# What if Tolkien had never written?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-tolkien-had-never-written/131249>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [October 7, 2002, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-tolkien-had-never-written/131249 "2002-10-07T19:36:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\
**Post date:** [October 9, 2002, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-tolkien-had-never-written/131249/21 "2002-10-09T16:49:57Z")

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Badtz Maru writes:

\> I think the popularity of Tolkien was largely a product of it’s  
\> times - there was a growing interest in magic, mysticism, and  
\> things medieval in the 60s and 70s, and LotR had all that.

Was the popularity of Tolkien a result of the interest in “magic, mysticism, and things medieval” or was it the cause of them? It’s not clear. Some of the magical and mystical things would have appeared in any case. For instance, Carlos Castaneda’s books might have come out anyway, I suppose. But even there I’m dubious. The first one came out several years after the paperback editions of _The Lord of the Rings_. Perhaps Tolkien’s works made it easier for things like Castaneda to be published (even though Tolkien probably despised Castaneda’s books, if he bothered to read them).

But would the interest in medieval things have happened without Tolkien? Would we be having Renaissance Fairs if _The Lord of the Rings_ had not been published? What inspired the interest in medieval affairs other than Tolkien?

I think of Tolkien as being the one thing that carried over from the 1963-1965 period (The British Invasion: reading Tolkien, the Beatles and the other popular British bands, James Bond, _The Avengers_, Carnaby Street fashions, go-go boots on girls doing the twist in discos, and Beatle haircuts (i.e., modishly long but less than shoulder-length hair) on men) and the 1966-1969 period (The Hippie Era: the Grateful Dead and other San Francisco bands, beards and shoulder-length hair on men (including the Beatles), casual and colorful fashion, smoking dope, huge rock concerts, moving to rural communes, and, yes, reading Tolkien). People think of the '60’s as being one undifferentiated period, but it wasn’t. There was also a third period of the '60’s, the 1960-1962 period (Camelot: Kennedy and “Ask not what your country, etc.”, the early manned space flights, and the high period of Pax Americana, when we were convinced that we could control the world, and which came to a crashing halt with the Bay of Pigs and the beginning of the Vietnam War).

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