A Defense of 'Lord of the Rings' against Modernist criticism

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Feanor of the Peredhil

I find it fascinating that different areas of literature (and their relevant enthusiasts) constantly feel the need to defend and express their own validity. However it's possible that I'm spoiled: all of my essays over the past two years have been craft-oriented.

Instead of reading it as Tolkien-validation, I took this surprisingly readable piece more as a how-to guide of identifying the ingredients JRR used to bake his story. A kilo of Lear, a liter and a half of Old English, and a splash and a pinch of anachronisms for added taste...

The use of uncommonly employed words draws subconscious - if not directly conscious - parallels between works. I doubt this is to say, "Look, LotR is just like Lear! Art!" but more to say, "Remember the themes in Lear of power, insanity, betrayal, redemption? You just keep that in the back of your mind, dear reader." One might say the parallels being drawn are being stretched a bit past plausibility, but think on it this way: if you see an author finish a thought with, "So it goes..." and you don't think of Vonnegut, it means you never read Vonnegut. To me, the use of intertextual lit references isn't swiping, and it neither confirms nor denies a text's cultural significance. It's laying a librarian-friendly scavenger hunt for your bibliophile audience, and it's playing psych games.

I think you are spot on about each 'school' having its own row to plough, but I think you are indeed most spoiled if you are so immune to the enduring and still pervasive influence of T.S. Eliot to claim that intertextual references neither confirm nor deny a text's significance. (Then again, maybe his influence has faded faster in his native land.)

It was Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that firmly established the concept in academe that a poet's greatness does not lie with his deviation or retreat or departure from tradition but with his fidelity to past literature, expressed by Eliot as "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer". The finest and best poets were those whose work re-informed the entire classical structure of European literature. For Eliot, tradition was the classical tradition. There was no female tradition, no post-colonial tradition, no northern tradition, no local folklore tradition, just this intimate dialogue with past greats. Talent was not a genius one was born with, but something developed through intimate acquaintance and study of past poetry.

So when Tolkien came along and justified and valorised Northern Literature and mythologies, he was doing something outside the prevailing formalisation of the English canon. Thus, for over fifty years defenders of Tolkien have laboured in the shadow of Eliot and attempted to demonstrate how Tolkien's intertexual references demonstrate his place in Eliot's theory and his right to be regarded as part of the accepted literary canon. (Note here, I'm not accepting Eliot's theory, just explaining that generations of English students before you could not blithely claim that intertexual references don't establish significance.)

I'm probably overgeneralising here, but I think this kind of defense has been much more common than any using any other literary theory. I cannot recall, for instance, seeing Bloom's theory of "the anxiety of influence" being applied to demonstrate Tolkien's rebellion against his predecessors. Probably some of the feminists have had a go at Tolkien, but few others.

It might be fun to examine how each literary theory picks up (or doesn't) aspects of Tolkien: Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian for psychology, Kristeva, Derrida, post-colonial theory.

Ultimately I think I would hear Tolkien's own voice: "But what of the banana peel?"