Quote:
Originally Posted by Andsigil
Well, that certainly sounds familiar, even in (ostensibly) what's supposed to be a democratic republic.
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Exactly; "the Democratic People's Republic of Mordor" comes to mind, although I doubt Sauron bothered with such pretence. I suppose Professor Tolkien might be arguing that strong political ideologies were essentially indistinguishable from false religions, especially with the implication of Sauron being equivalent to a "Marshal This-or-That" of one of the totalitarian "political religions" of the Twentieth Century.
In another thread I mentioned Brian Rosebury's statement in
Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon that "The modernity of Tolkien’s work, from the point of view of its content, lies not in coded reference to specific contemporary events or phenomena, but in the absorption into the invented world – no doubt a partly unconscious absorption – of experiences and attitudes which Tolkien would scarcely have acquired had he not been a man of the twentieth century."
Dr. Rosebury goes on to say "Some are obvious enough.
The Lord of the Rings describes a continental war, in which the survival of whole peoples and cultures is at stake. The undertow of apocalyptic dread is familiar to anyone who has lived in the nuclear age, but its primary biographical source must greatly pre-date Hiroshima: almost certainly it lies around 1914–15 when Tolkien, in common with millions of young men, discovered that he would have to go to war.The successive international crises of the Thirties and Forties can only have reinforced this impression of secular imperilment. Naturally Tolkien would have been more aware than most people of pre-modern analogies: the fall of the Roman Empire, the bare survival of Christian civilisation in the age which produced
Beowulf, the lively expectation of world’s end that obsessed some medieval and Reformation believers. But that historical awareness is itself a modern, even a modernist, attribute."
I find this an interesting argument, because it depends on how we understand "modern". There were certainly continental wars before the First and Second World Wars, such as the Napoleonic Wars and, perhaps, the Thirty Years' War, both of which are "modern" according to some definitions. I believe such wars were also, to some, seen as "apocalyptic" in their time. Thus I suppose the question arises of whether we define "modern" in terms of "modernity" or "the modern period", of the early 16th century until the present day, or as specifically "modernist", that is, of the first half of the 20th century in particular.
One thing I note, which has surely been observed elsewhere, is that Professor Tolkien's love of a good pipe (and many of his characters' subsequent enjoyment of it as well) is a fairly "modern" thing and rather out of place in the medieval world. I wonder if Aragorn still enjoyed a pipe after he had become King? It's unsurprising that the more "modern" Hobbits smoked, but curious to observe that High Men, Dwarves and Wizards did too. There is another bit of "modern" culture working its way backwards into the "medieval" - or is it drawing the medieval forward, into the modern?
(Incidentally, I've been thinking about why Legolas found smoking strange. Even though the Elves made some pipes for Bilbo, is it possible that for Professor Tolkien a pipe meant relaxation and an aid to thinking, which was something Men, Wizards incarnate as Men, Dwarves and Hobbits might need, but Elves did not?)