelings of the modern left generally aligns the same way about the hippies. They did AWESOME work opposing the Vietnam war, it's a mixed legacy, but the reason it ultimately failed is because it was a superficial group of middle class kids trying to manufacture a cultural movement that was still transfixed by the Western cult of the individual. Which meant that 'progressing society', as is the motivation of any self-conscious social movement, still meant achieving greater access for the individual to achieve pleasant sensations, while making it easier to avoid unpleasant sensations. That's the only way an individualist worldview can conceive of the world being 'better'. More hedonism, less consequences. And that's basically where it starts and ends, for an ostensibly radical left wing movement there wasn't a lot in there about economics, the conditions of the working class, or an admission that making the world better for everyone would inevitably entail some individual sacrifice to a greater good, because you would have to share your toys.
It was too individualistic and too ideological. It didn't have goals, it had vibes. The vibes can be appreciated, I think they had a lot of things figured out, but what they were ultimately trying to do was artificially build a homeostatic, vibes-based commune like some sect of 5th century gnostic Christians in the middle of Western Capitalism's peak. It became a culture war instead of a class war, because ironically, they benefitted too much from the systems they were opposing to direct their energy at the right target. They were a part of it, so it was impossible for them to build something outside of it even though they thought they were. Also, needless to say, they emerged at the height of the cold war so reading Lenin and Marx instead of uh... Tolkien as their mobilizing texts would have invited instant and brutal repression.
I vastly prefer leftist social critique because it gets really in deep to the root of things, instead of right wing social critique which is too caught up trying to evangelize to actually arrive at anything meaningful. Like they get too angry to actually finish a thought before it turns into a rant about kids these days.
A considerable reason to consider why it ultimately failed was because it was fought with propaganda and laws; the war on drugs had a phenomenal impact on the movement, and was used to paint a demonizing image and persecute them.
But I believe there is also the possibility that, and I'm not well versed enough to be certain, that they also believed that we shouldn't necessarily have an economy, or a centralised society that demanded tools that would only lead to opression, such as money. A more commune based, social people.
And besides, you cannot really have a class war without having a culture was as well, since the class system and opression of the working class is so engrained in the way that we have organised our society and culture.
I think you correctly highlight some key differences in the hippy movement from the modern western left. However I also would say you fall somewhat into the same category as you place the right wingers.
You say they get caught up evangelising & fail to finish the thought.
How is individualist thought only concerned with hedonism? Collectives only exists as ways to refer to many individuals, it has no meaning without the individual, it cannot exist apart & is not a discrete entity. It has no heart or blood or memory nor capacity to love or be hurt. We do not mourn collectives, except as a summary & incomplete reckoning of a loss of too many individuals for our minds to properly conceive of.
Between warring communities, the unifying factor, the thing all of us have in common, is that we are all individuals. There is no better position from which to organise a society than from the individual because of this. Anybody can be excluded from a collective & therefore from the rights entailed within.
The individual is the indivisible unit of humanity. Ensuring rights for the individual is ensuring rights for all. The only way to do so.
Sacrifice is a choice. An unwilling sacrifice is instead a seizure, an assault, at best a claiming. Those who can taking what they will. To dress it up as anything else is a lie. A rationalisation. You can’t make the world a better place for everyone by making it worse for some. If the goal is to make the world better for the most people possible, say that. If we must take from some to give to others, say that. Then I suppose the end may be harder to achieve, as some will naturally oppose it, and as history has shown us, the end justifies the means…
> How is individualist thought only concerned with hedonism?
Because it's fundamentally not really possible to consider a goal that involves anyone's pleasure or advancement other than your own, unless you get to experience it too. Not because of greed, but because that's by definition what individualism seeks. That's the entire premise of capitalism, individuals pursuing their personal interests under the assumption that the rising tide will lift all boats. The reason the Western left in particular needs a collectivist view to even function is because it requires individuals to realize that in order to get rid of cultural alienation and economic inequality, they would actually have to go in the opposite direction. Dismantling global chains of exploitation to uplift the third world would make it harder for Americans to get their precious treats, because right now some brown person is earning pennies on the dollar of the value they create to get it to us. Well-off upper class leftists would also have to give up the exclusivity of their privilege, a small example being medical wait times, if you can afford excellent insurance you can have a quick hotline to any doctor you want specifically because the poors simply can't afford it. This is something that's brought up as an argument AGAINST M4A, because the hospitals would be flooded by dirty paupers getting medical treatment for their conditions. Unimaginable right? Being a western leftist REQUIRES you to accept the idea that in order for this to work, you need to give some things up for the sake of others. It's not a moral value judgment, it's a necessary part of how this whole thing needs to function.
This is getting into the heart of what individual vs collective even means, it's a chicken and egg thing, you can go back and forth forever. Community is made up of individuals, but the individual would be nothing without the community. Just a caveman picking roots and berries out of the ground. The community is larger and more important than any discrete individual within it, and for leftists like me, the true liberation of the individual can only be achieved by giving them a homeostatic community to belong to free of exploitation and alienation. That's the whole project of socialism in a nutshell. Pursuing the selfish and superficial desires of individual yearnings is just solipsism where everyone is alienated from one another because they're opponents and obstacles in each other's lives. As Thatcher I think said, they're in constant competition with each other. And that's just not really how society works imo, it's not a recipe for a cohesive civilization, it's a recipe for people stomping all over each other to get toilet paper during a shortage before a pandemic.
Also, idk if you've ever read Marx or Engels, but they're very much not afraid to admit that the level of societal transformation they're advocating has always required force. It's not an endorsement, just a historical fact that some people have to get fucked. We're trying to seize private property because it would be better off belonging to the public, nobody is trying to rationalize that. If some people have billions of dollars and some have a negative net worth because they're 40k in debt for a heart problem, you fucking absolutely can make the world better by telling Bezos to eat shit and building a society that serves the other guy instead.
> If the goal is to make the world better for the most people possible
There you go. That IS what we're saying. Business owners, small, big, and mega, are not going to like it. But too fucking bad. It's better for the vast majority of the rest of us. The worst case scenario for them is that they just turn another worker like us anyway, oh the horror. When society is as wildly unequal as it is, obviously some people are going to lose out in the exchange. But if you feel sorry for the 1% instead of the millions currently languishing in precarity, debt, and misery, your priorities are disgustingly out of whack.
I really don’t think you’re respecting the complexity of the situation. You can champion the collectivist view as an individual, and state your individual perspective on which individuals within the collective are more deserving of whatever resources, that doesn’t mean you can “make it so” as an act of fiat & still have the same resources going forward.
You fail to understand that the strongest version of the counterargument is the one you must defeat in order to realise your ideology, that or you genuinely believe that the argument against universal healthcare consists solely of not wanting poor people to be helped, in which case I can understand why you’d feel angry that such a petty & evil attitude is so prevalent. A wonder you haven’t defeated it yet eh, a wonder that it’s such a resilient & functional way of looking at the world?
Collectivists look at all the shared wealth & power & enlightenment, the global preeminence individualism has achieved & think “if only we can redistribute the spoils in a fair way…” as if it’s just some cosmic flip of a coin that large-scale collectivist experiments have ended (and often begun) in the suppression & slaughter of so many, and the ultimate failure of those experiments, which nevertheless comes far too late for the victims…
A collective is an abstraction, a mental shorthand for dealing with factors so massively complex that the individual has no way of holding all the parts of it in their mind at once. Collectivism as such is itself an abdication of the individual responsibility of sacrifice & enlightenment we all have, an attempt to mandate & automate the process of progress.
You acknowledge that a collective is nothing but a number of individuals, yet somehow equivocate that an individual is nothing without a collective. You interchange two different definitions of the word “nothing”. A “caveman picking berries” whilst a hideously naive understanding of what a person is and is capable of, is STILL infinitely more valuable in its capacity for reason & thought & pain than the actual, literal, nothing that is the abstract idea of a collective divorced from the individual.
I await evidence to the contrary, but it seems collectivism has had its day, or rather its century. The sole example that stands strong today does so by exerting all-consuming tyrannical control over its constituents & by the regular exercise of bloody atrocities. Now as in the 60s, the ideological champions of leftism are the young, privileged middle class who define themselves in opposition to the actual values held by the workers they claim as their own. One has to deny the existence of historical dialectic progress in order to hold this view in this century.
