Yes, Tolkien is Wonderful, but...

[Feanor of the Peredhil]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

It's interesting that magic realism became so identified with literature of South and Central America. I've seen one humorous definition that suggests it belongs to Spanish-speaking cultures. We can wonder what the influence of Don Quioxte might be.

I'd argue that Spanish-speaking cultures are just inherently cooler when it comes to art. I mean... Salvador Dali, anybody?

More seriously, I feel an internal nudge to point out that before it blossomed in [mostly Latin American] literature, magic[al] realism was a visual arts idea for some post-Expressionism [potentially German but I don't have my old notebook with me] work. The images in question are painted with a degree of such hyper-realism that they become surreal in how perfect they are. There's no blatant magicness about them, and no fantasy, only the mundane transformed through sheer being into the extraordinary. Here's an example of contemporary hyper-realist painting: some of it doesn't count as it has fantastical elements, but others, particularly his Vespid Mortem series, portray something exceptionally simple in an astonishing manner.

Give that visual arts connection, and my inability to keep one form of art packaged safely away from another, I'm curious if that idea shifts Tolkien's work closer into the category of magic[al] realism: he creates such a hyper-realistic world that fans often know more about it than they know about their own...