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Old 03-05-2006, 11:10 AM   #8
davem
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davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
We also know that Tolkien was a fan of Science fiction - probably Wells (he refers to Morlocks in one of his letters), David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arturus (which he & Lewis admired) - & of ghost stories (he knew Barrie's Mary Rose), & was interested in time-travel (he was very familiar with Dunne's 'An Experiment with Time'). The very fact that he & Lewis tossed a coin to see which of them would write a Science Fiction story & which would write a time travel story certainly suggests that Tolkien was happy to do either.

The most interesting of the above is probably Lindsay's book, which is as far from an 'Edwardian' novel as one could imagine. His love of Eddison's works (despite his discomfort with their morality) is also interesting.

Certainly (as Humphrey Carpenter noted) there is a certain similarity between the early parts of Fellowship & the stories of John Buchan, & its been pointed out that some of the descriptions in LotR of Mordor are very close to the descriptions of urban decay in The Old Curiosity Shop.

In short, I don't think we can say LotR is an Edwardian novel - certainly it has a certain 'Edwardian' mood & style, but many other literary influences, both ancient & modern were there. The Leaf-mould of the mind is made up of many different things.
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