[Fordim Hedgethistle]

An interesting thread topic indeed! I do not have the requisite knowledge of works such as the HoME (which I have yet to read. . .*chagrin*) but I could not help myself from responding to this discussion, even if at something of a tangent.

Obviously, no work of art or artist is so easily understood in terms of straightforward cause and effect: I don’t think there’s any way to know or discover a line or point at which LotR can be divided into pre- and post-war. That having been said, there are some very tantalising notions being bandied about here. And there’s the old adage that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” to remember. In one of history’s great ironies, post-war German and Jewish artists both faced the same problem: how can one maintain faith in art (an essentially humanist endeavour) in the face of the mechanised inhumanity of the Holocaust? The profound impact of the War on all who went through it cannot be overstated.

Still, I agree with those who point to WW1 as the more definitive crisis in Tolkien’s own life. I fully understand and take to heart the terrible depredations done by Nazism to the northern myths cherished by Tolkien, but I think it is wrong to see this as anything other than part of a long road he’d been on (with most of his generation) for several decades. The War to End Wars, the dawning recognition among Englishmen of the essentially totalitarian and despotic nature of their Empire, the breakdown of communal faith, class revolution and consciousness, mechanisation, industrialisation, urbanisation – all of these stresses had been operative for a long time, and resulted in what we now rather inaccurately call the Modernist Crisis. This crisis resulted in, broadly speaking, two kinds of artistic reaction. There were the High Modernists like Joyce, Eliot and Woolf who sought to explore or reflect the meaningless they felt in their lives and world in an art that was radically experimental. Where meaning failed, Art and Aesthetics would prevail. For writers like Tolkien, Waugh and Greene, however, who steadfastly (and at times shrilly) maintained their faith against the stresses of their society, art was not something to substitute for meaning, but a vehicle whereby they could embody their faith and render it concrete for others.

I’ve always thought that in both cases the results were the same – as soon as one places all of one’s faith in art, then the art can never stop or cease, because that would be the death of faith. In this respect, I’ve always thought it fair to compare Tolkien’s writing to James Joyce’s. Each of them had a brilliant and early success in which they did something that no-one had done before: for Joyce it was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for Tolkien The Hobbit. They then each went on to write a more elaborate and mature ‘sequel’ that came to surpass the original achievement and become, in effect, created worlds all of their own – the Dublin of Ulysses is no less fully realised a sub-creation than the Middle-Earth of LotR. But having written their great works, neither one of them could cease. Each had invested so much of themselves and of their faith into their art, that for each of them, their art had become their new faith. So Joyce took his radical experimentation further and further, trying to give his faith the greatest expression possible, and the result is the almost unreadable Finnegan’s Wake. Tolkien did the same, and the result was the vast repository of his later writings only dimly captured in Christopher Tolkien’s Silmarillion.

Both Joyce and Tolkien tried to ‘fix’ a broken world and faith through their arts – but the only way they could do this was to create an art so vast that one could fit the world into it. For Joyce, he tried to cram every detail of Dublin into his works, to the point where the narratives simply fall apart beneath the weight. For Tolkien, he tried to so fully realise his secondary world that it became an end to itself in neglect of the primary world. For both of them, their art become and end to itself, which is both their great strength and weakness as writers.