Impact on popular culture

The Lord of the Rings has had a profound and wide-ranging impact on popular culture, from its publication in the 1950s, but especially throughout the 1960s and 1970s, where young people embraced it as a countercultural saga. Its influence has been vastly extended in the present day, thanks to the Peter Jackson live-action films. Well known examples include "Frodo Lives!" and "Gandalf for President", two phrases popular among American Tolkien fans during the 1960s and 1970s, The Lord of the Rings-themed editions of popular board games (e.g., Risk: Lord of the Rings Trilogy Edition, chess and Monopoly), and parodies such as Bored of the Rings (produced for the Harvard Lampoon), the VeggieTales version - Lord of the Beans, the South Park episode The Return of the Lord of the Rings to the Two Towers, and the Mad Magazine musical send-up titled "The Ring And I" in which the characters sing their parts to the tunes of popular music hits.
In particular, the book, along with Tolkien's other writings, has influenced many musicians. The British rock band Led Zeppelin made four compositions that contain explicit references to The Lord of the Rings - namely "Ramble On", "The Battle of Evermore", "Misty Mountain Hop", and "Over the Hills and Far Away" (with others, such as "Stairway to Heaven and Kashmir", alleged by some to contain such). Another British rock band, Camel, made a triptych on their second LP Mirage – tracks entitled "Nimrodel", "The Procession" and "The White Rider". The band Rush made a song called "Rivendell", about the joys of staying at the Elven haven (found on their album Fly by Night, 1975). The band Styx released the song "Lords of the Ring" on their 1978 album Pieces of Eight. The German power metal band Blind Guardian have made several compositions such as , "Majesty", "Wizard's crown", "Run for the night", "By the gates of Moria", "Gandalf's rebirth" and "Lord of the Rings", plus a song about The Hobbit called "The Bard's song - the Hobbit", and have also produced a Silmarillion-inspired album, Nightfall in Middle-Earth; their song The Bard's Song (In the Forest) contains the line "This songs of Hobbits, Dwarves, and Men", a clear reference to the series. 1960s guitarist Steve Took also took his pseudonym in honor of the hobbit character Peregrin Took.

Nearly the entire discography of Austrian black metal band Summoning is inspired by Tolkien's works. Swedish keyboardist Bo Hansson released an album entitled "Music Inspired by Lord of the Rings" in 1970 (1972 in the UK and US). The Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish also reference the book in many of their songs, most notably in "Elvenpath". The Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth took their name from the Plateau of Gorgoroth in Mordor. The Swedish death metal band Amon Amarth borrowed their name for the Sindarin equivalent for Mount Doom (though they draw their influence from Norse mythology). The defunct California-based band Cirith Ungol took their name from the mountain cavern found in The Two Towers. Black metal musician Varg Vikernes of Mayhem and Burzum adopted the name Count Grishnackh from an Orc character in The Two Towers. Burzum also means "darkness" in the Black Speech, the language developed by Sauron. Enya wrote an instrumental piece called "Lothlórien" in 1991, and composed two songs for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - "May It Be" (sung in English and Quenya) and "Aníron" (sung in Sindarin). Also, the Christian rock/Christian metal band Underoath released a song called "It's Dangerous Business Walking Out Your Front Door", taking a quote from the book.