J.R.R. Tolkien and the Evangelization of the Imagination

 Many thanks to Dominic N for alerting me to this excellent article, "Tolkien: Fifty Years On"

There's many points of interest in it. I had to smile at the sentence: "There is even, improbably, an ongoing attempt to make the poor man a saint, which one can only hope goes nowhere." That's putting it a little strongly, but calls for Tolkien's canonization do seem a little batty.

More seriously, there is this passage: "The often ferocious response of many critics perhaps stemmed from the apparent anachronism of the book, combined with its massive popularity. It was published in 1954, at a time when literary modernism was dominant and pervading the academy. Modernist writers were obsessed with interiority, broke with prior literary convention, and traded in irony, ambiguity and convoluted psychology. Literary critics of the time were taking up the “New Criticism”, which dispensed not only with the previous generation’s fascination with historical context in favour of close reading, but also with the traditionalist concerns for beauty and moral improvement, which were regarded as subjective and emotionally driven. Spare, complex prose, focused on the darker side of society, was in vogue. Into this context dropped 1,200 pages of dwarves, elves and hobbits in a grand battle of good and evil. They were greeted with the sort of enthusiasm one can imagine."

G.K. Chesterton received (and receives) the same kind of patronising response, as does Tolkien's contemporary C.S. Lewis. (I often ponder how surprised a patron or barman of the Eagle and Child might be if they realized that the two unremarkable-looking gentlemen sinking beers in the corner would eventually sell hundreds of millions of books between them.) They're all right in their way, but they're so naive and child-like, there's nothing complicated or ambiguous about them.

Of course, the accusation that Tolkien was a crude proponent of black and white morality is untrue. There are morally ambiguous characters in Lord of the Rings: Boromir, for instance. The difference with fashionable highbrow literature is that good and evil themselves are relatively straightforward concepts in the book-- as indeed, they are in real life.

It seems to be a constant in the history of literature that, every once in a while, a writer comes along who is sublimely indifferent to the literary developments of his (or her) time, is very successful, and is despised for it. A.E. Housman is a good example when it comes to poetry: Housman didn't so much react against the poetic modernism of his time as completely ignore it.

Interestingly, Tolkien is said to have enjoyed the writings of Isaac Asimov, a science fiction writer whose views could hardly have been further from his own. Asimov was an atheist, a humanist, a progressive, and an apostle of technological progress (even if he sometimes expressed disquiet about aspects of it). But he had as little time for literary experimentation as Tolkien. (Conversely, some of the most enthusiastic champions and practitioners of artistic experimentation, like Ezra Pound or D.H. Lawrence, were self-professed conservatives.)