Fantasy

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by davem

Yes - & that would stand if Tolkien had written LotR pre-WWI, or if he hadn't lived through the horror of the Somme. But he wrote it during WWII, & he knew the reality of battle, so he's not writing from ignorance, but actually denying the truth in order to present a falsehood more easily & effectively.

Well, first of all, if I remember the Letters correctly--they aren't at hand--it was the experience of the Somme which inspired and intensified Tolkien's intimate preoccupation with the heroic epic and started him off on his imaginary life with the Legendarium, so whether he wrote LotR in the twenties or the forties, it's imaginative roots lay with his WWI experiences. And that would include Edwardian culture, which, some here have suggested, highly colours his Shire. A writer's imaginative inspiration does not march lock step with historical chronology but answers to a different drummer and there's a great deal more in LotR which fits with gentrified Edwardian (and even Victorian) culture than the battle scenes. His sensibility was not modern, although his intellect was superb. We might as well ask why Victorians glorified war. After all, the crucial point about Tolkien's work is change or metamorphosis, from one age to another, so why shouldn't his sensibility lie with the age that passed, the Edwardian one, rather than with the sensibility that came of age as a result of the War to end all Wars?

We really do not know how Tolkien coped psychologically with his war time experience and the loss of his close friends. We do know that something caused a writer's block during his writing of LotR during WWII. But we do not know if his writing was a deliberate, conscious falsehood or if rather it represents his imaginative preoccupation with battle epics such as Maldon and Beowulf. He is not writing 19C novels of realism (or empiricism as it sometimes is referred to). He is weaving something else entirely. We can discuss the quality of his depictions but in good faith we can't ascribe to him lies and falsehood.

EDIT: Any more than, as Gwathagor mentions below, all artists are so described. I suppose this was why Plato gave poets a bad rep.