Frodo Lives!

"Frodo Lives!" was a popular counterculture slogan in the 1960s and 1970s, referring to the character Frodo Baggins from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. The term was used frequently in graffiti, buttons, bumper-stickers, T-shirts, and other materials. It was commonly associated with the hippie movement. Other examples of use include a Frodo Lives album released by Smash Records and merchandising items for the New Line Cinema The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The phrase was also displayed during the activation of a computer virus in the early 1990s, in which the text 'Frodo Lives!' was displayed in large letters with a moving border.[1]

Hippies who may be pushing thirty wear buttons that read "Frodo Lives" and decorate their pads with maps of Middle Earth ...

—Theodore Roszak[2]

The term first became popular because of an increase in the availability and number of readers of the novel (which, up until that point, had been subject to rather mixed reviews) following release of the Ballantine Books paperback edition.[3] While no longer as pervasive as it once was, the term continues to appear regularly in newspaper articles and popular culture related to Tolkien's stories.[4][5][6]

References
  1. Frodo Lives! virus in The Malware Museum on archive.org
  2. Roszak, Theodore (1995). The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. University of California Press. p. 40. ISBN 0-520-20122-1.
  3. Carpenter, Humphrey (1977), J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, New York: Ballantine Books, ISBN 978-0-04-928037-3
  4. Kempley, Rita (2001-12-19). "Frodo Lives! A Spirited 'Lord of the Rings'". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2010-05-03.
  5. Harvard Gazette: ARTS
  6. "The Bastards Have Landed! The Official Peter Jackson Fanclub". Archived from the original on 2009-02-04. Retrieved 2007-07-19.
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