Elvish Lives!

Image credit: Lord of the Rings: Pierre Vinet

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J.R.R. Tolkien

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Rand Miller read it in high school in Albuquerque. ''I remember how complete the world seemed to be,'' he says. ''That's got to be the part that affected me.'' Years later, Miller and his brother Robyn would create Myst and Riven, computer games that laid out the same kind of limitless landscapes. Jon Anderson, the teapot-pitched singer from the prog-rock titans Yes, found ''The Hobbit'' in a London bookstore and wound up soaking in the Tolkien canon when he climbed on a tour bus. ''My whole life,'' Anderson says, ''has been built on the idea that I am part of the elven culture.'' He recalls a trip to Hawaii when he hiked into the mountains, sat for five days of silence, and heard voices from the fairy kingdom. ''There's a lot of things going on in the beautiful mountainside that we, as humans, don't relate to,'' he says. ''Tolkien was like a door opener for me.''

Actually, doors were being smacked off their hinges. By the late '60s, wizards, dragons, elves, and orcs had burrowed into every crag and gully of the pop consciousness. A slogan showed up on lapel pins: Frodo Lives. Led Zeppelin lyrics overflowed with nods to Gollum and Mordor and the Misty Mountains. In what qualified as a megamerger between two nascent cults, ''Star Trek'''s Leonard Nimoy cut a catchy, borderline-deranged ditty called ''Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.'' ''He thought it was the corniest thing he'd ever heard, but I talked him into recording it,'' says songwriter and producer Charles Grean. ''I just got the idea that hey, you know, Tolkien was sort of an underground hit....'' So ubiquitous was Middle-earth mania that in 1969, The Harvard Lampoon saw fit to put out a parody book: ''Bored of the Rings.''

Fans called from thousands of miles away, neglectful of time zones, thirsty for answers. They woke up the professor so many times that he had to take precautionary steps. (''Thank you very much for your suggestions about my telephone number, which I will consider,'' Tolkien wrote to his publishing house in 1966. ''Removing the number from the directory seems better than the method adopted by Major W.H. Lewis in protecting his brother, which was to lift the receiver and say, 'Oxford Sewage Disposal Unit' and go on repeating it until they went away.'')

To the professor, age 75 by the Summer of Love, a hobbit made more sense than a hippie. ''I remember his secretary telling me that she used to keep things from him, because she knew it would upset him,'' Shippey says. ''She told me once about a hippie who sent a long letter about how, in a kind of drug-induced stupor, he had climbed to the top of a mountain, built a fire, and burned his wedding ring. She said, 'Well, I wasn't going to tell Tolkien that.'''

Faced with such dire misinterpretations, Tolkien was all too happy to correct people -- often with a long letter. Alas, too late; his private enterprise was destined to become whatever the masses wanted to make of it. Theories abound -- that his work got swept up in the mind-expansion vogue, that his fantasias provided an escape from Vietnam body counts. People point out, with a wink, the profusion of pipe-weed toking and mushroom eating within the Middle-earth milieu. ''Totally drugs,'' Anderson says. ''Totally marijuana.'' If to be great is to be misunderstood, then Tolkien was a colossus, trailing a flurry of warped conjecture behind him.

Had the freak with the scorched wedding ring looked closer, he would have found an old-fashioned view of romantic love at the core of Tolkien's work. Anybody who's read ''Rings'' -- or Tolkien's other teeming compendium of myth, ''The Silmarillion'' -- knows the tale of Beren, a mortal man, and Lúthien, an elf princess who gave up her immortality in order to stay with the man she loved.

In ''Rings'' it's a story told in passing, around a campfire. To Tolkien it was full of private significance. The story of Beren and Lúthien is the place where his two passions come together -- words and his wife. Edith died two years before her husband did, and in his grief the author wrote a letter to his son Christopher. ''I have at last got busy about Mummy's grave,'' he said. He had plans for the inscription:

EDITH MARY TOLKIEN
1889–1971
LÚTHIEN

Tolkien urged his children not to feel ''that the use of this name is a sentimental fancy.'' Giving Edith the name of an elven princess ''says for me more than a multitude of words: for she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien.'' Not that he'd ever explain that in an autobiography. Such a task, he wrote Christopher, ''is against my nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths.''

Additional reporting by Jeff Chu