HAPPY CHILDREN ARE all alike, the sage might have counseled; each unhappy child is unhappy in his or her own way.  A preponderance of enduring children’s stories, those with the fiber to last, say, a century or more, are marked by an unhappiness of one kind or another: an absent parent, an evil stepmother, poverty, unfairness, persecution. Witches lurk, giants snarl, spells are cast, and people die. Childhood in Winnie-the-Pooh? That’s a world driven by daydreams and idle moments, by fine ideas, generosity, and pleasure in small things. What was Pooh up to one morning?  “Well, he was humming this hum to himself and walking along gaily, wondering what everybody else was doing, and what it felt like, being someone else. . . .”

Good feelings bloom throughout the Hundred Acre Wood, feelings of comfort and ease and the possibility of a happy surprise. Problems don’t turn out to be such serious problems after all. Potential crises never quite materialize. Nothing really seems that bad. When we first meet Pooh, Christopher Robin has him by one arm and is haphazardly dragging him down a flight of stairs, the stuffed bear’s head knocking—“bump, bump, bump”—on each step. Pooh proves unbothered. “It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs. . . . ”  

When a small worry does arise for Pooh, it can usually be placated by a taste of condensed milk or a lick of honey. You’re able to take life as it comes when you’re bound to a core belief that things are going to turn out all right. Above all, in the pages of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, there’s an overriding sense—the threat of running into a Heffalump notwithstanding—of being protected and safe. Is there a child of any age, 2 to 102, who doesn’t want that?

*

My daughter Maya started at the local dance studio at an age when the classes served in essence as a form of one-hour babysitting. By the time she was 6, she took part in her third annual spring recital, on stage in the high school auditorium. As ever, the extended family turned out. “You know, the first couple of years, you weren’t much good at this.” Maya’s grandmother, my mom, was blunt in the post-show assessment. “But this year, you really looked great up there! What happened?”

Maya considered this for a moment. “The truth is,” she then said, “for a long time, when I was younger in dance class, I didn’t really understand what was going on. But this year, I suddenly did! Now I do!”

Such epiphanies are common in childhood, inevitable markers for the developing brain and the continuing apprehension of the wider world. Pooh and his friends are not 6 (until, finally they are), and the capers they embark upon, or get thrust into, manage to be at once purposeful and desultory. They have a mind to do something they’ve dreamt up or heard about, but they aren’t quite sure how to go about doing it. It’s a bit like following along in a dance class when you don’t really understand what’s going on. Pooh is a bear who may one day spend his time earnestly tracking the footprints of a Woozle only to gradually realize that the footprints are in fact his own. He’s also a bear who sizes up the situation and the available assets and then thinks to use an upturned umbrella as a ship to float across the flooded forest floor and rescue Piglet. (Not all endeavors go so well. This is a good time to warn Pooh readers against trying to float up to inspect a live beehive by holding onto a balloon.)

Pooh and Christopher Robin are proud of Pooh’s stroke of umbrella genius, just as they are proud when, after they’ve set out to find the North Pole, Pooh indeed finds it, in the Wood. The sign that Christopher Robin ties to that pole as he plants it upright in the forest floor—

NORTH POLE

DISCOVERED BY POOH

POOH FOUND IT 

—is his version of a parent sticking their child’s fingerpainting on the door of the fridge. A buoyant Pooh, after a consult with Christopher Robin, soon sets out to find the East Pole as well.

*

In the summer of 2025, a meme emerged across social platforms featuring Jim Cummings, who has been the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh since 1988. Cummings is now 72, and, in the meme, he holds his infant grandson on his lap. In a soft, faintly husky tone—Poohlike, to be sure—Cummings says to the baby: “You’re braver than you believe, smarter than you seem, and stronger than you think. And cute as a button.”

It’s an adaptation of a line delivered by Christopher Robin in the 1997 movie Pooh’s Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin. When Christopher Robin says it in the movie, he does so as part of an attempt to brace Pooh for what the future may bring. “Pooh bear,” Christopher Robin begins. They are playing together on the branches of a tree, and evening has set in. “What if, someday, there came a tomorrow when we were apart?”

