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Bêthberry · 10-13-2022, 09:28 AM

I am very late to reply here and for that I apologise. Events beyond the barrow and outside Middle-earth have limited my ability to write a thoughtful response.

It is very difficult to define exactly what modern is or means: do we use historical dates or do we use literature? There have been those who want to call anything after 1850 modern, which results in a mammoth hodge podge of very contradictory styles of writing dumped into one soup. Then there have been those who define modernism by the styles and literature of the high priests of literature in early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, to take but two. Then there are those of a biographical bent who want to consider the life events Tolkien lived through. Each approach skews things towards its own point of view.

Initially it was the talking heads of high modernism who dissed Tolkien for not writing like a modernist. Men like Edmund Wilson who called LotR something like juvenile trash (if I am recalling correctly) that lacked narrative form. (This is not to overlook the enthusiastic responses of writers like WH Auden, Iris Murdoch, Tolkien's fellow Inklings, Ursula Le Guin. It seems that writers recognised Tolkien's imaginative depth if academics could not.) It was in part a response to this hostility that those who valued Tolkien sought out the very strong elements of medieval literature in his work, to demonstrate that Tolkien had an excellent command of language and of literary form. Pointing out his medieval affinities was a way of demonstrating that Tolkien had literary and academic expertise. The literary scholars Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger did much to redeem critical evaluation of Tolkien.

Ironically this valuable work probably further isolated Tolkien from comparison with the modernist movement in English lit, at least for some time. But the wheels of evaluation do move, even if somewhat slowly. Garth's book on Tolkien in WWI did much to establish what were Tolkien's literary aims by examining the event that Tolkien said put him on the road to developing his own aims in writing and the early aims of Tolkien's own coterie.

But a writer's claim about his intentions and motivations should never be taken as the unconditional authority and so in fact scholars and readers have begun to examine Tolkien's relation to the literature of his time. Prominent have been Dimitra Fimi's examination of Tolkien's relationship to radical linguistic experimentation of the time ( https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloft...h/vol5/iss1/2/), to argue that Tolkien navigates his own position between two different ways of thought, between language as communication and language as art. Also the two volume studies from Walking Tree Press, Tolkien and Modernity (http://www.walking-tree.org/cormareB...o.php?number=9) Then there's also Theresa Nicolay's Tolkien and the Modernists and Ralph C. Wood's, Tolkien among the Moderns , for those who might be interested. (I am of course omitting others.)

Clearly Tolkien was not interested in modernist irony or modernist theories of consciousness. But high modernism was not ironclad and by the 1930s writers like Woolf and Eliot were in fact examining something Tolkien was, how to write an English literature in the decline of empire, how to establish a core vision of what the communal experience is. Eliot himself wrote The Idea of a Christian Societywhich argued against materialism and the destruction of the natural world and Woolf's final novel, Between the Acts uses the popular trope of a public, rural pageant. So did E.M Forster (another modernist, who Tolkien had nominated for a Nobel prize in literature) and J. C. Powys (A Glastonbury Romance). Tolkien's fellow Inkling, Charles Williams, also wrote two books about re-enchanting English landscape and rural life. There was in fact in the 1930s a common anthropological effort in English writers to reclaim England's cultural authenticity by considering its past roots in the rural community. The public pageant was a popular form of entertainment which did just that, presenting an historical English past before that past was ruined by empire and materialism. And not only writers--Vaughan Williams' music fits with this effort to discover a new organic culture.

We have learnt that Tolkien's interest in creating a mythology for England was inspired by his love for the Finnish Kalevala--and that no doubt is true--but his writing during the 1930s can in fact also be understood within a common anthropological concern for what might be called, for want of a better term, "Englishness".

10-13-2022, 09:28 AM	#9
Bêthberry Cryptic Aura Join Date: May 2002 Posts: 6,169	I am very late to reply here and for that I apologise. Events beyond the barrow and outside Middle-earth have limited my ability to write a thoughtful response. It is very difficult to define exactly what modern is or means: do we use historical dates or do we use literature? There have been those who want to call anything after 1850 modern, which results in a mammoth hodge podge of very contradictory styles of writing dumped into one soup. Then there have been those who define modernism by the styles and literature of the high priests of literature in early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, to take but two. Then there are those of a biographical bent who want to consider the life events Tolkien lived through. Each approach skews things towards its own point of view. Initially it was the talking heads of high modernism who dissed Tolkien for not writing like a modernist. Men like Edmund Wilson who called LotR something like juvenile trash (if I am recalling correctly) that lacked narrative form. (This is not to overlook the enthusiastic responses of writers like WH Auden, Iris Murdoch, Tolkien's fellow Inklings, Ursula Le Guin. It seems that writers recognised Tolkien's imaginative depth if academics could not.) It was in part a response to this hostility that those who valued Tolkien sought out the very strong elements of medieval literature in his work, to demonstrate that Tolkien had an excellent command of language and of literary form. Pointing out his medieval affinities was a way of demonstrating that Tolkien had literary and academic expertise. The literary scholars Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger did much to redeem critical evaluation of Tolkien. Ironically this valuable work probably further isolated Tolkien from comparison with the modernist movement in English lit, at least for some time. But the wheels of evaluation do move, even if somewhat slowly. Garth's book on Tolkien in WWI did much to establish what were Tolkien's literary aims by examining the event that Tolkien said put him on the road to developing his own aims in writing and the early aims of Tolkien's own coterie. But a writer's claim about his intentions and motivations should never be taken as the unconditional authority and so in fact scholars and readers have begun to examine Tolkien's relation to the literature of his time. Prominent have been Dimitra Fimi's examination of Tolkien's relationship to radical linguistic experimentation of the time ( https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloft...h/vol5/iss1/2/), to argue that Tolkien navigates his own position between two different ways of thought, between language as communication and language as art. Also the two volume studies from Walking Tree Press, Tolkien and Modernity (http://www.walking-tree.org/cormareB...o.php?number=9) Then there's also Theresa Nicolay's Tolkien and the Modernists and Ralph C. Wood's, Tolkien among the Moderns , for those who might be interested. (I am of course omitting others.) Clearly Tolkien was not interested in modernist irony or modernist theories of consciousness. But high modernism was not ironclad and by the 1930s writers like Woolf and Eliot were in fact examining something Tolkien was, how to write an English literature in the decline of empire, how to establish a core vision of what the communal experience is. Eliot himself wrote The Idea of a Christian Societywhich argued against materialism and the destruction of the natural world and Woolf's final novel, Between the Acts uses the popular trope of a public, rural pageant. So did E.M Forster (another modernist, who Tolkien had nominated for a Nobel prize in literature) and J. C. Powys (A Glastonbury Romance). Tolkien's fellow Inkling, Charles Williams, also wrote two books about re-enchanting English landscape and rural life. There was in fact in the 1930s a common anthropological effort in English writers to reclaim England's cultural authenticity by considering its past roots in the rural community. The public pageant was a popular form of entertainment which did just that, presenting an historical English past before that past was ruined by empire and materialism. And not only writers--Vaughan Williams' music fits with this effort to discover a new organic culture. We have learnt that Tolkien's interest in creating a mythology for England was inspired by his love for the Finnish Kalevala--and that no doubt is true--but his writing during the 1930s can in fact also be understood within a common anthropological concern for what might be called, for want of a better term, "Englishness". __________________ I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away.