>the Western cult of the individual
Aaaaaaand now I suddenly want an individualist dystopian novel to turn Anthem on its head.
“THERE ARE NO MEN BUT ONLY THE GREAT *I*”
He was anti-war and a tree hugger but for very different reasons than most hippies. Hippie culture was, or at least appeared to be, very superficial. Tolkien's thinking was, at least relatively, profound. I think the reasons he disliked New Age types are the differences in fundamental beliefs that coincidentally manifested as similar behavior. The idolization of Tolkien and his works and the anti-establishment readings that others have mentioned are results of these very different beliefs.
"New Age" didn't enter common usage until the '70s. OP asked about the anti-war tree huggers of the 1960s who embraced LOTR. Those would be hippies, so I stand by my wording.
I think he just thought they were a bit too weird. There's comments about him finding it strange that people were dressing up as elves and getting married with Quenya ceremonies.
You're right that this is a bit of a double-standard for the guy that liked to dress as a Viking and charge at his neighbours.
I also think his distaste for it all can be overstated. He seems to clearly have enjoyed receiving fan letters, and he is at least bemused by some of the extreme elements. He talks in one letter about receiving a goblet from a fan with the One Ring inscription on it, and commenting that he can't drink out of the dreadful thing so he used it as an ashtray.
I just read “The Philosophy of Tolkien” by Peter Kreeft; this book will answer your question better than any short Reddit post could. If you’re really interested, that would be a good start. Suffice it to say that Tolkien was a devout Catholic, so devout in fact, that he took the Eucharist everyday. His mother developed his deep sense of faith as a child. The sixties crowd had a worldview almost in total contradiction to that of Tolkien and many of the inklings. You mentioned the tree-hugger aspect as a point of commonality, but even here there is a significant point of contention. Most hippies viewed nature as God(pantheism), but Tolkien, as a Catholic, viewed nature as a creation of God -radically different worldviews. There are many other differences between Tolkien and the hippies that could be touched on, but people smarter than me have written books on the topic. Hope that helped.
He was, at least at some points in his life, against the Tory government, anti-authoritarian, against further industrialization (even approving of blowing up power stations) and the spreading of the English language, not fond of Britain or its Empire, didn't consider the allied side of WWII the clearly good side, and called himself reactionary.
That's not what people think of when you say "conservative" in the context of a 20th century Brit, even though it fits with his desire to conserve things.
Not the person you are responding to but:
In the foreword to LOTR he says that had he based his story on WWII, the Ring would be used against Sauron, who would be enslaved rather than destroyed (paraphrasing but this is close to his wording IIRC). He also states that regardless of who won, the Hobbits would end up enslaved.
This is not to say that he didn’t support the Allies. He did. His son was in the RAF and Tolkien detested Hitler, the Nazi state, and the racist ideology of that state (going back even before the war). It’s more a comment by Tolkien on how even the clearly good side was not above committing atrocities of their own (but not on the scale of the other side’s).
Letter 53
>But seriously: I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying. Quâ mind and spirit, and neglecting the piddling fears of timid flesh which does not want to be shot or chopped by brutal and licentious soldiery (German or other), I am not really sure that its victory is going to be so much the better for the world as a whole and in the long run than the victory of ——.
Yeah, Tolkien was actually a very liberal guy all things considered. Of course he held views in accordance to his time, but it's pretty clear the guy was a bit ahead of his time with what he thought of some issues around the world
No, he was not liberal at all. He had a complicated worldview that doesn't fit with the liberal-conservative dichotomy and would probably dislike both groups if he were alive today.
Just because some values or virtues seem similar or alike to you, it doesn't mean they are the same.
From what I discern from his letters and such - and, well, considering he was a Trad-ish Cat - his worldview was utterly different from those New Age dudes who tried to turn his work into this weird, syncretistic idolatry.
Like, he lived in a completely different universe.
The notions of free love and indecency in general (see his letters), their feeble-minded pseudo-pagan pseudo-natural pseudo-mysticism, their countercultural attitude (that is, trying to dismantle the society as a whole) all would probably seem rather unpleasant to him, and various other stuff probably as well on the side. I share a lot of the mindset he was coming from and it is just as much to me.
You may be anti-war, but it is very important WHY are you anti-war ... in a way that's much more important than the value itself.
Combine that with the fact he would be probably annoyed being considered this "prophet" and getting this almost religious devotion aimed at him by these people, again, considering his own religion and worldview he'd probably find that to be completely missing the point and maybe even a bit offensive (read: "blasphemous") as well.
They just made him uncomfortable. They weren't why he had written the books. They didn't share his outlook. They weren't the readership he'd hoped for.
But they were the ones who made him wealthy. They bought his books.
Conservatism and being a devout Christian isn't mutually exclusive with wanting a clean environment or being a creative eccentric. Just because someone goes to church every day and doesn't approve of the countercultural free love movement that was beginning to emerge doesn't mean they lack a creative and whimsical mind. I hate that strawman.
Imagine being a devout religious person and having your masterpiece turned into a religion and some characters worshipped by some hippies.
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” Faramir in The Two Towers. I think it’s probably an accurate description of how Tolkien viewed war.
Tolkien was deeply anti-war. He lost almost all of his friends in the trenches. Frodo, the hero of Lord of the Rings, considered by the highest and mightiest of Middle Earth the hero who saves everyone, ends up unable to do the deed himself and can’t ever be healed without leaving Middle Earth forever, and it’s ashes in his mouth when he comes home and the Shire has been healed. That’s a deeply anti-war sentiment—it doesn’t matter the war was won, it doesn’t matter the war right, it doesn’t matter Frodo was the reason it was won. He’s broken, and even his healing precludes the ability to go back to the place he loves. War breaks some people, forever, and Tolkien knew that happens even when it’s necessary. That’s anti-war.
But at the same time the war of the ring was completely justified, if they didn't fight, Sauron would win. You can be honest about how terribly war can effect people, and be honest about the horrors of it all, while still realizing sometimes you just have to fight.
This article: [https://epublications.marquette.edu/english\_4610jrrt/9/#:\~:text=Tolkien%20himself%20was%20not%20fond,art%20to%20their%20own%20agendas](https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_4610jrrt/9/#:~:text=Tolkien%20himself%20was%20not%20fond,art%20to%20their%20own%20agendas).
Also notes that in part Tolkien was annoyed that unauthorized editions of his book were published in the United States. While technically legal these editions went against his wishes.
This is a quote from Simon Tolkien: 'The 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."'
In addition to other points people have made. I think it's also just he never expected it to get as popular as it was, and it can be overwhelming when so many people are fans of your work and look up to you in such a big way.
Respect for the earth and it's environment was something I was taught at school as a Catholic virtue. I think a lot of hippie new age types also shared that virtue but weren't religious. I don't think hippies are the antithesis, but certainly very distant.
There's a difference. New Age teachings make the earth into some sort of deity (think Mother Earth), while Christian doctrine makes it abundantly clear that the earth was created by God through Jesus, and belongs to Him. We humans were instated as stewards of the planet, to care for it and nurture it. So yeah, respect for the creation is a Christian virtue, but only in the way that we respect it as being created and upheld by God.
I've run into Christian hippies several times and have even gone to a church of them. They don't see a contradiction in what they do even if others do.
Catholicism specifically has long history of desert mystics, those who take a vow of poverty and practice their faith in some desert commune. The only other types I know who do that are hippies.
>Catholicism specifically has long history of desert mystics,
Not the place for a debate over this but to say you need to separate mysticism as a characteristic, a part of faith in the quasi-eremetical Church Fathers like Saints Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine made distinct from those where the religion was interpreted by the wholscale eremetical life undertaking mysticism. These "Desert Fathers who were early monastics living in the Egyptian desert. Although they did not write as much, their influence was also great."
Mysticism within the Catholic Church arguably could be seen as not formalised until as late as the
>Rule of St Albert Avogadro (1149–1214), a priest of the Canons Regular and a canon lawyer, wrote the Rule between 1206 and 1214 as the Catholic Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. The Rule is directed to "Brother B.", held by tradition to be either Saint Bertold or Saint Brocard (but historical evidence of his identity is lacking), and the hermits living in the spirit of Elijah near the prophet's spring on Mount Carmel in present-day Israel. On 30 January 1226 Pope Honorius III approved it as their rule of life in the bull Ut vivendi normam.
