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Originally Posted by Lalwendė
At the risk of being wormy, if LOTR has a broader reach than simply England, does this mean that the Englishness of the text is simply being picked up on by world cultures which themselves have absorbed English influences?
Does an English Icon need to be purely parochial? Or can it also be an Icon that is appreciated by a global audience? Other Icons include Alice In Wonderland and the Miniskirt, which do have global audiences. They are not limited to England, nor were the influences on their development be purely English, but they are nevertheless English Icons which have 'gone global', as LOTR has.
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Lal: to the rest of the world, Englishness is exotic. A wild idea, I know, but everyone in the world thinks of themselves and where they are as normal and everywhere else as exotic. We tend to disparage the normal (who wants to be normal) and value the exotic (oooooo, that's so wonderfully exotic). So to the rest of the world, the Englishness of
LotR is something that we react to not with familiarity (those "absorbed English influences") but with the thrill of the
unfamiliar.
For North American readers there's Elves, Dwarves, Dragons and Wizards alongside waistcoats, people who say "fiddlesticks", castles, and a monarchy -- we don't have any of those things over here!
But I daresay that this exotic-Englishness appeals to English readers as well since the England that Tolkien preserved (quite Elvishly, I might add...) in his stories is one that no longer really exists either. So I would argue that
every reader of the story exists at least one remove from the English-aura we find there...