J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the bestselling fantasyThe Lord of the Rings, was largely rejected by the literary establishment during his lifetime, but has since beenaccepted into the literary canon, if not as amodernist then certainly as a modern writer responding to his times. He fought in theFirst World War, and saw the rural England that he loved built over andindustrialised. HisMiddle-earth fantasy writings, consisting largely ofa legendarium which was not published until after his death, embodied his realism about the century's traumatic events, and his Christian hope.
Scholars have compared Tolkien to authors of the 19th and 20th centuries, writing that he fits into theromantic tradition ofWilliam Morris andW. B. Yeats; has some connection with theCeltic Revival and theSymbolist movement; can be likened to the romanticLittle Englandism andanti-statism ofGeorge Orwell andG. K. Chesterton between the wars; and the disillusionment of Orwell,William Golding, andKurt Vonnegut after theSecond World War.
Tolkien's writing has some clearly modern features, especially the strong emphasis onintertextuality, like the work ofT. S. Eliot andEzra Pound; but he differs from them in using the diverse materials not so as to present a fragmented collage, butto create a world of his own, providing a mythic prehistory,a mythology for England.
The author of the bestselling fantasy novelThe Lord of the Rings,[1]J. R. R. Tolkien, born in 1892, was orphaned as a boy, his father dying in South Africa and his mother in England a few years later. He was brought up by his guardian, theCatholic priest Father Francis Morgan, and educated at boys'grammar schools and thenExeter College, Oxford. He joined theBritish Army'sLancashire Fusiliers and saw the horror oftrench warfare in theFirst World War. After the war he became a professor of English language at theUniversity of Leeds, and then at theUniversity of Oxford. He specialised inphilology, especiallyOld English works such asBeowulf, taking little interest inEnglish literature written after theMedieval period. He died in 1973.[2]
Tolkien encountered sharp criticism forThe Lord of the Rings from literary figures such asEdmund Wilson[3] andEdwin Muir.[4] The hostility continued for some years after his death with attacks from writers such asMichael Moorcock in his essay "Epic Pooh".[5] In 2001,The New York Times reviewer Judith Shulevitz criticized his "pedantry",[6] while in theLondon Review of Books, Jenny Turner attacked it as a "cosy little universe" for "vulnerable people".[7] In 2002, the critic Richard Jenkyns inThe New Republic criticized it for lacking psychological depth.[8]
21st century scholars, largely accepting Tolkien as modern, have offered a variety of estimations of his position in the literary canon, from recognising his realism in the face of the collective traumas of his time,[10] to noting his romanticism,[11] and describing the long-establishedelegiac tone of his writings, aligning Middle-earth with the modern world.[12]
Theresa Nicolay showed in her 2014 bookTolkien and the Modernists[10] that Tolkien'sMiddle-earth fantasy, likeModernism, was created as a reaction to two collective traumas of the 20th century, namelyindustrialisation andthe mechanised mass killing of the First World War. These traumas left people with feelings of hopelessness and alienation, and a sense that good tradition was broken and that religion had failed. Tolkien differed from many modernists in having a strongCatholic faith, giving him hope. Nicolay described how this combination of realism and hope guided Tolkien's Middle-earth writings.[13]
The scholar of theologyRalph C. Wood, in his 2015 bookTolkien among the Moderns,[14] argued that Tolkien was neither escapist nor antiquarian, and had engaged with modern literary figures such asJames Joyce andIris Murdoch. His book was criticised for overlooking scholarship on Tolkien's engagement with modernism, such as the work ofVerlyn Flieger,Dimitra Fimi, who examinedhis attitudes to race,[15] and the 2-volume collectionTolkien and Modernity edited byThomas Honegger and Frank Weinreich in 2006.[16][17][18]
In 2005, the Tolkien scholar Patchen Mortimer commented on the "contentious debate" about Tolkien, noting that his many readers found his books and "the attendantlanguages, histories,maps,artwork, and apocrypha"[19] a huge accomplishment, while his critics "dismiss[ed] his work as childish, irrelevant, and worse".[19] Mortimer observed in 2005 that admirers and critics had treated his work as "escapist and romantic",[19] nothing to do with the 20th century. Mortimer called this "an appalling oversight", writing that "Tolkien's project was as grand and avant-garde as those ofWagner orthe Futurists, and his works are as suffused with the spirit of the age as any by Eliot, Joyce, orHemingway".[19]