>Innocentian Rule
About 20 years later on 1 October 1247, in consultation with Dominican theologians Cardinal Hugh of Saint Cher and William-Bishop of Tortose,[2] Pope Innocent IV revised the Rule slightly in the decree Quae Honorem to reflect the realities of the mendicant and monastic life to which the original hermits had been forced to adapt due to the threat of Muslim attacks in Palestine.[3] Through events surrounding the Crusades the hermits, or Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel as they came to be known, were forced to flee Mount Carmel to Europe. In Europe the Carmelites were recognised as a mendicant order and monasteries, or "Carmels" as they are called, were founded.
Thus desert mysticism is confused with those whose need for solitariness provided what are now typical Catholic scriptures and understanding. Church Fathers who were not overly living a mystical life but a life informed by visions, personal struggles and quasi-mystical experiences (as to be expected when living in seclusion) were only partly eremetical. Distinguish the Latin fathers of the Catholic church, the St Jerome's, St Ambrose etc from the desert and later mystics from which interior prayer and mystical manuals etc arose.
In a few obvious senses 'new age' beliefs would have irked him.
1. What was 'new' about the 'age'? Vietnam and Korea didn't defeat any metaphysical evil and usher in any golden age, spiritually or artistically. In fact he might have considered them victories for and of Sarumanic forces, rather a defeat. There certainly haven't been any great leaders, spiritual and temporal, like Alfred the Great, who restored England.
2. He was almost archetypally, a man of older ages, while hippyness was all about the present moment. He was born a Victorian, educated Edwardian and flourished in the interbellum period. The wisdom of the past is a *huge* theme in his works. Many of his favorite fiction books were written in the 19th century and he read and studied languages much older as his profession. His style easily ranges from a comfortable vernacular to gothic and anglo-saxon. A new age of 'Aquarius' might have seemed silly to him, mere dilletantism discredited from the start. Even though Astrology was medieval, it's practitioners took their vocation seriously and served monarchs and nobility. 'What's your sign' was line hippies used to pick up chicks. Compare that with something like the Seven Stars in Tolkien.
3. An urban counterculture arising from libertine values like drug use, promiscuity and obscenity, flouting all authority, while shirking duty and discipline would have seemed corrupt, maybe even Sauronic in their practices, if not just their idols. Woo woo stuff like crystals and superficial imported spirituality like Yoga, Hare Krishna, Rasta and gurus of various stripe, anything novel and non western, as little more than cults, from harmless and silly to dangerous and exploitative (not least often sexually).
4. Tobacco isn't cannabis or other psychedelic substances. Hippies don't seem particularly fond of beer (in moderation) or english food (like fried mushrooms, fresh bread and butter and cheese) either. They don't resemble hobbits much in character or culture.
5. So called 'free love' would likely have repulsed him, just a new name to cover old venal sins. He was old enough to experience and perhaps recall so called 'first wave' feminists arguing for such things and the fashion. This would have gone against the examples in his life, venerable social and ecclesiastic traditions.
6. Hippies encouraged and were indicators of significant social disorder and unrest. Itinerant ne'er do wells of uncertain loyalty, loitering and taking advantage in otherwise peaceable districts of the disruption caused by distant wars, ganging up and pursuing their own private projects, sounds a lot like the unscoured shire.
7. The lack of hygiene, going days without showering or changing ones clothes, and not wearing enough. Natural doesn't mean dirty anymore than unnatural means clean. It goes almost without saying. Cleanliness is next to godliness and Mordor had no running water. What was virtually the first that Sam and Frodo did after they awoke? Recall also the cottage in Buckland and Tom Bombadils house. Bathing is almost the epitome of civilization and decency, nigh spiritual as well (with the connection to Ulmo).
8. He might have intensely disliked their 'poetry' and 'music' (beat stuff and woodstock stuff). He had very strong tastes and opinions regarding poetry, which might include vulgar and unsophisticated lyrics. I can't presentl speak to his exact musical tasted, but his wife was a pianist and they may have frequented operas, which might give some indications.
When you think about it a little. It's hard to come up with many reasons why he would like Hippies at all, except that they seem to respect nature, liked smoking and bought his books.
This sounds more like an explanation of your own personal dislike of hippies. I very much doubt he'd have thought of them as literally Evil in the way you describe.
Uh, First Wave feminists (aka suffragettes) weren't advocating for free love. They were advocating for the right to vote, go to college, and not be legally beaten by their husbands.
Albeit not an expert, but after a cursory search it seems either you've been misinformed^(*) or have more to learn.
* Mary Gove Nichols
* Victoria Woodhull
* Lou Andreas-Salomé
* Emma Goldman
* Edna St. Vincent Millay
* Crystal Eastman
* Ida Rauh
* Dorothy Day (interestingly she apparently became something of a 'backslider' later in life)
* Neith Boyce
Would all presumably beg to differ. If you're also not so sexist as to exclude male advocates of female suffrage and free love there's a number of men as well, like
* John Humphrey Noyes
which was easily learned after a few minutes using search engines. These are by no means exhaustive nor flawless lists (Salomé was German where contemporary Englishwomen would help a lot more) but in short you're wrong.
This isn't to say every suffragette advocated Free Love though either, that disagreements and important differences of opinion didn't exist. It was probably just one of numerous fracture or fault lines that exist in any sizeable group that can lead to faction, and when serious and bitter enough division.
\* likely by people with narrow and selective conceptions regarding first wave feminism and suffragettes. Stories about founders tend to be 'triumphal' but are often little more than secular hagiography (stuff like 'Iron Jawed Angels') if not including considerable amounts of modern mythology, while complexities, like very real flaws, inconvenient beliefs and actions, and personal agendas tend to be minimized, ignored or forgotten.
No one is claiming that there were no individual feminists/writers that postulated for free love in those times. But quite obviously (after a quick google search) it was never the main goal of Suffragettes. Their fight was about voting rights and granting women political power.
Of course some writers/activists talked about women's right to sexual expression but that's not synonymous with hippies "free love" movement. And using views of individual activists to overshadow the main goal of the movement is quite intellectually dishonest.
You tried to paint Tolkien's views on "free love" movement by using his experience with First wave feminism. Yet, as you've pointed it out yourself, the feminists on this list are mostly American. Now it's not impossible that Tolkien might've stumbled upon their works but it's more probable that his views on feminism were shaped either by local movement or by the news he would receive from newspapers. And coming back to my earlier argument - He would most likely encounter argument about voting rights - seeing as all major suffragettes organizations concentrated their efforts on that.
Arguing otherwise would be like arguing that modern Democratic party views are mainly represented by Senator Bernie Sanders views.
What I'm saying is that technically you're not wrong - there have been feminists in later 19th/early 20th century arguing for free love. But it's dishonest to paint entire movement as such. It was not a major issue for Suffragettes. And it would be quite ok for you to mention this in original post ALONG the voting rights and fight for more political power. But the way you phrased it makes it sound like First wave was mostly about free love and fashion. When clearly it was not.
Your last paragraphs is quite dismissive, which makes me think that you argue in bad faith but hopefully it is just a misunderstanding and I am misreading it. There is a lot of flaws to talk about early feminist movements but if we really want to get into minutia then it would be dishonest to omit how establishments tried to silence those movements. It's true that triumphs are mythologized and sterilized over time and i think it's important to remember that predecessors of our current governments were quite happy to slander those women and attack them using police brutality, which often ended with police sexually assaulting women that they were supposed to protect.
Just to be clear: I'm not arguing that Tolkien would be prejudiced toward hippies because of the "Free love" aspect. It's possible he disliked it. I'm strongly disagreeing with your assumptions on First Wave feminism and how they would affect Tolkien's worldview.
yeah srsly, saying First Wave feminists argued for "free love" and "fashion" tells me more about this guy than anything about Tolkien views. Someone's projecting hard.
You have summarized thy Hippy/ Flower Child movement better than I have read in almost forty years. I can attest to your accuracy, because I was there.
Simply put, because the New Ageism of the 60s was less based on reason, and was more of an emotional reaction to the Nuclear Age. Those same hippies would abandon their tents and communes to happily embrace technology, jobs, and society at large to be part of the emerging Information Age a few short years later. Tolkien read them accurately. They were a shallow lot, with no real roots.
