Tolkien and the modernists
His Middle-earth fantasy writings, consisting largely of a legendarium which was not published until after his death, embodied his realism about the century's traumatic events, and his Christian hope.
Tolkien's writing has some clearly modern features, especially the strong emphasis on intertextuality, like the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; but he differs from them in using the diverse materials not so as to present a fragmented collage, but to create a world of his own, providing a mythic prehistory, a mythology for England.
The author of the bestselling fantasy novel The 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.
Mortimer called this "an appalling oversight", writing that "Tolkien's project was as grand and avant-garde as those of Wagner or the Futurists, and his works are as suffused with the spirit of the age as any by Eliot, Joyce, or Hemingway".
She argues that the form and themes of Tolkien's early writings fit into the romantic tradition of writers like William Morris and W. B. Yeats, and have a looser connection with the Celtic Revival and with the Symbolist movement in art.
Shippey suggests however that rather than seeing the chapter as an allegory 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.
"[22] Shippey draws a parallel with a contemporary work, George Orwell's 1938 novel Coming Up for Air, where England is subjected to a "similar diagnosis" of leaderless inertia.
[10] Shippey compares the treatment of evil in The Lord of the Rings with that of disillusioned contemporary authors after the Second World War such as Orwell, William Golding, and Kurt Vonnegut.
On the other hand, his work was "supremely intertextual",[12] like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, full of allusions, interweaving and juxtaposing styles, modes, and genres, most visibly in The 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 to subcreate a world.
He gives as an example Rainer Maria Rilke's Angels in the Duino 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".
[25] He notes, too, Shippey's analysis of Tolkien's "transformations of motifs"[25] from Shakespeare's Macbeth: the march of the Ents to destroy Isengard, recalling the coming of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane; and the killing of the Witch-king of Angmar, fulfilling the prophecy that "not by the hand of man shall he fall" by bringing about his end with a Hobbit, Merry Brandybuck, and a woman, Éowyn.
"[28] 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).
"[32] 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.