The notion is so alien to Pooh (you try imagining a tomorrow when oxygen has been entirely removed from the atmosphere) that he can’t comprehend it. “As long as we’re apart together, we shall certainly be fine,” Pooh says.

Christopher Robin giggles but presses on. “Yes, yes, of course. But if we weren’t together. . . . If I were somewhere else?”

The scene moves along, with Pooh catching fireflies in the waning light, and leads to the braver/smarter/stronger adage. But the point has now been made. Tomorrow will come. It turns out that within all the comfort and warmth, there is indeed a dagger of cruel truth beneath the surface in Winnie-the-Pooh, the same cruel truth that finally undoes every happy childhood: It ends.

Here are a selection of images that touch on the rich narrative celebrated in LIFE’s new issue Winnie-the-Pooh: The World’s Most Wonderful Bear, available at retail and HERE.

Cover images: TGlyn Jones/Alamy; (inset) © Ernest H. Shepard/BuyEnlarge/ZUMA Press; (stock) Toru Kimura/Getty Images; enjoynz/Getty Images

A.A. Milne with his son, Christopher Robin, and the stuffed bear Christopher Robin originally called Edward. The early Winnie-the-Pooh short stories were based on tales Milne made up to entertain Christopher Robin.

Getty Images

E. H. Shepard, here in 1976, was a prolific painter before he turned to illustration. He modeled his drawing of Winnie-the-Pooh after his own son’s bear, called Growler.

Getty Images

Christopher Robin and Pooh had each other’s back in this illustration from A.A. Milne’s first Winnie-the-Pooh book, which came out in 1926.

© Ernest H. Shepard/BuyEnlarge via ZUMA Press Wire

Pooh, Piglet and Christopher Robin from A.A. Milne’s 1926 “Winnie-the-Pooh,” the first illustrated book with these characters.

ZUMAPRESS.com

Pooh met Tigger in Milne’s second collection of Winnie-the-Pooh stories. The illustration is by E.H. Sheppard.

ZUMAPRESS.com

Pooh and Piglet in A.A. Milne’s 1926 collection The House on Pooh Corner.

ZUMAPRESS.com

Ernest Shepard in 1969 (opposite). In addition to the Pooh books, he illustrated children’s classics such as The Wind in the Wilows and The Secret Garden.

David Montgomery/Getty Images

This 2009 novel picked up where the Milne stories left off.

AFP via Getty Images

This rare Winnie-the-Pooh book featured an inscription from author A.A. Milne asking for artist E.H. Shephard to decorate his tomb.

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The post What Winnie the Pooh Reveals About Childhood appeared first on LIFE.

When James Earl Carter died at his home in Plains, Georgia, on December 29, 2024, he was 100, and many people who as 18-year-olds had voted for or against him in the 1970s were contemplating retirement—an unthinkable concept for Carter. To the end, the nation’s longest-lived President remained passionately engaged in American life and global affairs, his body buffeted by illness but his intelligence undimmed. 

Jimmy Carter’s protean career saw soaring triumphs and crushing defeats, but one theme ran through it like a river—a call to service, deeply rooted in devout Christian faith. He’d risen meteorically to the White House, suffered a precipitous fall, then rebuilt his legacy through good works at home and abroad, whether it was promoting public health and welfare or safeguarding the environment or protecting human rights. His dogged resilience was a lesson in the human capacity for renewal. It seemed Jimmy Carter would go on forever.

He was 96 when he and his wife, Rosalynn, appeared with three other former Presidents and their first ladies—the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas—in a two-ad campaign urging Americans to sign up for the COVID-19 vaccine in March 2021. One spot showed clips of the couples receiving their shots; in the other, the ex-Presidents stood together, each addressing the camera. 