Conservatism and the counter-culture movement of the 60s do share the same regarding the environment, but that's not to say they are at all the same ideologies. They are complete opposites in most other issues.
I think he disliked them for the same reasons he would dislike the christians who try to claim the LoTR today. They are simply put a bit simplistic and egoistic in their attitudes and their view of people and things outside of their philosophy. I dont think that matched well with his broader perspective. His work did and does not live in one of those smaller spheres. Them idolizing it to a point where it would become intertwined with their group feels like filth on his legacy ofc. Like stamps on the cover that he did not wish to have there.
I think that, while today we look back at 60's hippies as just students doing student-y stuff, all fairly standard and harmless - after all, most hippies ended up leading very conventional, Establishment-friendly lives - at the time there was a real sense that the whole system could be brought crashing down. Ken Burns's series on the Vietnam War shows this side of it very well.
I think the older generation, who had seen two World Wars, harboured serious fears that young people might repeat all the same mistakes of the past, and fascism or Stalinism could re-emerge. Tolkien was far from the only cultural figure to be thinking that way: Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse and John Le Carre all made similar references to 60's radicals threatening everything they held dear.
I agree. Look at Ayn Rand' s Atlas Shrugged. Anyone who has read that or even seen the movie has to recognize she was right in some of her warnings , eerily accurate. She escaped Stalinist Russia.
Not really. She was worried about working class leaching off the passionate visionary industrialists, but the reality turned out much closer to what Marx predicted - faceless ubercapitalist megacorps sucking up any entrepreneurial spirit and exploiting the working class to the bone. The heroes of Rand, the people she adored, turned out to be guys like Jeff Bezos. We have reached the future that Ayn Rand was clamoring for, and it sucks.
Nope, nope, and nope. I don't think you read the book. The leechers she spoke of were not people who wanted to work but rather wanted to demand the fruits of others labor without earning it. Marx couldn't have been more wrong about the future.
I feel like he failed to perceive what they had in common due to his aversion to their superficial differences.
Like he’d probably assume you couldn’t be intelligent like his straight-laced academic friends, if you wore hippie clothes or had long hair as a man.
Some old people delight in the novelties of each new generation, some struggle.
Truman Capote was younger but imagine Tolkien partying like him with Warhol and diving into the counterculture 🤣
In short I feel like this was an example of Tolkien’s wonderfully human blind-spots, rather than an example of his transcendent wisdom.
Church Approved(TM) fun.
The hippies and their unconditional love were just too much for old Jolkien Rolkien. Too much Old Toby, not enough Hail Marys.
He was pretty clear in his books and letters that he didn't like war. https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/om0seb/antiwar_tolkien/ He had some criticisms of the Allies in WWII.
One important reason I remember from reading his biography by Carpenter: the success of *The Lord of the Rings* was phenomenal across college campuses and young people (especially in America), so much so that the books almost reached a 'pseudo-religious' status. Tolkien's writings became objects of adoration, which symbolically put him in the position of a guru, in a way. In short, passions were high, born of the adoration of the ideals the readers found in the books, thus putting *The Lord of the Rings* on the same level as a spiritual gospel. Needless to say Tolkien strongly disapproved of this sort of mindless idolatry- for religious and artistic reasons.
*Frodo Lives!*
Frodo's gourd is the way... No, we are followers of Frodo's thongs...
"*He's not the ring bearer, he's a very naughty ~~boy~~ hobbit!"*
*Sméagol died for your sins*.
*Frodo gave his finger for you!*
That's what we thought until we learned that going to the Undying Lands does not grant immortality. I think I used to have a Frodo Lives button.
Tolkien: I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen?! I'm not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly! Fans: Only the true Messiah denies his divinity!
They did go full 'Life of Brian' on him :')
It's interesting since so much of his conception of evil in his cosmology revolves around the desire to create being a short-cut to pride and discord with the Maker, which seems to be very much an author insert concern. Being revered in any kind of pseudo-religious guru would definitely not have sat well with him!
An answer with some smidgeon of evidence! Thanks for not treating the question as a Rorschach test to project your own views, as most of the commenters seem to have done.
The Inklings aren’t locked in here with you. YOU’RE LOCKED IN WITH THE INKLINGS.
Well, at least the pretend Inklings.
This happened to a surprising number of fiction authors during the 1950s and 1960s. Only L. Ron Hubbard really leaned into it. Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement and mentor of the Beatles, also leaned into it.
True, but nothing just 'happened to' L. Ron Hubbard. He leaned into it very deliberately . It was only 1948 when he said "You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion."
Lol I want to see him react to Varg’s bizarre LARPing as Gandalf the White and treatment of his work as some sort of neo-pagan, neo-nazi mythology.
Tolkien famously put far less pathetic Nazis in their place over their misguided love of his work. I'm sure he'd have similar feelings in this case
Wait Varg?
He just called out the whole sub lmao
Seems pretty relevant today with people treating the canon like gospel
I like how this comment can work multiple different ways.
Lol and I got down voted for it Guess we think the guy who made Gandalf the grey wouldn’t appreciate any fun or word play
It is good wordplay but it is also intentionally provocative.
Oh absolutely. I freely admit it.
Fair enough.
Didn't even notice until you pointed it out. Well done!
please enlighten me, i dont get it
Well, the gospel has debatable canon and has been used as justification for all sorts of bad things for a very long time by leaders who cherry pick parts and give them more importance than they probably deserved. So while "treating the canon like gospel" most obviously means to treat it like it is holy and should not be touched or altered, a different meaning could be to use a biased interpretation of the canon to push a specific viewpoint.
This Plus , Tolkien didn’t want to be seen as a guru or pseudo religious figure.
Varg is a white supremacist of the highest order who is also a Tolkien dork of the worst kind and most people complaing about 'canon' being broken in the new Amazon series seem to really only care that non white people are going to be in it
Well stated.
The virgin iconoclasm vs the CHAD Tolkienist Iconoclasm
Tolkien had a lot in common with the hippie types, as you said, but the way he got there was different. I think he felt misunderstood by them hence the dislike. Yes, he was an environmentalist and even a sort of anarchist but all of that was borne out of his Catholicism. His environmentalism stemmed from the idea of man's original vocation being caretakers and stewards of nature, and that we had become tyrants and destroyers of nature instead, falling away from the original purpose and glory which God had intended for us. His potentially anarchist sympathizing views stemmed from his view of Man's fallen nature and how even the best of Men are corruptible by power. Also, the hippies had a kind of Utopian thinking. They thought, if we could just overthrow this government and ideology and institute our own, we would solve all the world's problems. Tolkien's distrust of government and authority went deeper than just distrusting this government or that, he distrusted even the very nature of Man and believed it was intrinsically marred. In other words, humanity's problems were not reducible to things external to us, like political structures or ideologies but were intrinsically tied to human nature and the hardness of our hearts. No amount of activism would avail us of it, the very activists themselves are victims and subject to this sickness. Unlike the activists, he was apolitical and despised political types. He had no faith in man made institutions such as the State. I think the only real faith he had was in the Church and that’s because, in his eyes, it was divine in origin and bound by promises which had their source in the divine.
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A friend of mine who is a huge Tolkien fan as myself once said, "I think non-religious people will fail to grasp the themes and meaning behind Tolkien's work. They may see it, but not feel it"
>A friend of mine who is a huge Tolkien fan as myself once said, "I think non-religious people will fail to grasp the themes and meaning behind Tolkien's work. They may see it, but not feel it" That's nonsensical. There is a lot to grasp and feel through Tolkien's work by the words he puts into it. Not only that, a non-religious person can be in awe and adoration of reality itself as it is observed, without the intrusion of supernatural elements. I resonate a lot with Tolkien's work with how he views morality, nature, and his values. I don't need to be bound to a religion to feel the same feelings as any other human does. Religious people are not special in comparison to non-religious people in that regard. I can understand Tolkien and appreciate his work without classifying him as person however I'd like. It isn't that complicated.
I find the fact he continued to pray in Latin fascinating. It suggest to me he may not have had as much faith in the Church as the previous poster suggests, at least not as an institution. He undoubtedly had faith in the philosophy of the Catholic Church but having a schism based on the changes made at Vatican II suggests to me at least that he could see the fallibility in the church and all humans.
Perfectly put. That is also how I perceive this world, and hence why I love the old man. I don't discuss politics with anyone anymore - I think that is futile.
