Kalessin, thank you for hosting this thread with admirable courtesy.
I restate your disagreement in the following question: "Is mass appeal of Tolkien necessarily a reflection of a peculiarly modern 'disconnection' or alienation?" I grant that there may be Tolkien aficianados for whom disconnection from the past, or alienation, is not the driving force of their love of Middle Earth; yet I would wager that it plays a role in the majority. There are different aspects to the desire to escape alienation, such as environmentalist
sensitivity, yearning for community, urge to escape industrial dehumanization (The Machine), a need to be freed from the bland
(brand) homogenization of popular culture, a longing for a sense of purpose and a meant-to-be-ness in life, a craving for Faerie, or a hunger for feeling alive instead of half alive, for light instead of shadows and darkness; I do not doubt that there are other modes (note the root word for modernism there).
All of these modes (and more I'm sure), can be found in LotR. Thus LotR is a modern work of literature. It could not have been written in any century but the 20th, because as much as it evoked all these modes of escape from humdrum modern life, those very modes are themselves accessible to a particularly modern mind. Consider how Tolkien evokes the Shire through dialogue and detailed description of character,
setting, and societal attributes; or how the Ring as a nexus of evil seizes upon the imagination of a particularly modern mind with a whole variety of applications - the drive for power; addiction; the complexity of human (read also elvish and dwarvish) motivation regarding desire for the Ring. I could go on and on but I think my point is established.
Related question: "Does the mass appeal for Tolkien demonstrate a dovetailing between a work redolent of timeless values and an audience that, having lost faith in progress, longs to be 'grounded' in a
collectively-mourned and idealistic sensibility?"
I'll need to be persuaded that there is a lack of dovetailing with collectively mourned sensibility. I'm not convinced that nostalgia is the correct word in speaking of the sense of a lost reality. There is a nostalgic piece in Tolkien, granted. And I take exception to a broad-brush naming of all nostalgia as psychological sickness - after all, is not the lost beauty of the old English and old American countrysides something worth mourning? Of course one must go beyond mourning or fall prey to psychological sicknes. But there is more that is yearned for in Tolkien than a past reality, it is Faerie, a reality that is more
real than the reality we live in. More alive. More full of light and color. This is best evoked by Tolkien in Smith of Wootton Major, my favorite of all of Tolkien's works.
I am not convinced that timeless values and an idealistic sensibility is the sum of that which is mourned. What was lost was myth making. Myth may have been lost, rejected by modernist scientific rationalism (which is not bad in itself, just poverty stricken wihtout myth making), but it is something we cannot do without. The modernist attempt to do so was a historical aberration and the postmodernist embrace of myth is a return to this natural human means of subcreation. The hobbits did reassert their way of life in the Shire after they defeated Saruman, and this way of life was ensured by a benevolent monarchy. Could Tolkien have been prophetic, and we hobbits may yet throw off the oppressive ugliness of modernism and kick Sharky out?
Estel Descending (I like the name): I saw Final Fantasy on the big screen but have never played the game. I enjoyed the story and do recognize that it was not disneyfied nor demythologized. Of course it's no LotR, but that's asking for too much. Another example of demythologizing is "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister", a retelling of the Cinderella story without the magic and the myth. It was enjoyable, but it was a different story.
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