We started a retrospective on Tolkien’s rise to superstardom, which began with a left-wing movement in the 1970s appropriating his work and has slowly migrated over time to people realizing how right-wing and Christian Lord of the Rings is. Now, we continue.
The right-wing Tolkien movement did not start in America. It started in Italy, in 1970, with a book that arrived five years late and through the wrong door.
In the United States, The Lord of the Rings had entered the culture through a pirate paperback and a countercultural explosion. College students spray-painted “Frodo Lives” on subway walls and mapped Mordor onto the Pentagon. The Italian reception was the mirror image. No hippies. No graffiti. No mass-market paperback revolution. Instead, a right-wing publishing house, a Traditionalist philosopher’s preface, and a left-wing cultural establishment that refused to touch the book.