It was Carter’s second time in the news that week. Days earlier, he’d released a statement blasting Georgia Republicans for a slate of measures restricting absentee ballots and eliminating Sunday voting, widely seen as a reaction to GOP losses in his traditionally red home state. Georgia had favored Joe Biden in the 2020 election and sent Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the U.S. Senate, partly on the strength of mail-in and Sunday votes from majority Black districts. “I am disheartened, saddened, and angry,” said Carter, who had backed both senators and endorsed Biden. “We must not promote confidence among one segment of the electorate by restricting the participation of others.”

Carter became such a fixture in public life, it was hard to believe he’d burst onto the national scene seemingly out of nowhere in 1976 to wrest the presidency from Gerald Ford. A polarizing war, racial division, and Watergate had left the nation starving for change—and the unpretentious governor/peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, fit the bill. Physically unprepossessing, Carter was hardly magnetic in stump speeches, but he won 297 electoral votes, 50 percent of the popular vote, and on Inauguration Day became the first incoming President to walk from the Capitol to the White House. In the Oval Office, Carter saw himself as a technocratic problem solver, but he was an insular President, reliant on a tight inner circle of friends and advisers nicknamed the Georgia Mafia. Bluntly honest, he seemed incapable of schmoozing legislators.

Still, backed by a Democratic Congress, Carter could claim substantial achievements, including enacting strong new pollution controls, bolstering consumer protections, establishing the Energy and Education departments, and appointing many female and Black federal judges. And then there was his crowning foreign policy triumph, brokering peace between Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat—the Camp David Accords. 

But other crises overwhelmed Carter’s presidency: runaway inflation, energy shortages, and the humiliating hostage standoff with Iran. In 1980, Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in an epic landslide, 489 electoral votes to 49; he returned to Plains depressed, and roundly dismissed as a failure. As it turned out, he was just getting started. 

Other one-term Presidents have enjoyed distinguished second acts. John Quincy Adams served 18 years in the House as a fierce abolitionist; William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But Carter’s four-decade post-presidency, the longest in American history, was unmatched for its breadth and depth of accomplishment. Much of it sprang from the Carter Center, the nonprofit he and Rosalynn started in 1982, which has launched programs in 80 countries to promote health, sanitation, economic justice, and democracy. Carter became a leading authority on election integrity, roaming the globe to monitor voting. His most visible humanitarian work, though, was when he rolled up his sleeves and built houses with Habitat for Humanity, helping to provide some 4,400 families with safe, affordable shelter. 

Carter won hearts around the world with his grace in the face of a 2015 cancer diagnosis—melanoma had metastasized and spread to his brain. He thought he had weeks to live but recovered and kept going. Social media immortalized him as a humanitarian action hero—a viral meme depicted him on the job with Habitat, hammer in hand, captioned, “You May Be Badass, But You’ll Never Be 91-Year-Old Jimmy Carter Battling Cancer While Making a House for the Unfortunate Badass!” 

Even in his final years, Carter continued to show up for his convictions and his community. In May 2022, he filed a friend of the court brief to prevent a road being built through an Alaskan refuge. The following year, he and Rosalynn surprised attendees of the annual Peanut Festival in Plains when they waved to the crowd from a car. It would be the beloved couple’s last appearance at the event; Rosalynn died on November 19, 2023, at age 96. Carter’s tribute to his wife of 77 years summed up his own character as well. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in this world, I knew someone loved and supported me.”

Here are a selection of photos from LIFE’s special tribute issue to Jimmy Carter.

Cover image: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders/Corbis/Contour RA/Getty

A young Jimmy Carter, in his naval uniform, with wife Rosalynn. They were married for 77 years.

Jimmy Carter Presidential Library

Jimmy Carter was sworn in as the 39th President of the United States by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger on January 21, 1977

Hulton Archive/Getty

Carter met with Israel’s Menahem Begin and Anwar Sadat of Egypt at Camp David, 1978. The agreements that resulted from the meetings, known as the Camp David Accords, led to a historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

Everett/Shutterstock

Even before his Habitat for Humanity days, Jimmy Carter enjoyed building things. Here the former President made use of the woodworking tools given to him as a going away gift from his Cabinet and staff. Carter was sanding a table he built for Rosalynn to use as a typewriter stand.

