Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Introduction by Peter S. Beagle

My tour through The Lord of the Rings enroute to creating the animated musical will take a different approach to projects created by other enthusiasts. I am interested in exploring a holistic view of the text in its historical context. For me, the societies and cultures, both real world and fantasy, in which the book was written and read has the same importance as the material in the book itself. I come from an academic background, meaning that I was in school for too long and have permanently warped my brain with professor jargon, but I will do my best to keep these essays manageable for a reader with a high school level education. With this in mind, I begin with the three-paragraph introductory essay written by Peter S. Beagle and first appearing in the 1973 edition of The Lord of the Rings: Part One, The Fellowship of the Ring, which I will call Fellowship for the remainder of this post.

When Beagle penned his mini-essay, he was already a well-established fantasy author, and yet only thirty-four years old. Tolkien, in contrast, was eighty-one and fourteen years past retirement as a professor and philologist or studier of words. Tolkien died on September 2 of that year, two months after Beagle wrote his essay. I hope Tolkien read the essay, as it shows Beagle’s great admiration for the author as a person, along with his work and his wisdom, not unlike the admiration that the protagonists of The Lord of the Rings hold for their immortal elders.

As stated in the essay, Beagle first read Tolkien’s original books fifteen years prior, putting his first contact in 1958 at age nineteen, a mere four years after the books were published. Inspired by this work, among others, Beagle wrote his first novel, A Fine and Private Place that year and was published by age twenty-one in 1960. Eight years later, in 1968, he followed up with his best known work, The Last Unicorn, and later wrote the screenplay for the 1982 animated movie based on the novel. In between, he worked on the ill-fated rotoscoped 1978 version of The Lord of the Rings: Part One, which never received its sequel. Throughout Beagle’s career, which continues to the present, he has won the top prizes in fantasy, including Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards, a Hugo Award, and a Nebula Award.

Accolades aside, Beagle reports in his essay that he first learned of the books from a New York Times review written by W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden, a British-American poet. Auden described The Fellowship of the Rings as a “wonderful Christmas present” and compared it positively to another British novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, about an action hero solving a murder mystery in the days leading up to World War I. In contrast to overall praise, Auden found the first chapter, “A Long-Expected Party” to be “a little shy-making” with “initial archness”, an old school British way of saying he did not much like the harsh character backstory showing protagonist Frodo Baggins as a social outcast despite his privilege. Maybe Auden did not appreciate the blunt commentary of the Hobbiton community or found the situation too close to home; he gave no details. Despite his dislike of the beginning, Auden lauded the novel for “hold[ing] up the mirror to the only nature we know, our own” and declared that “No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy than "The Fellowship of the Ring."” Beagle notes that despite the glowing review from Auden, mainstream acknowledgement of The Lord of the Rings was slow on the uptake. He prides himself as an early adopter but does note the Frodo Lives graffiti of the New York subways. In the 1960s and 1970s, Frodo inadvertently became associated with the counterculture or hippie movement when Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House Group, published the first American paperback edition in 1965, incidentally the same year my parents were born. Several aspects of the character may have drawn the hippies, with the main four claims being that Frodo was a self-sacrificing pacifist, a flower child, a smoking aficionado, and a protector of the land at the beginning of an industrial revolution.

Like many claims about the book, not all stand up to scrutiny. For the first claim, the hippies conveniently forgot several of Frodo’s violent incidents in Fellowship alone, including “The Shadow of the Past” when he remarks “What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature… He deserves death.” (65) upon learning about Gollum, cutting off the hand of a Barrow-Wraith in “Fog on the Barrow-Downs”, and stabbing the foot of a troll in Moria during “The Bridge of Khazad-Dûm” when the other members of the Fellowship have frozen in fear. While Frodo does possess the quiet, seething rage of many pacifists, he allows himself to lash out at friends and enemies alike, although gaining empathy and emotional control is key to his character development through the second and third book.

The second claim appears related to Frodo’s unusually close connections with elves, who canonically wear sweet-smelling flowers in their hair. Several lyrical passages from Frodo’s perspective describe trees and flowers, including a bizarre paragraph about feeling the life energy of a tree in Lothlorien, no doubt a favorite reading for the hippies. However, the secondary protagonist, Sam Gamgee, has a more consistent and closer connection to nature, from being less affected by the dark magic of Old Man Willow while passing through “The Old Forest” in Fellowship to revitalizing the land with Galadriel’s enchanted soil after “The Scouring of the Shire” in The Return of the King.

