A fierce anti-war movement arose in response.īut that was all to come. Initial support for new deployment of American power was robust, but it wasn’t long before Americans were facing a questionable and costly Iraq War, followed by a cascade of War on Terror iniquities that included torture and domestic wiretapping. Bush recast a new Axis of evil, his administration hoped that the Western world would get behind it as unequivocally as it had when facing the original Axis. New Lineįive months after 9/11, when then-President George W.
Liv Tyler as Arwen in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It certainly did post-9/11, when the distinction between good and evil once again seemed stark and indisputable. Still, like any stark morality tale, The Lord of the Rings lends itself well to allegory despite Tolkien’s authorial objections. The main narrative concerns the quest of a good-hearted Hobbit (Frodo Baggins), who is spurred on by an ancient wizard (Gandalf) to march the One Ring to Rule Them All across Middle-earth and cast it into the fires of Mount Doom, thus saving the world from the powers of darkness that threaten to overwhelm it.Īlthough Tolkien had served for Britain in WWI and later suffered the German blitzkriegs of England during WWII, he always insisted that his tales were not allegories for contemporary events, despite how neatly they aligned with a world at war and an unambiguous evil - the Axis countries of Germany, Italy, and Japan - attempting to conquer the globe. Tolkien’s LOTR stories (which also includes the prelude novel, The Hobbit, published in 1937) are operatic fairy tales set in one of the most elaborately imagined story worlds in all of fiction. LOTR made good and evil feel unambiguous Viggo Mortensen as King Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. By providing audiences escape, comfort, and an unambiguous moral guidepost for negotiating the complicated feelings the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon caused in 2001 and beyond, Jackson’s LOTR became essential to the era. And yet, 9/11 actually contributed to the trilogy’s astonishing success - which included winning boatloads of Oscars (unheard of for fantasy films then and now).
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