Frodo Lives

1965

Date: 1965-1969 · Place: United States (originating university campuses and New York City subway) · Figures: J. R. R. Tolkien, author · Donald A. Wollheim, Ace Books editor · Tolkien Society of America, founders Dick Plotz and Ed Meskys · Tags: Fandom, Graffiti, ButtonCulture 01. The Ace Paperback In 1965 Donald A. Wollheim's Ace Books exploits a perceived copyright gap and publishes an unauthorized paperback of The Lord of the Rings, seventy-five cents a volume. Houghton Mifflin and Ballantine respond with an authorized paperback edition that fall. By 1968 over three million copies circulate in the United States. The Tolkien Society of America forms in 1966 around Dick Plotz, a Bronx high school student, and Ed Meskys. Buttons, posters, and graffiti follow within months. 02. The Slogan as Counterculture The phrase Frodo Lives appears in Sharpie on New York subway platforms, on Berkeley telephone poles, on Pentagon protest signs in October 1967. Variants spread: Gandalf for President, Go Go Gandalf, Come to Middle-earth. Tolkien receives so much fan mail at his Sandfield Road address in Oxford that he and his wife are forced to change their telephone number in 1968. He calls the American admirers his deplorable cultus. "Many young Americans are involved in the stories in a way that I am not." — J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to Rayner Unwin, 12 September 1965 Sources • Humphrey Carpenter, 'J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography' (Allen & Unwin, 1977) • Nancy Martsch, 'Tolkien Fandom Review' (Beyond Bree Press, 2014) • Marquette University, J. R. R. Tolkien Collection, fan letters 1965-1973