The third claim, while denied by more conservative readers, has more merit based on textual evidence. Even so, this claim once again better fits another character. Excerpts from the in-universe book Herblore of the Shire written by Frodo’s younger cousin, Merry Brandybuck, many years after the quest of the Ring, appear in the “Prologue” of Fellowship. Here, Merry states that hobbits “in the Shire smoked various herbs, some fouler, some sweeter” (9), although the “modern” source on the same page describes pipe-weed itself as “a variety probably of Nicotiana” or tobacco. This topic concerning an addictive substance and its economic implications is treated seriously in the text and serves as a major yet overlooked secondary storyline. Discussion of “Big Pipe-Weed” will receive at least one post of its own in the future.

The fourth claim earns a more thorough examination here. Beagle leans heavily into the fourth point, spending his middle paragraph describing the Fifties and Sixties, two decades that he describes as “foul” in true Tolkien fashion. He explains that “industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable… the world progress lost its ancient holiness”. During this era after World War II, deep in the political tension of the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement, activists pushed back against government propaganda and its support of an unsustainable capitalist society. Improvements in transportation, the rising availability of consumer goods, and the population explosion made the previously vast, sparse world suddenly become smaller and crowded. According to research conducted by the United Nations, our own world with its population about 2.5 billion in 1950 became a world with about 3.6 billion by 1969. Many historians and fantasy readers, Beagle and Tolkien included, long for the romanticized emptiness of the medieval period in Europe, where the world population was a mere 350 million, according to the World Population History project created by the organization Population Connection. Beagle remarks in his essay that “lovers of Middle-earth want to go there. I would myself, like a shot.” I personally prefer to stay in a world with modern medicine and indoor plumbing, not to mention without sentient rings and a Dark Lord and hundreds of other Servants of the Shadow attempting to enslave and kill us all.

Beagle calls Middle-earth “a green alternative to each day’s madness here in a poisoned world.” According to Etymonline — not for the last time will this beloved etymology website make a guest appearance in this series — green has been the “color of environmentalism since 1971”, a mere two years before Beagle’s essay. At irregular intervals throughout the text, meditative prose describes the natural world from fields of wild flowers and forests of sentient trees to haunting scenes of total habitat destruction. The Lord of the Rings predated the modern environmentalist movement, but the clean-up of The Shire predicted efforts made in communities around the world to restore their rivers, fields, and forests after the reckless damage caused by the ongoing Industrial Revolution. Middle-earth never develops its own industrial revolution, although it reaches an early stage in The Shire, which is quietly the most technologically advanced society in the fantasy world. Just as Frodo is in part responsible for destroying the Ring and preserving the written history of Middle-earth, he also stops industrialization before it gains momentum.

After referencing his first discovery of the text, its connection to counterculture in subsequent decades, and its relevance to the modern era, Beagle changes directions near the end of the mini-essay, writing in the final pair of sentences: “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers—thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams”. I examine the closing statement through the lens of post-colonial theory, an academic study of colonialism and imperialism that first arose in the 1960s as people subjugated by Western empires rediscovered their identities. The first sentence supports the ideas put forth in post-colonial theory, that Western cultural knowledge has displaced the traditions of non-Western people and acts as an unreliable narrator of history. The phrase “thieves planting flags” may allude to the brutal colonization of Africa and the Americas, while “murderers carrying crosses” is a religious allegory for evil rulers portraying themselves as Christian martyrs.

Yet the second sentence offers praise to colonizers, albeit so-called “colonizers of dreams”. This split between support for a new, modern ideal and falling back on ancient tradition — the dichotomy of the colonizer and colonized — is, in fact, a commonly cited criticism of Tolkien’s work. Both Tolkien and Beagle sentimentalize the fantasy of a simpler time, a Middle Ages with a consistent food supply, benevolent rulers, and free of spreadable disease even in the midst of endless war. The real Middle Ages were a time of famine, the Black Death, low life expectancy, high infant mortality, and a lack of social order. Life improved little for European serfs during the Renaissance, although the nobility received the benefits of art and culture. Not until the Age of Exploration, also called the Age of Colonization, did the lives of everyday Europeans improve at the expense of people who became colonized and enslaved.

In a short three paragraphs, Beagle proves himself as an exact writer, alluding to historical events surrounding the release and reception of the book while paralleling themes found within the text. While his views were radical for his day, he falls back on sentiments now viewed by some readers as outdated, especially his romanticization of earlier eras. Overall, the essay fits the theme of the following fantasy, preparing readers to think critically about the upcoming text and decide for themselves where they will align with the information presented, and where they will differ or push back in interpretation.