Hello all,
I wanted to point out something I noticed today while it was fresh in my mind, before I forget. I didn't think it was worth starting a whole new topic for, so I thought I would post it here. I know this thread is notionally about "fantasy" texts but personally I think that if you want to find literature with a similar "feel" to Professor Tolkien's work it
can be found, but not in the modern fantasy genre.
As I believe I have mentioned before, I'm a scholar of utopian literature (I'm hopefully submitting a PhD on the topic in about ten days, in fact). As a result I've read a number of significant works by H.G. Wells, and today I was finishing off
The Sleeper Awakes, which I began some time ago and was distracted from. This item from the climax of the novel came to my attention.
In the finale the protagonist Graham, the titular Sleeper, now owner of all the world's wealth, is using an aeroplane to hold off airborne attackers who have come to reinstate plutocratic-oligarchial rule after Graham has vowed to bring the working classes out of drudgery. At one point during the fighting, one of the "flying stages" use for launching the aeroplanes is destroyed to stop the enemies using it and it is described as follows:
The eastward stage, the one on Shooter's Hill, appeared to lift; a flash changing to a tall grey shape, a cowled figure of smoke and dust, jerked into the air. For a moment this cowled figure stood motionless, dropping huge masses of metal from its shoulders, and then it began to uncoil a dense head of smoke. The people had blown it up, aeroplane and all!" (Wells, 1910)
As you can probably imagine, this reminded me very much of a comparable passage from
The Lord of the Rings:
"'The realm of Sauron is ended!' said Gandalf. 'The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his Quest.' And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell." (Tolkien, 1955)
I don't know how much Wells Professor Tolkien read, beyond the fact that he presumably read
The Time Machine given his occasional references in lectures and correspondence to Eloi and Morlocks, but I thought this similarity was extremely interesting.
In both cases the image represents a notionally threatening, authoritative figure. The flying stages of
The Sleeper Awakes are the heart of air power, the means by which the elite of the year 2100 maintain much of their military and economic control of the world. Sauron is, of course, Sauron. Yet both are also fundamentally very impotent things, brought down by the actions of the humble.
Despite the fact that Wells and Tolkien, I believe, had rather different philosophies - Wells supported a form of socialism and was opposed to a lot of organised religion, for instance - I often find that they often deal in similar ideas and similar imagery.