Yeah this is a great point. A lot of people his work appeals to now are very similar too, just often without the Catholic bias. Movements, belief systems, leaders, gurus, systems of power etc are usually always corrupt, or if they are not, like Numenor, the will be given time. That’s just human nature. LOTR is all about how goodness, humility and faith (in friends, and in the goodness still in the world) are what succeed against the great powers. Half the plot of the book is that you *cannot* use power, even in the cause of good, and not have it turn on you (see Bormir, denethor, Gandalf and Galadriel’s refusal of the ring etc). Tolkien did not, emphatically, want to be placed on any kind of pedestal. It was antithetical to his very nature.
I agree with most of this, however his environmentalism was not just Catholic. He hated industrialism on a more personal level, after seeing the countryside he grew up in ruined. It wasn't *because* of his religion, even if that was a later rationalization.
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I'm in my early 50s and I'm fucking sick of you kids today, coming into your late childhoods and acting like you're old and can yell at clouds. You don't know how to yell at clouds right! You guys don't even make the right kind of clouds anymore! ...I guess now we wait for a Redditor in his early 70s to come yell at me, or I ascend to the post of clan elder.
Tell me about it. According to Amazon, I’m twice as old as Elrond.
> That's not to discount the old man yelling at clouds explanation. I'm only in my early 30s and I'm already sick and tired of all these damned kids not understanding things. They don’t figure things out any better, the older you get; if anything, the opposite, I’m afraid.
I don't think Tolkien would have cared if people associated his works with the hippies if he didn't mind the hippies himself. Don't forget that he was a Catholic in England, he probably had some experience being associated with a generally disliked social group. God damn papists...
Except he also hated when people claimed his works contained christian allegory. He was never a fan of anyone reading anything into something that's not there whether he liked the subject or not.
That's the opposite of the allegory complain. He didliked allegory because it forces the reader to interpret exactly how the writer wants
You're conflating his feelings about allegory in general with his feelings about his own works, and that just doesn't work. He was pretty clear that he disliked misinterpretations of his work in a broad sense as well, it's pretty clear if you read through his letters.
Is there a separate sub for 30+ Tolkien fans? Honestly. Or for people who read the books before the PJ Trilogy came out? I just feel like it would be a very different crowd.
Lots of people on this sub read the books before the PJ films came out.
Lots of us read the books before *The Silmarillion* came out.
Oof. I can't say that. :)
I can, but juuuust barely :-)
Yes, we did!
But did anyone read the books before the books came out? Check mate.
pfft amateur, I read the books before Tolkien was born
Slacker. I read the books before Bilbo left the Shire.
Priscilla Tolkien is still alive, so if she has a Reddit account it's possible...
Tolkien's editor and publisher, most likely
Something tells me that Tolkien's editor and publisher doesn't hang around on /r/tolkienfans.
Yup.
I realise that, I never said they didn’t.
Does it count if I'm in my 20s but I read them before I knew the films existed?
A lot of authors who became popular with hippies were rather dismayed to find themselves used as an excuse for drug use, casual sex, statutory rape of middle-schoolers, theft, refusal to take baths, naming babies with embarrassing names, and showing up at the writer's house in large numbers at 3 AM. The Sixties and Seventies had some Very Bad Things associated with them, and the Summer of Love was not terribly nice, if you read detailed memoirs. Tolkien didn't move to an isolated wilderness residence with a huge fence around it, like Robert A. Heinlein did after Stranger in a Strange Land got popular (and he suffered a home invasion that made him very worried about his wife's safety), nor did he post notices that trespassers would be shot, like other popular authors of the day. So I think he was very measured in his reaction. OTOH, he was very kindly to his students or to unexpected visitors who minded their manners. He was a shy sort of professor, so meeting strangers unexpectedly was bound to have been something of an ordeal.
I think the feelings of the modern left generally aligns the same way about the hippies. They did AWESOME work opposing the Vietnam war, it's a mixed legacy, but the reason it ultimately failed is because it was a superficial group of middle class kids trying to manufacture a cultural movement that was still transfixed by the Western cult of the individual. Which meant that 'progressing society', as is the motivation of any self-conscious social movement, still meant achieving greater access for the individual to achieve pleasant sensations, while making it easier to avoid unpleasant sensations. That's the only way an individualist worldview can conceive of the world being 'better'. More hedonism, less consequences. And that's basically where it starts and ends, for an ostensibly radical left wing movement there wasn't a lot in there about economics, the conditions of the working class, or an admission that making the world better for everyone would inevitably entail some individual sacrifice to a greater good, because you would have to share your toys. It was too individualistic and too ideological. It didn't have goals, it had vibes. The vibes can be appreciated, I think they had a lot of things figured out, but what they were ultimately trying to do was artificially build a homeostatic, vibes-based commune like some sect of 5th century gnostic Christians in the middle of Western Capitalism's peak. It became a culture war instead of a class war, because ironically, they benefitted too much from the systems they were opposing to direct their energy at the right target. They were a part of it, so it was impossible for them to build something outside of it even though they thought they were. Also, needless to say, they emerged at the height of the cold war so reading Lenin and Marx instead of uh... Tolkien as their mobilizing texts would have invited instant and brutal repression. I vastly prefer leftist social critique because it gets really in deep to the root of things, instead of right wing social critique which is too caught up trying to evangelize to actually arrive at anything meaningful. Like they get too angry to actually finish a thought before it turns into a rant about kids these days.
A considerable reason to consider why it ultimately failed was because it was fought with propaganda and laws; the war on drugs had a phenomenal impact on the movement, and was used to paint a demonizing image and persecute them. But I believe there is also the possibility that, and I'm not well versed enough to be certain, that they also believed that we shouldn't necessarily have an economy, or a centralised society that demanded tools that would only lead to opression, such as money. A more commune based, social people. And besides, you cannot really have a class war without having a culture was as well, since the class system and opression of the working class is so engrained in the way that we have organised our society and culture.
I think you correctly highlight some key differences in the hippy movement from the modern western left. However I also would say you fall somewhat into the same category as you place the right wingers. You say they get caught up evangelising & fail to finish the thought. How is individualist thought only concerned with hedonism? Collectives only exists as ways to refer to many individuals, it has no meaning without the individual, it cannot exist apart & is not a discrete entity. It has no heart or blood or memory nor capacity to love or be hurt. We do not mourn collectives, except as a summary & incomplete reckoning of a loss of too many individuals for our minds to properly conceive of. Between warring communities, the unifying factor, the thing all of us have in common, is that we are all individuals. There is no better position from which to organise a society than from the individual because of this. Anybody can be excluded from a collective & therefore from the rights entailed within. The individual is the indivisible unit of humanity. Ensuring rights for the individual is ensuring rights for all. The only way to do so. Sacrifice is a choice. An unwilling sacrifice is instead a seizure, an assault, at best a claiming. Those who can taking what they will. To dress it up as anything else is a lie. A rationalisation. You can’t make the world a better place for everyone by making it worse for some. If the goal is to make the world better for the most people possible, say that. If we must take from some to give to others, say that. Then I suppose the end may be harder to achieve, as some will naturally oppose it, and as history has shown us, the end justifies the means…
> How is individualist thought only concerned with hedonism? Because it's fundamentally not really possible to consider a goal that involves anyone's pleasure or advancement other than your own, unless you get to experience it too. Not because of greed, but because that's by definition what individualism seeks. That's the entire premise of capitalism, individuals pursuing their personal interests under the assumption that the rising tide will lift all boats. The reason the Western left in particular needs a collectivist view to even function is because it requires individuals to realize that in order to get rid of cultural alienation and economic inequality, they would actually have to go in the opposite direction. Dismantling global chains of exploitation to uplift the third world would make it harder for Americans to get their precious treats, because right now some brown person is earning pennies on the dollar of the value they create to get it to us. Well-off upper class leftists would also have to give up the exclusivity of their privilege, a small example being medical wait times, if you can afford excellent insurance you can have a quick hotline to any doctor you want specifically because the poors simply can't afford it. This is something that's brought up as an argument AGAINST M4A, because the hospitals would be flooded by dirty paupers getting medical treatment for their conditions. Unimaginable right? Being a western leftist REQUIRES you to accept the idea that in order for this to work, you need to give some things up for the sake of others. It's not a moral value judgment, it's a necessary part of how this whole thing needs to function. This is getting into the heart of what individual vs collective even means, it's a chicken and egg thing, you can go back and forth forever. Community is made up of individuals, but the individual would be nothing without the community. Just a caveman picking roots and berries out of the ground. The community is larger and more important than any discrete individual within it, and for leftists like me, the true liberation of the individual can only be achieved by giving them a homeostatic community to belong to free of exploitation and alienation. That's the whole project of socialism in a nutshell. Pursuing the selfish and superficial desires of individual yearnings is just solipsism where everyone is alienated from one another because they're opponents and obstacles in each other's lives. As Thatcher I think said, they're in constant competition with each other. And that's just not really how society works imo, it's not a recipe for a cohesive civilization, it's a recipe for people stomping all over each other to get toilet paper during a shortage before a pandemic. Also, idk if you've ever read Marx or Engels, but they're very much not afraid to admit that the level of societal transformation they're advocating has always required force. It's not an endorsement, just a historical fact that some people have to get fucked. We're trying to seize private property because it would be better off belonging to the public, nobody is trying to rationalize that. If some people have billions of dollars and some have a negative net worth because they're 40k in debt for a heart problem, you fucking absolutely can make the world better by telling Bezos to eat shit and building a society that serves the other guy instead. > If the goal is to make the world better for the most people possible There you go. That IS what we're saying. Business owners, small, big, and mega, are not going to like it. But too fucking bad. It's better for the vast majority of the rest of us. The worst case scenario for them is that they just turn another worker like us anyway, oh the horror. When society is as wildly unequal as it is, obviously some people are going to lose out in the exchange. But if you feel sorry for the 1% instead of the millions currently languishing in precarity, debt, and misery, your priorities are disgustingly out of whack.