Bettmann/Getty

Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, visited children suffering from schistosomiasis during their Feb. 15, 2007, trip to Nasarawa North, Nigeria. The Carters traveled to the community to bring national attention to the country’s need to make disease prevention methods and treatments with the medicine praziquantel more accessible in its rural and impoverished communities.

Emily Staub/The Carter Center

Jimmy Carter helped an Egyptian voter to cast his ballot at a polling station in Cairo on May 24, 2012 during the country’s second day of the country’s first free presidential election. Representatives from the Carter Center came to the country to serve as election monitors.

Wissam Saleh/AFP/Getty

Carter met with the locals while in Kathmandu on November 18, 2013, to monitor Nepal’s elections.

Deborah Hakes/ The Carter Center

The post Jimmy Carter: A Noble Life appeared first on LIFE.

Resting on a stool, acoustic guitar in hand, Bob Marley introduced what he called “this little song” to the audience at Pittsburgh’s Stanley Theatre. It was September 23, 1980, and Marley was 1,500 miles from Jamaica when he sang “Redemption Song” in public for the last time. 

Two days earlier, he had collapsed while jogging in Central Park, in New York City, and was told the cancer eating at his body and brain would kill him before the year was out. Five months earlier, he had been tear-gassed by police as he performed at an independence celebration for the hours-old nation of Zimbabwe. Four years earlier, at a rehearsal for the Smile Jamaica festival, he was shot by gunmen who were never caught. 

But as of September 23, 1980, nothing had killed this prophet. For a decade, Bob Marley had climbed higher and higher. He had infused an obscure island genre—a genre repeatedly dismissed as silly novelty music—with irrepressible melodic grace, universal appeal, and indomitable political power. He had taken the humble religious movement of Rastafari and turned it into a global campaign for justice. Along the way, he had written a score of powerful, tender love songs. Marley is reggae’s biggest star, with hundreds of millions of albums sold. Yet that simple declaration is not nearly enough to convey the size of Marley’s triumph. His songs sail through borders other rock stars can’t cross. It’s hard to imagine a group of Japanese fans traveling to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for a concert celebrating Elvis or the Eagles. But in 2006, at an event marking what would have been Marley’s 60th birthday, a group did just that. “I feel the songs as much as anyone else,” 25-year-old Chihiro Nakamori told the New York Times. This was a quarter century after Marley’s death. His battle against Babylon—Rastafari’s term for oppressive colonial and imperialist forces—made Marley a symbol of resistance that transcends time, language, geography, and culture. He has been heralded as the second coming of Bob Dylan. His face sits side by side with Che Guevera’s on tapestries at street markets and in murals around the world. Tunisians kicked off the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010 singing “Get Up, Stand Up.” 

Marley’s mighty reach remains unparalleled. It’s a reach that spans the philosophy of “Three Little Birds,” with its coo of “Don’t worry about a thing / ’Cause every little thing is gonna be alright” and his songs of freedom: “Exodus,” “War,” “Rat Race,” “Get Up, Stand Up,” “Redemption Song.” 

As Marley sat on that stool in Pittsburgh, he urged the audience to do what he had been urging them to do his entire career. He asked the people to help him sing all he ever had, these songs of freedom. 

In less than a year, Marley would be dead, but not gone, never gone. Bob Marley has achieved immortality, lifted anew by each generation singing his songs, from Pittsburgh to Addis Ababa, Japan to Jamaica.   

Here are a selection of photos from LIFE‘s new special issue on Bob Marley:

Cover photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Bob Marley and The Wailers, 1964. (Left to right: Bunny Wailer, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh.)

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Bob Marley and the Wailers in 1973, on the British television show The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Photo by Alan Messer/Shutterstock

Bob Marley performed at the Odeon in Birmingham, England, 1975.

