Have Gun, Will Eat Popcorn: When I was working on my master's degree in Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University over 25 years ago, my idea of a great job was to become the next Leslie Fiedler. He was a critic famous for mediating between academe and mass media as he interpreted the way popular culture helped the public interact with the troubling issues of the day. In the meantime, I engaged in those consuming and passionate discussions with other graduate students in the Department of Popular Culture.

     For example, Cindy Packard and I debated the merits of Billy Jack as we returned from the nearest big city - Toledo - where it was showing in the winter of 1975. In hindsight I'm tempted to say Billy Jack only dramatizes America's peculiar belief that the nonviolent philosophy taught by Gandhi and Martin Luther King ought to contain an exception

for anyone who really deserves a kick in the head. On the other hand, Billy Jack's struggle and spectacular failure to abide by his own code were the very reason the movie became a kind of lightning-rod for those trying to recover their moral bearings after the civil rights and antiwar tempests of the Sixties. The film would have disappeared after an unprofitable initial release but for its stubborn creator, Tom Laughlin, and the movie's cult following -- one theater in Dayton showed it every week for two years. When Laughlin succeeded in getting it re-released, pop culture students flocked to study the film and the phenomenon.

     These old memories came rushing back to me in December when a reporter from the LA Times gathered a group of us around a restaurant table moments after we'd finished watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on its first day in release.

     How strange to be living out a version of that old fantasy, sought by the media for our opinion. The Times' Lynn Smith wanted to do a story on local Tolkien fans' reaction to the new movie. Smith contacted the head of the

Mythopoeic Society and was put in touch with Lynn Maudlin, who gathered Diana and I, Lee Speth, Shannon Riojas (Maudlin's son) to see the movie with the reporter.

     We lined up in front of the theater 90 minutes before showtime. We were surprised to be the first ones there, less surprised that nobody came in costume, though it mildly disappointed the reporter. (Times change - two decades ago I did wait outside a Westwood theater for the Bakshi Lord of the Rings with a long line of costumed Mythies.)

As we debriefed at a restaurant

next door, we acknowledged Peter Jackson had made a good movie that was sufficiently faithful to Tolkien to be worth nitpicking passionately. We spent a good couple of hours pouring out our compliments and complains, not without an egotistical eye peeled for what the reporter thought worth jotting down. (She also recorded.)
     Lynn Smith's article appeared in the Times on December 22, headlined "A Semi-Fantastic Voyage: Members of the Tolkien and Mythopoeic societies express feelings varying from joy to frustration after seeing 'The Lord of the Rings.'" Smith did an impressive job of extracting the spirit of our comments from the hours of material she gathered. I was happy to see she chose not to portray us as dorks, which might easily have happened after Lee Speth insisted on explaining Golfimbul to her, an eldritch cross between softball and kick-the-Dane's-head played late nights at Mythcon.
     The article straightforwardly summarized our reactions, mainly in our own words. For example, Diana observed that in the book Fellowship of the Ring

there's almost no fighting, but in the movie the battle scenes are relentless. "I needed breaks," Diana was quoted. "I felt that all the way through the whole film as if someone was hitting me upside the head, saying, 'This is monumental. Are you paying attention here?' The problem is, when there are really huge moments, you can't appreciate them." The article also captured our annoyance with the last scene of the movie, so contrary to the spirit of Tolkien. "'"Let's go hunt some Orc" didn't really cut it for me,' Maudlin said."

     Hollywood had been so enamored with the movie that we were literally the first people reported in the Times having anything to say that wasn't effusive praise. A surprising number of acquaintances told me they read the article. They, too, invariably started the conversation saying, "I liked the movie." Well, all of us liked the movie, but what we'd been asked to do was speak to the issue of its faithfulness to the book. In any case, remembering my pretensions when I was at Bowling Green, I have to laugh at myself: when

the moment arrived Mr. Popular Culture looked like just another literary curmudgeon in a clever plastic disguise…

     One Ringie-Dingie: Plenty of expensive Lord of the Rings  paraphernalia was marketed with the movie. If you've flown recently and paged through the Skymall catalog, you may have read the ad for an authentic gold replica of The One Ring for only $295: "Displayed in a rich wood treasure box, the One Ring is cast in gold and features the inscription below in Elvish, an ancient language of Middle-Earth."

     Tut tut! Gandalf said the letters are Elvish, but the language is Mordor! You can never be too careful when buying collectibles. And why should I be reassured that this recreation comes with a certificate of authenticity from New Line Cinema? It's probably printed with the same magical red ink Hollywood accountants use to make the profits disappear from their books.

     Elves at Qumran? Prior to the release of the movie, the October 2001 issue of Wired reported in detail about the epic verbal battles between self-appointed protectors of Tolkien's "virtual world" and the makers of The Fellowship of the Ring movie. Slammed along the way were the handful of Mythopoeic Society members who have spent years studying Tolkien's invented languages in their spare time:

     "The issue is compounded by the fact that a tremendous amount of Tolkien's

linguistic material remains unpublished and in the hands of a fan cabal. In the early, 1990s, the estate made thousands of pages of Tolkien's notes available to a handpicked crew of linguists loosely known as the Elfconners. The group includes a NASA scientists named Carl Hostetter and a Berkeley record store clerk named Arden Smith. After promising not to share the material with others, the Elfconners were supposed to prepare and publish at least a portion of these writings. But a full decade after the Elfconners first received copies from Christopher Tolkien, the clique has published only a few early lexicons in their increasingly irregular journals - a situation that recalls nothing so much as the Dead Sea Scrolls controversy."

     Talk about exaggeration. The Dead Sea Scrolls had been in the hands of a select group of full-time professional scholars 40 years before the monopoly was broken. The Elvish linguists have day jobs and work with Tolkien's material in their spare time. They are fortunate to have Christopher Tolkien's permission to access these texts, and Wired must be infected by the hacker mentality to believe Hostetter, Smith and the rest should give away Tolkien's material, inviting legal action against themselves.

     Wired also claimed, "To make matters worse, the Elfconners have behaved as informal copyright police, pressuring other linguists not to publish their dictionaries and grammars. 'It's against all principles of scholarship and decency for one scholar to try to use the law to prevent another scholar from publishing,' says David Salo, who has yet to publish his 366-page analysis of Sindarin for fear of an estate suit."

     Salo's fears have been cleverly slanted to disregard the real issue: does his manuscript include material he needs the estate's permission to publish? Until he gets that permission he is no more a victim of repression than someone who avoids shoplifting because the store has a video surveillance camera. (How often have I heard my wife, Diana, a C. S. Lewis scholar, discuss the need to get permission from Douglas Gresham when she quotes from the unpublished letters of his mother, Joy Davidman Lewis? This is how scholarship is properly done.)

     Meanwhile, despite the misleading impression given in Wired, the Elvish linguists are continuing to publish their results. A new, 40-page issue of one of their journals, Vinyar Tengwar, features the first part (of two) of a presentation and analysis of five hitherto unpublished Quenya texts by J.R.R. Tolkien: his translations of five Catholic prayers: the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, the Gloria Patri, the Sub Tuum Praesidium, and the Litany of Loreto. The first three are presented in this issue, with two more to come next issue. All five texts are edited by Patrick Wynne, Arden Smith, and Carl Hostetter.

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