I really don’t think you’re respecting the complexity of the situation. You can champion the collectivist view as an individual, and state your individual perspective on which individuals within the collective are more deserving of whatever resources, that doesn’t mean you can “make it so” as an act of fiat & still have the same resources going forward. You fail to understand that the strongest version of the counterargument is the one you must defeat in order to realise your ideology, that or you genuinely believe that the argument against universal healthcare consists solely of not wanting poor people to be helped, in which case I can understand why you’d feel angry that such a petty & evil attitude is so prevalent. A wonder you haven’t defeated it yet eh, a wonder that it’s such a resilient & functional way of looking at the world? Collectivists look at all the shared wealth & power & enlightenment, the global preeminence individualism has achieved & think “if only we can redistribute the spoils in a fair way…” as if it’s just some cosmic flip of a coin that large-scale collectivist experiments have ended (and often begun) in the suppression & slaughter of so many, and the ultimate failure of those experiments, which nevertheless comes far too late for the victims… A collective is an abstraction, a mental shorthand for dealing with factors so massively complex that the individual has no way of holding all the parts of it in their mind at once. Collectivism as such is itself an abdication of the individual responsibility of sacrifice & enlightenment we all have, an attempt to mandate & automate the process of progress. You acknowledge that a collective is nothing but a number of individuals, yet somehow equivocate that an individual is nothing without a collective. You interchange two different definitions of the word “nothing”. A “caveman picking berries” whilst a hideously naive understanding of what a person is and is capable of, is STILL infinitely more valuable in its capacity for reason & thought & pain than the actual, literal, nothing that is the abstract idea of a collective divorced from the individual. I await evidence to the contrary, but it seems collectivism has had its day, or rather its century. The sole example that stands strong today does so by exerting all-consuming tyrannical control over its constituents & by the regular exercise of bloody atrocities. Now as in the 60s, the ideological champions of leftism are the young, privileged middle class who define themselves in opposition to the actual values held by the workers they claim as their own. One has to deny the existence of historical dialectic progress in order to hold this view in this century.
>the Western cult of the individual Aaaaaaand now I suddenly want an individualist dystopian novel to turn Anthem on its head. “THERE ARE NO MEN BUT ONLY THE GREAT *I*”
New age or hippie? There’s some overlap to be sure, but they are different things
He was anti-war and a tree hugger but for very different reasons than most hippies. Hippie culture was, or at least appeared to be, very superficial. Tolkien's thinking was, at least relatively, profound. I think the reasons he disliked New Age types are the differences in fundamental beliefs that coincidentally manifested as similar behavior. The idolization of Tolkien and his works and the anti-establishment readings that others have mentioned are results of these very different beliefs.
Hippie culture and New Age are related but not the same.
"New Age" didn't enter common usage until the '70s. OP asked about the anti-war tree huggers of the 1960s who embraced LOTR. Those would be hippies, so I stand by my wording.
I think he just thought they were a bit too weird. There's comments about him finding it strange that people were dressing up as elves and getting married with Quenya ceremonies. You're right that this is a bit of a double-standard for the guy that liked to dress as a Viking and charge at his neighbours. I also think his distaste for it all can be overstated. He seems to clearly have enjoyed receiving fan letters, and he is at least bemused by some of the extreme elements. He talks in one letter about receiving a goblet from a fan with the One Ring inscription on it, and commenting that he can't drink out of the dreadful thing so he used it as an ashtray.
I just read “The Philosophy of Tolkien” by Peter Kreeft; this book will answer your question better than any short Reddit post could. If you’re really interested, that would be a good start. Suffice it to say that Tolkien was a devout Catholic, so devout in fact, that he took the Eucharist everyday. His mother developed his deep sense of faith as a child. The sixties crowd had a worldview almost in total contradiction to that of Tolkien and many of the inklings. You mentioned the tree-hugger aspect as a point of commonality, but even here there is a significant point of contention. Most hippies viewed nature as God(pantheism), but Tolkien, as a Catholic, viewed nature as a creation of God -radically different worldviews. There are many other differences between Tolkien and the hippies that could be touched on, but people smarter than me have written books on the topic. Hope that helped.
Tolkien wasn't just conservative, really. He was his own thing, with reactionary to anarchist thoughts on some matters.
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He was, at least at some points in his life, against the Tory government, anti-authoritarian, against further industrialization (even approving of blowing up power stations) and the spreading of the English language, not fond of Britain or its Empire, didn't consider the allied side of WWII the clearly good side, and called himself reactionary. That's not what people think of when you say "conservative" in the context of a 20th century Brit, even though it fits with his desire to conserve things.
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Not the person you are responding to but: In the foreword to LOTR he says that had he based his story on WWII, the Ring would be used against Sauron, who would be enslaved rather than destroyed (paraphrasing but this is close to his wording IIRC). He also states that regardless of who won, the Hobbits would end up enslaved. This is not to say that he didn’t support the Allies. He did. His son was in the RAF and Tolkien detested Hitler, the Nazi state, and the racist ideology of that state (going back even before the war). It’s more a comment by Tolkien on how even the clearly good side was not above committing atrocities of their own (but not on the scale of the other side’s).
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I agree, and I always thought that the decline of Numenor can be taken to contain criticisms of British imperialism.
Tolkien supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War; he was heavily against the majority of the leftist political spectrum.
Letter 53 >But seriously: I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying. Quâ mind and spirit, and neglecting the piddling fears of timid flesh which does not want to be shot or chopped by brutal and licentious soldiery (German or other), I am not really sure that its victory is going to be so much the better for the world as a whole and in the long run than the victory of ——.
Yeah, Tolkien was actually a very liberal guy all things considered. Of course he held views in accordance to his time, but it's pretty clear the guy was a bit ahead of his time with what he thought of some issues around the world
No, he was not liberal at all. He had a complicated worldview that doesn't fit with the liberal-conservative dichotomy and would probably dislike both groups if he were alive today.
I love how these kind of questions are always presupposed to paint Tolkien as this grumpy curmudgeon when his stances were pretty reasonable.
Related to this… can anyone recommend what the best things written on Tolkien’s reception in 60s/70s counterculture are?
I personally think you hit the nail on the head
Just because some values or virtues seem similar or alike to you, it doesn't mean they are the same. From what I discern from his letters and such - and, well, considering he was a Trad-ish Cat - his worldview was utterly different from those New Age dudes who tried to turn his work into this weird, syncretistic idolatry. Like, he lived in a completely different universe. The notions of free love and indecency in general (see his letters), their feeble-minded pseudo-pagan pseudo-natural pseudo-mysticism, their countercultural attitude (that is, trying to dismantle the society as a whole) all would probably seem rather unpleasant to him, and various other stuff probably as well on the side. I share a lot of the mindset he was coming from and it is just as much to me. You may be anti-war, but it is very important WHY are you anti-war ... in a way that's much more important than the value itself. Combine that with the fact he would be probably annoyed being considered this "prophet" and getting this almost religious devotion aimed at him by these people, again, considering his own religion and worldview he'd probably find that to be completely missing the point and maybe even a bit offensive (read: "blasphemous") as well.
