The Atmosphere of the 1970s

With the reader's kind permission, I'd like to continue this series, as one reader put it, "disentangling and pursuing to various lengths" its elements.  I'll recall the reader's memory and repeat that it is 1973, I am 9 y.o., there is no D&D anywhere in the world and I retain all the knowledge up until the present day I'm writing this, as I have time travelled back to the year stated.  For me, this is merely a thought experiment, combining elements of my life at the time with the real problem of how does one get a campaign started in a world without most of the conveniences we have at present, where no one conveniently knows the game or has even heard of it.

The first thing on my agenda is, as I said, the making of the setting.  I prefer to run the Earth as a game setting, but I must begin somewhere on the globe.  Given the limitations already thus described, and knowing I'd have to sell the game to a group of young persons, I think of all the places in the world that the best start would be in the wilds of Britain — that being the forested counties of the west bordering upon and including Wales itself.  First because it's actually easier running D&D in an region that is a mixed wilderness and fairly civilised place; secondly because the region believably speaks English, and my early players would have no formal understanding of "common" languages; and thirdly because it already retains, for many at that time, a strong memory of the adventures of King Arthur and Robin Hood, thus making the setting an easier sell.

Incidentally, I personally have no memory of the Lord of the Rings at that time.  I have no anecdotal memory of the "Frodo Lives" meme post 1967, nor of the popular music inspired by the books between 1970 and 1974.  I was immersed in science fiction in the 1970s ... I had no interest in fantasy fiction until after my actual introduction to D&D in 1979.  Nor do I remember any of my peers or friends talking about this Lord of the Rings book, or even the Hobbit.  My first encounter with the Hobbit, which inspired me to read the book (and be relatively disappointed by it), was the 1977 Rankin/Bass film that aired November 27 of that year — which I watched that night on television, with great pleasure.

Thus I don't believe I could rely much on Tolkein's cultural value regarding my peers.  Though the Hobbit was published in 1973 and the Lord of the Rings in 1954-55, his works floundered in obscurity for decades before they made their way into mainstream culture.  Tolkein died in September of 1973, a little more than three months before my thought experiment, and just as he was barely seeing the beginning of society's claiming of his work.

I want to pause here, as this reflection gives me a excuse to recall such things as Tolkein's influence on fantasy thought and imagination — always a good subject for a D&D blog.  I wish to make the observation that Tolkein was phenomenally talented as an "imagineer" in the Disney-sense; he invented, and gave flesh to, many marvelous and fantastic concepts that continue to grip the zeitgeist of literature and RPGs.  He deserves tremendous accolades for those contributions.  I'm very glad he lived, I'm very glad he chose to break with the sentiments of his day, I'm very glad he was able to conceive dualities between mythological and historical texts and to apply those concepts in a manner sufficient to relay what was possible in both literature and social phenomenology.

But Tolkein was not a great writer.  His books are not great books.  They are viewed with a synchophantic nostalgia by many, who deliberately blind themselves to the poor sentence structure, the clumsy narratives, the second-rate adaptations of earlier, better works, the periods of excessive overwriting, the agonising horror of digressions into perfectly awful characters that should never have escaped an editor's hatchet ... and, for me, the painful overuse of juvenile-fiction tropes of marathon prepositional phrasing coupled with a plot line that runs like a tour guide repeating, "... and we're walking, and we're walking."

The reason why Tolkein floundered for so long is simply that he deserved to.  The culture for which he wrote admired writing; the culture in which Tolkein thrived was one transformed by the media of radio and television into McLuhan's "culture of ideas."  What matters to our culture is that orcs, as a concept, exists at all ... not that they were "written well."  The culture's priorities had to change into something that could celebrate the ideas Tolkein invented while at the same time mostly ignoring the process by which those ideas came into being (i.e, "writing").  Today, Tolkein is far, far more impressive as a movie than he is as an author — though he had nothing whatsoever to do with the movie, or the concept of even the 1977 Rankin/Bass film ... because he was dead by then.

Those few who grip to Tolkein as an author fail to impress — merely because it's so obvious how tiny and frivolous is the selection of books with which they compare Tolkein.  If a person has read a mere hundred books twice in their lifetime, then it's certain Lord of the Rings would seem monumental ... and more so if that reader had read the tome a dozen times or more.  Time spent re-reading and re-reading Tolkein is time not spent reading something else ... a mathematical calculation that seems lost on the fan.

But let's have this digression end here.  My point has been to outline to some degree that the world of imagination in 1973, and the few years after it, have very, very little in common with anything we're familiar with today.  Jaws won't appear in theatres until June 20, 1975.  Star Wars won't happen until May 25, 1977.  Even Logan's Run, which only the oldest will remember as a huge phenomenon in the culture of science fiction, won't arrive until June 23, 1976.  Prior to these adventure giants, the largest single phenomenon of science fiction culture in 1973 is Planet of the Apes.  As far as pure fantasy goes, the giants were the Conan series, John Carter of Mars and Tarzan; but these pulp fiction wonders were universally panned by the main stream in general — until, again, the mainstream changed, to where the quality of writing underneath Conan mattered less than the concept of Conan himself.

In short, when convincing players to jump into a game like D&D, useful cultural references just aren't available.  Gygax and the boys really were stumbling into something unusual and rather fantastic at the time I'm waiting for my school to burn down that Christmas of '73 ... but of course, without any resources to pitch the concept they were building, early D&D relied upon the remarkable changes that would come about as technological and directorial choices began to forge a new fictional landscape with the late 1970s.

In 1973, we're really in the weeds.  Which is, again, a reason why my focus would have to be on building a game version that I could run ... before even considering the effort of pitching it to players.  As I've already said, my little self is going to enter Grade 7 in 1976, transferring to Junior High ... at which time I would meet a whole new group of friends post-elementary.  Friends who played tactical wargames.