You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The ‘Frodo Lives!’ campaign was a widespread social phenomenon of counter-cultural disobedience, reaching a particular zenith during the mid-to-late 1960s before dissipating throughout the 1970s. Coinciding with the astonishing commercial success of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the wider rise in popularity of genre fantasy during the mid-twentieth century (James, 2012), the campaign encouraged its participants to graffiti the slogan ‘Frodo Lives!’ (inspired by Tolkien's protagonist) on public spaces including subway stations and bus shelters, as well as displaying the message individually on badges, t-shirts and protest banners. Without any overt political agenda and without being particularly organised, the movement became a popular way of articulating youth dissatisfaction and dissent within a generational cultural war, whilst at the same time providing more conservative detractors with a useful slogan with which to denounce and deride the youth counter-cultural movement. ‘Frodo Lives!’ became a catch-all term that seemed to mean lots of things to lots of different people, offering a playful but nevertheless empowering register inspired by mid-twentieth century fantasy literature that played amongst the fractured US society of the 1960s.
The widespread popularity of the ‘Frodo Lives!’ movement serves as a potentially illustrative synecdoche for assessing both the political and emotional function of popular fantasy fiction within US society over the last century. Prior to its emergence as arguably contemporary mass media's most popular storytelling form, genre fantasy played a somewhat different social role during its initial wave of popularisation. Emerging out of the pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s and 1940s and aimed at a newly emerging market demographic of children and teenagers, fantasy fiction's popularity amongst certain subsections of the population was juxtaposed with its low cultural status amongst traditional, conservative critics. A