Help needed [accounts of Eye of Sauron... during Vietnam War]

I cannot help you, but what you write remindes me of one of the conferences I heard last year in Birmingham. The president of the Mexican Tolkien Society talked about the alleged influences of Tolkien's writings on the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Citing a confidential source, he told us that the highest ranks of the ZNLA are full of Tolkien-fans, and that tLotR is a compulsory reading for all members of the Army. He also made many parallels between passages in tLotR and in Sub-Comandante Marcos' speeches.

That's intersting. I hope the speech is published in one of the Tolkien Society Publications that come out every now and then.

It should be contained in the proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 conference, whenever that will be published.

Thanks Soronel,

I'll have to keep that in mind and keep checking for its publication..
I still haven't had much luck with my original query, but I'll be visiting our National Library next month, so I might come up with some more info then

The earliest source I can find is The Sunday Times, Aug 6, 1967, quoting Tolkien himself:

Someone sent me a photograph of festivities in Saigon showing the Vietnamese II Corps led by General Loc followed by a tribesman bearing the lidless eye of Sauron on his shield. Apparently an American special service officer in Darlac province tried to improve his Vietnamese by translating my book, and the locals became excited by it. So my mythology is becoming part of Vietnamese mythology.

I guess Tolkien wrote to his publisher, who then spread the word.

During the same month, Tolkien drew the doodle "Mordor Special Mission Flying Corps emblem" (A&I no. 185. TAI misread the inscribed “aug 1967” as "1969").

The Sunday Times account contains two elements: South Vietnamese II Corps and tribesmen. It appears all later variants can be traced backed to it, but each only contains one of the elements. So I categorize them as Variant A & Variant B.

Variant A (with South Vietnamese II Corps):

Sep 4, 1967, Publishers Weekly has a piece saying 'Word has come from Professor J. R. R. Tolkien in England that the fame of “The Lord of the Rings” has penetrated to South Vietnam. The Vietnamese Second Corps, led by General Loc, has taken the lidless eye of Sauron as its battle emblem. Sauron is one of the more villainous characters in Tolkien’s fantasy, which is perhaps a little unfortunate from the point of view of American-South Vietnamese public relations. What happened, apparently, is that an American special service officer in Darlac province tried to improve his Vietnamese by translating “The Lord of the Rings” into it. The local Vietnamese people became quite enthusiastic about Tolkien mythology and are adopting it as their own.'

This story is later retold in several Tolkien fanzines in 1967-8, and brought about the (in)famous review "The Hobbit War" by Douglas J. Stewart in The Nation, Oct 9, 1967, which itself was also quoted in several books.

Late 1967, Tolkien Journal 8 mentioned "We hear from Allen & Unwin that since a Green Beret translated LotR into Vietnamese for the benefit of the natives, a division of the South Vietnamese Army has adopted the Eye of Sauron for its emblem."

Variant B (with tribesmen):

Sep 2 1968, another version of the story emerged in a meeting of The Tolkien Society, "It seems that Captain Hurray of the special forces, while teaching English to the Montagnard tribesmen, happened to mention Minas Morgul. This reminded the Montagnards of their own fortified villages, they became interested and promptly flipped over the orcs. This particular tribe, the Gerai, use stout spears and large round shields, one of them decided to paint the Eye of Sauron on his shield and then paraded with it in Saigon in 1966. Photos were taken of it and the word spread from Vietnam to England and to Tolkien himself. After the meeting Dick Eney showed us slides and, even though the tribesman in question was some distance from the camera, the Eye of Sauron was quite visible on his shield." (Although this can be categorized as "Variant B", it actually contains more information than the original piece! It appears someone in Tolkien Society read the story and the photo from some newspaper, and sent them to Tolkien, which led to Tolkien's remarks in Aug 1967.)

Humphrey Carpenter's Biography. Appears to be based on Variant B. Or he found the original news?

Michael White's Biography. Clearly based on Variant B.

Daniel Grotta's Biography. Clearly based on Variant A.

The ultimate source (including photos) remains to be found. fuzzy_mic on reddit raised a very interesting possibility: this "Eye of Sauron" might be a traditional symbol of Vietnamese folk religion, Cao Dai.

A 1966 photo showing The Divine Eye in Cao Dai

Thanks for all of this zionius. I've found some information which starts to explain some of the ambiguities and inconsistencies that you've explored. I still have some more digging to do, but once I've exhausted those enquiries, I'll write this up and will report back here.

A follow-up on this, for those who are interested!

I came across a recording of a talk given by Dick Eney (https://fancyclopedia.org/Dick_Eney) at a meeting of the Tolkien Society at Baycon in 1968. Eney's talk reveals that he was the source of the story about the Eye of Sauron in Vietnam. There's a more detailed write-up on this in the October issue of Beyond Bree, but in short, Eney was in Vietnam in the second half of the 1960s, and met a US Special Forces captain who had been providing defensive training to a village of indigenous tribespeople in the highlands of South Vietnam. While doing so, he taught the villagers some English, and at one point used a short passage from LOTR to do so. He explained the basic storyline as well, and one villager decided to paint the Eye of Sauron on his ceremonial shield. That same villager ended up at an independence day parade in Saigon in 1966, during which Eney took a photo, where the shield (and the Eye) is visible. The villager was standing alongside an elephant that was dressed with the insignia of the Vietnamese II Corps (headed at that time by General Loc).

Eney included a slide of the photo in Volume 1, Issue 6 of the fanzine he was producing in Vietnam, entitled Curse You, Red Baron! - a copy found its way to Tolkien, and this seems to be the source of Tolkien's letter to The Times in 1967. But as Eney pointed out in his talk - this was about one single villager, who was not enlisted. So the South Vietnamese armed forces had most certainly not adopted the Eye as their battle emblem, as reported by Publishers Weekly (and in fact, Tolkien never said they had).

A copy of the photo has been tracked down, and I am looking at whether/how this can be published.

Could you share a snippet of the photo? Namely, just the detail of the eye? To compare to the one in The Sunday Times for scholarly analysis

The photo has now been published in the November issue of Beyond Bree.