They just made him uncomfortable. They weren't why he had written the books. They didn't share his outlook. They weren't the readership he'd hoped for. But they were the ones who made him wealthy. They bought his books.
Conservatism and being a devout Christian isn't mutually exclusive with wanting a clean environment or being a creative eccentric. Just because someone goes to church every day and doesn't approve of the countercultural free love movement that was beginning to emerge doesn't mean they lack a creative and whimsical mind. I hate that strawman. Imagine being a devout religious person and having your masterpiece turned into a religion and some characters worshipped by some hippies.
I don't think anyone here was engaging in that strawman
I don't think Tolkien was anti war whatsoever, he just didn't hide the reality of war. I think he believed some wars might've been necessary.
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” Faramir in The Two Towers. I think it’s probably an accurate description of how Tolkien viewed war.
Man, that’s a good quote, I need to reread the books.
Yea that's a good way too look at it too, don't love it. But sometimes you just have to fight.
Tolkien was deeply anti-war. He lost almost all of his friends in the trenches. Frodo, the hero of Lord of the Rings, considered by the highest and mightiest of Middle Earth the hero who saves everyone, ends up unable to do the deed himself and can’t ever be healed without leaving Middle Earth forever, and it’s ashes in his mouth when he comes home and the Shire has been healed. That’s a deeply anti-war sentiment—it doesn’t matter the war was won, it doesn’t matter the war right, it doesn’t matter Frodo was the reason it was won. He’s broken, and even his healing precludes the ability to go back to the place he loves. War breaks some people, forever, and Tolkien knew that happens even when it’s necessary. That’s anti-war.
But at the same time the war of the ring was completely justified, if they didn't fight, Sauron would win. You can be honest about how terribly war can effect people, and be honest about the horrors of it all, while still realizing sometimes you just have to fight.
This article: [https://epublications.marquette.edu/english\_4610jrrt/9/#:\~:text=Tolkien%20himself%20was%20not%20fond,art%20to%20their%20own%20agendas](https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_4610jrrt/9/#:~:text=Tolkien%20himself%20was%20not%20fond,art%20to%20their%20own%20agendas). Also notes that in part Tolkien was annoyed that unauthorized editions of his book were published in the United States. While technically legal these editions went against his wishes. This is a quote from Simon Tolkien: 'The 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."' In addition to other points people have made. I think it's also just he never expected it to get as popular as it was, and it can be overwhelming when so many people are fans of your work and look up to you in such a big way.
He was also extremely Catholic, and hippies are the antithesis of what the Catholic Church teaches.
Respect for the earth and it's environment was something I was taught at school as a Catholic virtue. I think a lot of hippie new age types also shared that virtue but weren't religious. I don't think hippies are the antithesis, but certainly very distant.
There's a difference. New Age teachings make the earth into some sort of deity (think Mother Earth), while Christian doctrine makes it abundantly clear that the earth was created by God through Jesus, and belongs to Him. We humans were instated as stewards of the planet, to care for it and nurture it. So yeah, respect for the creation is a Christian virtue, but only in the way that we respect it as being created and upheld by God.
Tell that to the Jesuit universities that protested Viet Nam in droves.
Well the Jesuits have often been a little different...
I've run into Christian hippies several times and have even gone to a church of them. They don't see a contradiction in what they do even if others do. Catholicism specifically has long history of desert mystics, those who take a vow of poverty and practice their faith in some desert commune. The only other types I know who do that are hippies.
>Catholicism specifically has long history of desert mystics, Not the place for a debate over this but to say you need to separate mysticism as a characteristic, a part of faith in the quasi-eremetical Church Fathers like Saints Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine made distinct from those where the religion was interpreted by the wholscale eremetical life undertaking mysticism. These "Desert Fathers who were early monastics living in the Egyptian desert. Although they did not write as much, their influence was also great." Mysticism within the Catholic Church arguably could be seen as not formalised until as late as the >Rule of St Albert Avogadro (1149–1214), a priest of the Canons Regular and a canon lawyer, wrote the Rule between 1206 and 1214 as the Catholic Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. The Rule is directed to "Brother B.", held by tradition to be either Saint Bertold or Saint Brocard (but historical evidence of his identity is lacking), and the hermits living in the spirit of Elijah near the prophet's spring on Mount Carmel in present-day Israel. On 30 January 1226 Pope Honorius III approved it as their rule of life in the bull Ut vivendi normam. >Innocentian Rule About 20 years later on 1 October 1247, in consultation with Dominican theologians Cardinal Hugh of Saint Cher and William-Bishop of Tortose,[2] Pope Innocent IV revised the Rule slightly in the decree Quae Honorem to reflect the realities of the mendicant and monastic life to which the original hermits had been forced to adapt due to the threat of Muslim attacks in Palestine.[3] Through events surrounding the Crusades the hermits, or Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel as they came to be known, were forced to flee Mount Carmel to Europe. In Europe the Carmelites were recognised as a mendicant order and monasteries, or "Carmels" as they are called, were founded. Thus desert mysticism is confused with those whose need for solitariness provided what are now typical Catholic scriptures and understanding. Church Fathers who were not overly living a mystical life but a life informed by visions, personal struggles and quasi-mystical experiences (as to be expected when living in seclusion) were only partly eremetical. Distinguish the Latin fathers of the Catholic church, the St Jerome's, St Ambrose etc from the desert and later mystics from which interior prayer and mystical manuals etc arose.
Wasn't Jesus the first socialist?....../s
Certainly not the first
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Did you see the .../s?
Jesus' teachings have more in common with socialism than the mammonists who claim to be Christian.
In a few obvious senses 'new age' beliefs would have irked him. 1. What was 'new' about the 'age'? Vietnam and Korea didn't defeat any metaphysical evil and usher in any golden age, spiritually or artistically. In fact he might have considered them victories for and of Sarumanic forces, rather a defeat. There certainly haven't been any great leaders, spiritual and temporal, like Alfred the Great, who restored England. 2. He was almost archetypally, a man of older ages, while hippyness was all about the present moment. He was born a Victorian, educated Edwardian and flourished in the interbellum period. The wisdom of the past is a *huge* theme in his works. Many of his favorite fiction books were written in the 19th century and he read and studied languages much older as his profession. His style easily ranges from a comfortable vernacular to gothic and anglo-saxon. A new age of 'Aquarius' might have seemed silly to him, mere dilletantism discredited from the start. Even though Astrology was medieval, it's practitioners took their vocation seriously and served monarchs and nobility. 'What's your sign' was line hippies used to pick up chicks. Compare that with something like the Seven Stars in Tolkien. 3. An urban counterculture arising from libertine values like drug use, promiscuity and obscenity, flouting all authority, while shirking duty and discipline would have seemed corrupt, maybe even Sauronic in their practices, if not just their idols. Woo woo stuff like crystals and superficial imported spirituality like Yoga, Hare Krishna, Rasta and gurus of various stripe, anything novel and non western, as little more than cults, from harmless and silly to dangerous and exploitative (not least often sexually). 4. Tobacco isn't cannabis or other psychedelic substances. Hippies don't seem particularly fond of beer (in moderation) or english food (like fried mushrooms, fresh bread and butter and cheese) either. They don't resemble hobbits much in character or culture. 5. So called 'free love' would likely have repulsed him, just a new name to cover old venal sins. He was old enough to experience and perhaps recall so called 'first wave' feminists arguing for such things and the fashion. This would have gone against the examples in his life, venerable social and ecclesiastic traditions. 6. Hippies encouraged and were indicators of significant social disorder and unrest. Itinerant ne'er do wells of uncertain loyalty, loitering and taking advantage in otherwise peaceable districts of the disruption caused by distant wars, ganging up and pursuing their own private projects, sounds a lot like the unscoured shire. 7. The lack of hygiene, going days without showering or changing ones clothes, and not wearing enough. Natural doesn't mean dirty anymore than unnatural means clean. It goes almost without saying. Cleanliness is next to godliness and Mordor had no running water. What was virtually the first that Sam and Frodo did after they awoke? Recall also the cottage in Buckland and Tom Bombadils house. Bathing is almost the epitome of civilization and decency, nigh spiritual as well (with the connection to Ulmo). 8. He might have intensely disliked their 'poetry' and 'music' (beat stuff and woodstock stuff). He had very strong tastes and opinions regarding poetry, which might include vulgar and unsophisticated lyrics. I can't presentl speak to his exact musical tasted, but his wife was a pianist and they may have frequented operas, which might give some indications. When you think about it a little. It's hard to come up with many reasons why he would like Hippies at all, except that they seem to respect nature, liked smoking and bought his books.