Ian Dickson/Redferns/Getty

Bob Marley and The Wailers walked down an alley to the stage door behind the Odeon in Birmingham, England, July 18, 1975.

Ian Dickson/Redferns/Getty

Bob Marley with The Wailers in Holland in 1980.

Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

Bob Marley and his band performed during the ‘Viva Zimbabwe’ independence celebration at Ruffaro Stadium in Zimbabwe, April 18, 1980.

Photo by William F. Campbell/Getty Images

Bob Marley, circa 1979.

PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy

The post Bob Marley: A Legendary Life appeared first on LIFE.

For decades, the principal narrative of Billy Joel’s career has revolved around the fact that in the mid-1990s, at the height of one of the most fruitful and accomplished runs of songwriting in popular music history, he stopped recording new songs. Joel’s final contemporary album, 1993’s River of Dreams (its intentionally prophetic final track is titled “Famous Last Words”), reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts, received four Grammy nominations, and went quintuple platinum. Joel walked away at his peak. Jim Brown leaving the NFL. Steve Martin abandoning stand-up. Garbo renouncing the screen.

Music, though, has a particular virtue. You can’t retell the same jokes indefinitely, nor write the same book twice, nor reenact the very same roles. But you can play the same songs—and exactly the same is what most audiences want—over and over, and people will come to hear them. That’s especially true when the songs are as superb and sturdy as Billy Joel’s are. He performs 25 live shows a year, sometimes more. In 2022, Joel was recognized for having played his 80th consecutive monthly gig (with a pause for COVID, of course) at Madison Square Garden. The show sells out each month, with every decent seat gone within hours of on-sale, and at each show the crowd sings along with every word of every song. A banner with his name and the number 80 was raised to the Garden rafters to hang beside the retired jerseys of great Rangers and Knicks. Madison Square Garden refers to itself as the world’s most famous arena, and Billy Joel is the house band.

Perhaps because he is so beloved and because his old songs have so successfully stood the test of time, and because he is absurdly wealthy and getting wealthier, Joel has expressed no regrets about his career choice. His legion of fans, and his many admiring music industry collaborators, might look at Joel’s 12 albums—an extraordinarily deep 121-song catalog of ballads, bangers, meditations, and mood-enhancers that includes 33 hits and twice that many crowd pleasers—and feel there must still be music left to write. Not Joel. “I thought I’d had my say,” he told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show in 2017. “I just said, ‘Okay, shut up now.’” He still loves writing music, he says, and continues to compose, largely for himself, and mainly classical piano pieces (post–River of Dreams, in 2001, he released a collection of classical compositions, Fantasies & Delusions), but he has never considered a return to pop songwriting. “Elton John says you should put out more albums,” Colbert said during the Late Show sit-down. “Yes, well,” said Joel, “I told him he should put out less.”

Joel’s appeal isn’t complicated: He wrote exceptionally tasteful melodies and sings with an exceptionally resonant voice. He plays a robust and mellifluous piano. He tells stories. His writing leans toward the upbeat, but not incessantly. Joel’s love songs tend to be adoring paeans. They’re often self-deprecating and sometimes come with a dose of carpe diem (“Only the Good Die Young” could be renamed “To His Coy Catholic Mistress”). Conquests are rare. Listeners don’t hear about him laying a divorcée in New York City. 

Joel has been openly lovelorn, not only through his lyrics but also in his life. While reporting a piece on Joel for the New York Times in 2002, Chuck Klosterman discovered that his then-single subject was wholly preoccupied by an absence of meaningful romance. “I find myself in the peculiar position of trying to make Billy Joel feel better,” Klosterman wrote. Joel has been married four times (for a total of 30 years and counting) and has three daughters, including two with his current wife, Alexis Roderick. The girls are ages seven and five. Joel is 73. At his daughters’ school, “people think I’m my kids’ grandfather,” Joel has said, thus affording the sweet and marginally plausible suggestion that not everyone around the neighborhood knows who he is.