Anna Vaninskaya, inWiley-Blackwell's 2014A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, looks at Tolkien's modernity in comparison to the literature and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. She notes that while Tolkien is popularly known as the author of two successful works,The Hobbit andThe Lord of the Rings, most of his output, worked on throughout his writing career but unpublished in his lifetime, washis legendarium that lay behindThe Silmarillion. She argues that the form and themes of Tolkien's early writingsfit into the romantic tradition of writers likeWilliam Morris andW. B. Yeats, and have a looser connection with theCeltic Revival and with theSymbolist movement in art. In terms of politics, she compares Tolkien's mature writings with the romanticLittle Englandism and anti-statism of 20th century writers likeGeorge Orwell andG. K. Chesterton.[11]
Tom Shippey, a Tolkien scholar and like him aphilologist, writes that the Shire is certainly where Middle-earth comes nearest to the 20th century, and that the people who had commented that the chapter "The Scouring of the Shire" inThe Lord of the Rings was about Tolkien's contemporary England were not wholly wrong. Shippey suggests however that rather than seeing the chapter as anallegory of postwar England, it could be taken as an account of "a society suffering not only from political misrule, but from a strange and generalized crisis of confidence."[21] Shippey draws a parallel with a contemporary work, George Orwell's 1938 novelComing Up for Air, where England is subjected to a "similar diagnosis" of leaderless inertia.[21]
Flieger notes how dark Tolkien'sSilmarillion legendarium is, and that "though it never wavered in intent" it inevitably changed with the changing world of the 20th century, taking on its "color, flavor, and mood".[9] She comments that his "great mythological song" began at the end of theEdwardian era, which it recalled nostalgically; took its shape in the very different era between the wars, which it viewed with "weary disillusionment"; and finally found an audience during yet another era, theCold War, which it regarded with apprehension.[9] Shippey compares the treatment of evil inThe Lord of the Rings with that of disillusioned contemporary authors after theSecond World War such as Orwell,William Golding, andKurt Vonnegut.[20] Flieger too compared him with Orwell, writing that:
If Tolkien's legendarium as we have it now isa mythology for England, it is a song aboutgreat power and promise in the throes of decline, racked by dissensions, split by factions, perpetually threatened by war, and perpetually at war with itself. It seems closer to Orwell's1984 than the furry-footed escapist fantasy that detractors ofThe Lord of the Rings have characterized that work as being.[9]
John Rateliffe quotes the early Tolkien scholarPaul H. Kocher's 1972 description of Tolkien's plan, to create a mythic prehistory by inserting intoThe Lord of the Rings:[12]
some forebodings of [Middle-earth's] future which will make Earth what it is today ... he shows the initial steps in a long process of retreat or disappearance by all other intelligent species, which will leave man effectually alone on earth. ...Ents may still be there in our forests, but what forests have we left? The process of extermination is already well under way in theThird Age, and ...Tolkien bitterly deplores its climax today."[22]
Rateliffe writes that Tolkien's "close identification" of Middle-earth and the modern world was present throughout his writing from the start of his career to its end, as was the "elegiac tone"; Tolkien began in 1917 with "lost tales", "the fragmentary sole surviving record of a forgotten history, ... the tragic story of a ruined people".[12]
Vaninskaya writes that Tolkien was certainly "a modern writer",[11] but questions whether he was a modernist. She notes that whereas his friendC. S. Lewis publicly engaged with modernism, Tolkien did not. On the other hand, his work was "supremely intertextual",[11] likeT. S. Eliot andEzra Pound, full of allusions, interweaving and juxtaposing styles, modes, and genres, most visibly inThe Lord of the Rings. The effect, though, was not, as those authors chose, to present modern life as "fragments in a jagged-edged collage", but "to mold an independent myth of his own", in fact tosubcreate a world.[11]
