impossibly obscure invented mythology, could suddenly find a huge American campus cult following in the middle of the radical, politically charged 1960s Tolkien was nobody’s idea of a radical campus professor, so what was it in his writing that was suddenly so relevant to the lives and politics of the youth culture of the 1960s, catapulting him into the category of one of the most popular authors of the century? The answer was that Tolkien’s approach to the ancient grand theme of the ring quest was as unconventional and inventive as his unlikely heroes, the Hobbits In fact, The Lord of the Rings proved to be the perfect student counterculture book It was full of action and adventure, but it appeared ultimately to hold an anti-establishment, pacifist message Frodo Baggins might not have been exactly a Hobbit Gandhi, but he did reject the temptations of worldly power to an almost saintly degree The student antiwar and ban the bomb movements of the sixties found an empathetic antihero in the Hobbit’s humble values, as did the back-to-the-land hippy dropout culture Tolkien could not have touched more bases with the youth culture of the sixties if he had commissioned a market survey If Tolkien was ambiguous about the “meaning” of his tale, there is no doubt that the parallels between the One Ring and the Bomb were not missed by activists in the late sixties and early seventies One need only read Robert Hunter’s The Greenpeace Chronicles to see how closely allied the counterculture was with Tolkien’s world Greenpeace came into being in 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, as an ecological guerrilla organization that attempted to stop American nuclear testing on Amchitka Island in Alaska To this end, it chartered its first ship and attempted to prevent the bomb from being exploded by sailing into the test area Writing about this maiden Greenpeace voyage, Hunter tells how they had arrived at a point where even the stout hearts of his shipmates saw their task as rather comically hopeless “There was something superbly comical about it: here we were, eight green-clad amateur seamen, on our way to confront the deadliest fire of the age, like Hobbits bearing the ring toward the volcano of Mordor.” It was a comparison that carried them a long way Like exhausted Hobbits, they persevered If Hobbits could overcome the forces of Sauron, why couldn’t a ragtag handful of hippies overthrow the US military-industrial complex? At one point the valves and pistons of the old engine of their rather battered vessel required such coaxing and constant care on their long voyage along the north Pacific Coast that the activists dubbed themselves the “Fellowship of the Piston Rings.” In Tolkien’s tale, when the One Ring is finally destroyed, the subsequent volcanic eruption closely resembles a nuclear explosion—but an explosion that destroys only the evil forces of the Ring Lord One might also see in that explosive “unmaking” of the One Ring the reversal of the traditional ring quest in a moral sense as well That Iron Age mentality of “might equals right,” which made the ring quest for power so important, ends with the nuclear age—when possession of such power entails only mutual destruction It was Albert Einstein who warned the world: “The unleashing power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking … we need an essentially new way of thinking if mankind is to survive.” Tolkien’s reversal of the ring quest demonstrates this “new way of thinking.” Its version of the quest represents a desire to change power structures Tolkien saw the results of the pursuit of pure power in two wars, and rejected it In his private mythic world, he understood a human truth that modern technology has brought home to mankind with a terrible vengeance in the form of the nuclear bomb If ever there was a manifestation of the ultimate power of the One Ring, the Bomb was it The “Cold War” was the result of the grudging admission that power of the kind represented by nuclear weapons was ultimately selfdestructive Tolkien also displayed this “new way of thinking” in his inspired choice of heroes One must not forget the importance of his Hobbits; it would do no good to change the nature of the quest without changing the nature of the hero Not only did Tolkien turn the ring quest on its head; he also reversed many of the characteristics usually expected of the quest hero He wrote: “The Hobbits are, of course, really meant to be a branch of the specifically human race (not Elves or Dwarves) … They are entirely without non-human powers, but are represented as being more in touch with ‘nature’, and abnormally, for humans, free from ambition or greed of wealth They are made small partly to exhibit the pettiness of man, plain unimaginative parochial man … and mostly to show up, in creatures of very small physical power, the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men ‘at a pinch.’”