He is without movie-star looks, and also without pretension or obvious affect. Minimal shtick, maximum relatability. John, with whom Joel has performed dozens of sold-out stadium shows, rose to fame leaping about in fun-house sunglasses, white feathers, and nipple-baring sequined jumpsuits. Joel during his ascent came on stage in blue jeans or slacks, maybe a sport coat, sat down at the piano, and played some killer songs for you. That’s how he does it today. He has lived as a star without shedding his blue-collar, only-human vibe. Not too cool, not too slick. Joel’s nine-year marriage to Christie Brinkley had a revenge-of-the-nerds, Say Anything quality—look who landed an uptown girl!

Joel mines his life for material, which has stamped his storytelling with a clear sense of place. From his first album (Cold Spring Harbor) to his last, local touchstones, drawn from Joel’s New York matrix, bring forth the universal. You may or may not remember those nights hanging out at the Village Green, and you may have never ridden the Staten Island Ferry or cruised the Miracle Mile, but the ideas of them—grounding allusions during times of change—echo everywhere. There was a Brenda and Eddie in your high school class. You know just what it means to be a big man on Mulberry Street.

Still, New York. In addition to his residency at the Garden, Joel played the final concerts at Shea Stadium in 2008. He performed the last show at Long Island’s old Nassau Coliseum in 2015, and the first show when the new Coliseum opened in 2017. (There’s a banner with his name on it hanging from those rafters too.) Back in 1990, Joel was the first rock performer to play Yankee Stadium. He delivered a 23-song set, and the fact that he includes 17 of those songs in his tour repertoire today is not to say that the absence of newly written material determines the makeup of his current shows. Summer 2022 performances by the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney, as examples, consisted almost entirely of songs written in the 1970s. The folks of many ages who packed stadiums to see Sir Paul were not, with all due respect, there to hear his 2018 ditty “Come On to Me.” They came for “Hey Jude.”  

Thousands of devoted fans have attended scores of Joel’s shows. (He’s generated more than $450 million in ticket sales since 2014.) The true faithful tend to be boomers and Gen Xers, though they often have millennial and Gen Z children by their side, and the kids know the words too. They all arrive at Madison Square Garden, with their mutual experience and their respective similarities, to sway and stomp in the aisles, to respond to the familiar cues and to follow the familiar tunes. And for two and half hours with Billy Joel, that’s all there is. He’s their home.

Here is a selection of photos from LIFE’s new special tribute issue Billy Joel: 50 Years of the Piano Man.

Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty

Billy Joel performed at Royal Albert Hall in London, 1979.

Gus Stewart/Redferns/Getty

Billy Joel in 1974, the year after he had released his first album for Columbia Records.

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Billy Joel in 1977 with longtime band members (left to right) Liberty DeVitto, Doug Stegmeyer and Billy Canata.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

High-energy live shows like this 1977 performance in New York City have long been an essential aspect of Billy Joel’s appeal.

Michael Putland/Hulton/Getty

In 1978 Billy Joel relaxed during a flight from Austin to Dallas while on tour with his album 52nd Street.

Wally McNamee/Corbis Historical/Getty Images

The gold records were starting to pile up when Billy Joel posed for this portrait at home in 1978.

Michael Putland/Hulton/Getty Images

Billy Joel and his first wife Elizabeth, who was also his manager, at their home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, 1978.

Dick Kraus/Newsday RM/Getty

In 1983 Billy Joel and second wife Christie Brinkley performed on the set of the music video for his song “Uptown Girl.”

Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Billy Joel performed in the music video for “A Matter of Trust,” off his record The Bridge, in 1986.

DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Billy Joel: Just The Way He Is appeared first on LIFE.

“Fantasy has a history of misfires,” filmmaker Peter Jackson told Entertainment Weekly in 2001, just weeks before the release of his first movie based on The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary landmark. “For every other genre—Westerns, war—you can name truly amazing films. So fantasy is interesting, because there aren’t really any clichés. It’s [a chance] to give an audience an original experience.”

