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Originally Posted by Aiwendil
I think one ought to be careful about how one defines 'romantic'. If you ask me, the 'Narn' is rather romantic. Tragedy and Romanticism are not opposites.
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Of course. One can use it in the precisely defined literary sense, or one can use it in the colloquial sense. CoH, as Garth & James Parker in the Boston.com review make clear, CoH is a post WWI, specifically a post Somme, novel. The 'romantic' idealism of the Victorian/Edwardian world died on the battlefields of France. Parker states
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Late in "The Children of Hurin" the warrior Dorlas suffers a failure of courage ("He sits shivering on the shore") that Tolkien's contemporaries would have recognized immediately as shell shock. To his admirer W.H. Auden, Tolkien confided that he was a writer "whose instinct is to cloak such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under mythical and legendary dress." John Garth, in his 2003 book "Tolkien and the Great War," imagines the convalescent Tolkien in 1917, sitting up in bed with pen and paper, poised at the creation of a work that will either be called "Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin" or "A Subaltern on the Somme." He did not, of course, write a trench memoir: The path he took went inward, and down, and it would require the faithful excavations of another Tolkien generation to see exactly how far he went.
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