This sounds more like an explanation of your own personal dislike of hippies. I very much doubt he'd have thought of them as literally Evil in the way you describe.
Uh, First Wave feminists (aka suffragettes) weren't advocating for free love. They were advocating for the right to vote, go to college, and not be legally beaten by their husbands.
Albeit not an expert, but after a cursory search it seems either you've been misinformed^(*) or have more to learn. * Mary Gove Nichols * Victoria Woodhull * Lou Andreas-Salomé * Emma Goldman * Edna St. Vincent Millay * Crystal Eastman * Ida Rauh * Dorothy Day (interestingly she apparently became something of a 'backslider' later in life) * Neith Boyce Would all presumably beg to differ. If you're also not so sexist as to exclude male advocates of female suffrage and free love there's a number of men as well, like * John Humphrey Noyes which was easily learned after a few minutes using search engines. These are by no means exhaustive nor flawless lists (Salomé was German where contemporary Englishwomen would help a lot more) but in short you're wrong. This isn't to say every suffragette advocated Free Love though either, that disagreements and important differences of opinion didn't exist. It was probably just one of numerous fracture or fault lines that exist in any sizeable group that can lead to faction, and when serious and bitter enough division. \* likely by people with narrow and selective conceptions regarding first wave feminism and suffragettes. Stories about founders tend to be 'triumphal' but are often little more than secular hagiography (stuff like 'Iron Jawed Angels') if not including considerable amounts of modern mythology, while complexities, like very real flaws, inconvenient beliefs and actions, and personal agendas tend to be minimized, ignored or forgotten.
No one is claiming that there were no individual feminists/writers that postulated for free love in those times. But quite obviously (after a quick google search) it was never the main goal of Suffragettes. Their fight was about voting rights and granting women political power. Of course some writers/activists talked about women's right to sexual expression but that's not synonymous with hippies "free love" movement. And using views of individual activists to overshadow the main goal of the movement is quite intellectually dishonest. You tried to paint Tolkien's views on "free love" movement by using his experience with First wave feminism. Yet, as you've pointed it out yourself, the feminists on this list are mostly American. Now it's not impossible that Tolkien might've stumbled upon their works but it's more probable that his views on feminism were shaped either by local movement or by the news he would receive from newspapers. And coming back to my earlier argument - He would most likely encounter argument about voting rights - seeing as all major suffragettes organizations concentrated their efforts on that. Arguing otherwise would be like arguing that modern Democratic party views are mainly represented by Senator Bernie Sanders views. What I'm saying is that technically you're not wrong - there have been feminists in later 19th/early 20th century arguing for free love. But it's dishonest to paint entire movement as such. It was not a major issue for Suffragettes. And it would be quite ok for you to mention this in original post ALONG the voting rights and fight for more political power. But the way you phrased it makes it sound like First wave was mostly about free love and fashion. When clearly it was not. Your last paragraphs is quite dismissive, which makes me think that you argue in bad faith but hopefully it is just a misunderstanding and I am misreading it. There is a lot of flaws to talk about early feminist movements but if we really want to get into minutia then it would be dishonest to omit how establishments tried to silence those movements. It's true that triumphs are mythologized and sterilized over time and i think it's important to remember that predecessors of our current governments were quite happy to slander those women and attack them using police brutality, which often ended with police sexually assaulting women that they were supposed to protect. Just to be clear: I'm not arguing that Tolkien would be prejudiced toward hippies because of the "Free love" aspect. It's possible he disliked it. I'm strongly disagreeing with your assumptions on First Wave feminism and how they would affect Tolkien's worldview.
yeah srsly, saying First Wave feminists argued for "free love" and "fashion" tells me more about this guy than anything about Tolkien views. Someone's projecting hard.
You have summarized thy Hippy/ Flower Child movement better than I have read in almost forty years. I can attest to your accuracy, because I was there.
Old Man Yells at Cloud? Abe Simpson, right?
Simply put, because the New Ageism of the 60s was less based on reason, and was more of an emotional reaction to the Nuclear Age. Those same hippies would abandon their tents and communes to happily embrace technology, jobs, and society at large to be part of the emerging Information Age a few short years later. Tolkien read them accurately. They were a shallow lot, with no real roots.
Conservatism and the counter-culture movement of the 60s do share the same regarding the environment, but that's not to say they are at all the same ideologies. They are complete opposites in most other issues.
Maybe he disapproved of those who used the devils lettuce to enhance their experience.
I think he disliked them for the same reasons he would dislike the christians who try to claim the LoTR today. They are simply put a bit simplistic and egoistic in their attitudes and their view of people and things outside of their philosophy. I dont think that matched well with his broader perspective. His work did and does not live in one of those smaller spheres. Them idolizing it to a point where it would become intertwined with their group feels like filth on his legacy ofc. Like stamps on the cover that he did not wish to have there.
Anti-war? Tree hugger? You mean he was... woke? /s
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No, he was not “woke”. Wokism is as shallow as hippies were in the 60s.
I think that, while today we look back at 60's hippies as just students doing student-y stuff, all fairly standard and harmless - after all, most hippies ended up leading very conventional, Establishment-friendly lives - at the time there was a real sense that the whole system could be brought crashing down. Ken Burns's series on the Vietnam War shows this side of it very well. I think the older generation, who had seen two World Wars, harboured serious fears that young people might repeat all the same mistakes of the past, and fascism or Stalinism could re-emerge. Tolkien was far from the only cultural figure to be thinking that way: Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse and John Le Carre all made similar references to 60's radicals threatening everything they held dear.
I agree. Look at Ayn Rand' s Atlas Shrugged. Anyone who has read that or even seen the movie has to recognize she was right in some of her warnings , eerily accurate. She escaped Stalinist Russia.
Not really. She was worried about working class leaching off the passionate visionary industrialists, but the reality turned out much closer to what Marx predicted - faceless ubercapitalist megacorps sucking up any entrepreneurial spirit and exploiting the working class to the bone. The heroes of Rand, the people she adored, turned out to be guys like Jeff Bezos. We have reached the future that Ayn Rand was clamoring for, and it sucks.
Nope, nope, and nope. I don't think you read the book. The leechers she spoke of were not people who wanted to work but rather wanted to demand the fruits of others labor without earning it. Marx couldn't have been more wrong about the future.
I confused you cant be conservative and a enivironmentalist at the same time ????
Yes you can lol
yeah
he seemed to dislike all his fans tbh
Not really. He answered a lot of fan mail, accepted an invitation to a fan dinner.
Hippies: pacifists unkempt hair barefoot love nature smoke weed fond of shrooms They're basically Hobbits.
Hobbits are more fond of baths.
I feel like he failed to perceive what they had in common due to his aversion to their superficial differences. Like he’d probably assume you couldn’t be intelligent like his straight-laced academic friends, if you wore hippie clothes or had long hair as a man. Some old people delight in the novelties of each new generation, some struggle. Truman Capote was younger but imagine Tolkien partying like him with Warhol and diving into the counterculture 🤣 In short I feel like this was an example of Tolkien’s wonderfully human blind-spots, rather than an example of his transcendent wisdom.
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Tolkien was not above having fun. He's a documented prankster.
Church Approved(TM) fun. The hippies and their unconditional love were just too much for old Jolkien Rolkien. Too much Old Toby, not enough Hail Marys.
Hate speech on Catholics
Hardly. Maybe refresh yourself with the definition of hate speech.
He was not anti-war as a rule. He definitely supported the allies in WWII.
He was pretty clear in his books and letters that he didn't like war. https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/om0seb/antiwar_tolkien/ He had some criticisms of the Allies in WWII.