Back in 1937, that’s precisely what the fledgling novelist and distinguished Oxford professor had done with The Hobbit. His debut, set in his imagined world of Middle-earth, drew on a long-­running fascination with fairy tales and Norse myth, creating a high-­fantasy world unlike anything ever previously committed to paper. The tale of a resolute homebody, hobbit Bilbo Baggins, drawn into a quest—­involving wizards, dwarves, elves, giant spiders, a fire-breathing dragon, a hoard of gold, and a massive conflict among five armies—immediately captured the public’s imagination and vaulted the novel to best-seller status.

Tolkien then spent 17 years crafting the sequel, and it proved worth the wait. Spanning more than 1,100 pages over three volumes, The Lord of the Rings told a far more complicated story, dense with mythology and invented languages, and made for a dazzling read. Even if it perplexed certain critics, it gained an immediate foothold with a generation of readers and forever changed the cultural landscape.

“His work reflected the potential of fantasy as a genre, and its influence extended beyond fantasy as well,” says Tolkien scholar Amy H. Sturgis, an author and professor at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina. “His stories spawned many imitators, but they also continue to inspire creators who seek to tell different tales from other perspectives. Just think of modern mythologies like Star Trek or Star Wars; they use detailed maps and created languages and invented histories for imaginary cultures in order to build immersive worlds and galaxies. They invite audiences to inhabit these fictional landscapes and explore the human condition through their hopeful morality tales. That’s Tolkienian storytelling.”

The Lord of the Rings novels found an especially receptive audience among the American counterculture, becoming fixtures on university bookshelves across the country, which grew their popularity and influence. “The hobbit habit seems to be almost as catching as LSD,” proclaimed Time magazine in 1966. “On many U.S. campuses, buttons declaring FRODO LIVES and GO GO GANDALF—frequently written in Elvish script—are almost as common as football letters.”

Among those Me Generation fans was future author Stephen King, who has cited The Lord of the Rings as one of his 10 favorite novels. “Hobbits were big when I was nineteen,” King writes in the introduction to one of the books in his Tolkien-inspired Dark Tower series. “There were probably half a dozen Merrys and Pippins slogging through the mud at Max Yasgur’s farm during the Great Woodstock Music Festival, twice as many Frodos, and hippie Gandalfs without number,” he continued, naming popular characters from the saga.

In the decades since, The Lord of the Rings has served as a gateway for readers to discover the joys of adventure stories set in worlds far beyond their own. It has inspired authors to explore the furthest reaches of their imaginations and conjure countless stories that are equally beloved. “Of all the authors [that] had an impact on me . . . Tolkien is right up there at the top,” said George R.R. Martin, whose novels spawned the blockbuster TV series Game of Thrones, in 2019. “I yield to no one in my admiration for The Lord of the Rings—I ­re-read it every few years. It’s one of the great books of the 20th century . . .”

Of Tolkien’s many famous fans, however, few may understand and treasure his work more deeply than comedian and late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert, who can even read Tolkien’s invented Elvish language. “Tolkien’s work has been a lifelong haven for me—truly a light in dark places when all other lights went out,” Colbert wrote in EW in 2014. “For an awkward teenager, Middle-earth was a world I could escape to.”

Filmmaker Peter Jackson read The Lord of the Rings in his later teen years, not realizing he’d someday return Tolkien’s epic to the forefront of popular culture. Released between 2001 and 2003, Jackson’s cinematic Rings trilogy dominated the worldwide box office, earning billions and racking up countless critical accolades. No longer just the domain of fantasy devotees, the story of heroic Frodo Baggins and his quest to destroy the Ring of Power became inescapable—though some longtime Tolkien experts were less enamored with the movies than general audiences.

“Ever since the Jackson adaptations were released there have been fans who confuse what Tolkien wrote with what Jackson filmed,” say Tolkien scholars Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull in an e-mail to LIFE. “Jackson did well from his films, but they sharply [and] sometimes angrily divided Tolkien enthusiasts, some of whom praise them highly and accept their many departures from their source, while others—such as ourselves—­find them seriously flawed.”