Brian Rosebury, writing in 1992, quotes Tolkien's biographer,Humphrey Carpenter's remark that "Though Tolkien lived in the 20th century, he could hardly be called a modern writer".[23] Rosebury notes that Tolkien belonged to the "lost" generation that contained the killedwar poets such asWilfred Owen; but by 1954–5 whenThe Lord of the Rings appeared, the fashion was for anti-modernist social realism with writers likePhilip Larkin andKingsley Amis, whose "styles of calculated plainness" Tolkien did not follow.[24] In short, Rosebury writes, Tolkien had a more complex relationship to modernism, which he calls the dominant literary tendency of the 20th century. In his view,The Lord of the Rings is "antagonistic" to the practices and values of modernism, but like many modernist works it uses myth creatively and adaptively. He gives as an exampleRainer Maria Rilke's Angels in theDuino Elegies, reworking the archetype of beings like humans but separate from them; the work is quite unlike Tolkien's, but like it throws mortality into sharp relief, and shows death as "a necessary and fitting, as well as a tragic, completion of our destiny".[24] He notes, too, Shippey's analysis of Tolkien's "transformations of motifs"[24] fromShakespeare'sMacbeth: the march of the Ents to destroyIsengard, recalling the coming ofBirnam Wood toDunsinane; and the killing of theWitch-king of Angmar, fulfilling the prophecy that "not by the hand of man shall he fall" by bringing about his end with aHobbit,Merry Brandybuck, and a woman,Éowyn.[25][24] Rosebury observes, too, that like Rilke and Eliot, Tolkien builds from his "religious intuitions", creating a work that may besuffused with Christianity, but keeps it thoroughly hidden with no trace of allegory; Rosebury likens this to the way that the particularist Catholic novelists such asGraham Greene andEvelyn Waugh gave their attention to human dramas, allowing the reader to notice some power in religious faith.[24]
Metanarrative, includingself-referentiality, is a distinctively modernist feature in literature. Tolkien's characters explicitly speak about storytelling, and are conscious of the metanarrative fact that they are in a story.[26][27][28] On the stairs of the dangerous pass ofCirith Ungol, as they are about to descend intoMordor, very likely to their deaths, Frodo and Sam discuss the nature of story. Sam says "We're in one, of course, but I mean put into words, you know ... read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say 'Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring!". Frodo answers "Why Sam ... to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story were already written".[29]Verlyn Flieger writes that this is "the most self-referential and post-modern moment in the entire book", since it constitutes the book itself looking both back at its own creation, and forward to the printed book that the reader is holding.[26] Kullmann and Siepmann comment that the laughter "is obviously due to the liberating function of literature."[27] Mary Bowman comments that it "is perhaps not surprising to find such a conversation, with its mood-altering impact, in a work written by a man who spent his professional career, as well as a good deal of his leisure time from boyhood, reading, teaching, editing, and writing about narratives of various sorts (not to mention creating them)."[28]
Rosebury states that Tolkien's writing shares several qualities with modernism, as well as having a modern novelistic "realism"; but the thing that keeps it from being called modernist is that it lacksirony. In particular, he writes, Tolkien is never ironic about value, nor about the literary text itself, both hallmarks of modernism;[24]Patrick Curry, writing inA Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, concurs with this.[30] Shippey notes that Tolkien can all the same make use of irony, as whenDenethor despairs "on the brink of victory", having been misled by looking in thePalantír. Shippey goes on to describeThe Lord of the Rings as "a profoundly ironic work, so much so that I do not think we have even yet got to the bottom of its many ironies."[31]
The Lord of the Rings is sharply aware of people's moral imperfection, and all the characters, "even the wisest", understand only a fraction of their world, but the work is not radically pessimistic about the possibility of knowing anything. Rosebury notes that one can see that modernism remains influential in the fact that saying a work is not ironic or self-referential can be taken as disparagement, whereas in the Romantic period, works such asByron's orGoethe's were basically always earnest. Rosebury concludes by suggesting that the "elements of neo-romantic earnestness in Tolkien may ... come to seem a welcome variant" of modernism, rather than a failure to adjust to it.[24]
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