Subsequent attempts at adaptation have fared less well than Jackson’s Rings juggernaut. Theater producer Kevin Wallace raised about $25 million to mount a three-and-a-half-hour Lord of the Rings musical onstage in Toronto, in 2006. Unfortunately, according to the Guardian, the production was “an unmitigated disaster.” A retooled, trimmed-down version premiered on London’s West End in 2007 but unceremoniously closed the following year.

If anything, the musical’s woes speak to how challenging it can be to get Tolkien right. Jackson struggled with his follow-up adaptation of The Hobbit, which he also made into a trilogy. Although the films once again found commercial success, they didn’t catch fire in quite the same way his Rings trilogy had—by that point, Game of Thrones had become a sensation in its own right, offering fans a more mature take on the fantasy genre. (Jackson also stated that behind-the-scenes turmoil on the productions left him with less time to prepare than he might have liked.)

There are yet more Tolkien projects ahead. Amazon announced a Lord of the Rings series, due to arrive in 2022. Set during Middle-earth’s Second Age, the TV show will take place thousands of years prior to the period of Jackson’s movies. Early reports indicate that the first season will consist of 20 episodes, all shot in New Zealand, on a staggering $465 million budget.

Future adaptations will certainly come and go, but regardless of their success or failure, Tolkien’s writings will endure. Even though his stories were conceived long ago and unfold in a landscape different from our own, the crises the characters face and the work’s underlying themes remain imminently relatable and relevant.

“We live in a complicated world with multiple, simultaneous crises unfolding,” says Sturgis. “It is easy to feel not only stressed but also helpless and hopeless. . . . Tolkien reminds us that the smallest and most humble can be heroes; there is a part everyone can play in fighting the darkness and making the world better. Most importantly, Tolkien acknowledges that even in the direst of times, we have reason to hope. Our need for consolation, inspiration, and hope is evergreen.”

Here are photos from LIFE’s new special issue The Lord of the Rings: The Origins, the Stories, the Extraordinary Adventure.

Front Cover: Photo illustration by Sean McCabe/RappArt; Entertainment Pictures/Alamy (Aragorn); New Line Cinema/Lord Zweite Productions Deutschland Film PR/Ronald Grant/Mary Evans/Everett (Frodo); Allstar Picture Library Ltd./Alamy (Samwise, Gollum, and Gandalf); AF Archive/Alamy (Arwen and Eye of Sauron; © New Line Cinema/Courtesy Everett (Tower); Pobytov/E+/Getty (Clouds); Cyrustr/iStock/Getty (Storm); solarseven/iStock/Getty (Fire)

J .R. R. Tolkien, Oxford professor and author of The Lord of the Rings, 1955.

Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Getty

In The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, those forming an alliance to wage war against evil included Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Boromir (Sean Bean) and, in the background, Gandalf (Ian McKellan) and Gimli (John Rhys-Davis).

Allstar Picture Library Ltd./Alamy

Sam (Sean Astin) had little trust for Gollum in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy

Frodo (Elijah Wood) beheld the enchanting ring in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

Allstar Picture Library Ltd./Alamy

A rightwraith tracked Frodo (Elijah Wood), Sam (Sean Astin) Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan) early on their journey in The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring.

AA Film Archive/Alamy

Andy Serkis, with the help of special effects.,played the role of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings movies.

Album/Alamy

Elrond (Hugo Weaving) and Arwen (Liv Tyler) in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

KPA Publicity Stills/United Archives GmbH/Alamy

Gandalf (Ian McKellan) took up arms in one of the brilliantly staged battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

Allstar Picture Library Ltd./Alamy

Gandalf (Ian McKellan) in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

© New Line Cinema/Courtesy Everett

Director Peter Jackson (center) was flanked by screenwriters Fran Walsh (left) and Philippa Boyens after they won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, February 29, 2004.

Mike Blake/Reuters/Alamy

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