The Nazis & a Mytholgy for England

[Aiwendil]

Good idea, putting this in a thread.

As I was going to say in an aborted PM response, I certainly agree that after LotR there was a change away from a mythological perspective toward a mixed theological and scientific one. Where I think that I disagree with you is in these points: 1. I don't think that the change in attitude was simply a result of his being scared away from mythology by the war; 2. I don't think that the change was complete; 3. I don't think that the change was detrimental to the quality of his work.

Certainly he saw in World War II the horrors that were associated with the misuse of the "Northern spirit". But surely he had seen the misuse of that spirit before. Wagner misused it long before. And Tolkien had faced German nationalism (albeit of a different sort) in a far more personal way in World War I. So World War II, I think, intensified certain sentiments rather than creating them.

I also would not analyze the change in terms of pre-LotR optimism and post-LotR pessimism. Loss and renunciation were key themes, even perhaps the main themes, of the Legendarium right from the beginning. Remember when the Book of Lost Tales was begun. If the post-LotR writings can be seen as responding to or dealing with the second World War, certainly the Book of Lost Tales deals in a much more personal and intense way with the first. As I stressed earlier, the planned ending for the Book of Lost Tales is much more tragic than the end of the Silmarillion.

But he can't have it both ways

You see, I think he can and does. It is, I think, this combination that makes the 1950s Silmarillion uniquely great. For he can never alter the fact that this is a mythology (that's why the Myths Transformed round Earth cosmology was so misguided). And there are basic elements of the structure of the Silmarillion that he was quite unwilling to alter. But he now infused it more thoroughly with his own Christian values, and imposed upon it a stricter metaphysics and theology. The result was a mythology unlike any other - one more consistent, more realistic, more coherent, in which the various individual stories contribute to one great story.

So the Legendarium becomes a sub creation 'only', with no intended relation to the primary world. In a way this liberates him - he no longer has to tie it in precisely to the ancient sources - but it becomes 'art for art's sake' - it can have no relationship to the primary world - hence, I feel, the difference between the first & second forewords to LotR, & the strident denials of 'allegory' in the second. He began by desperately wanting to be England's Lonrot, to give his country back its lost mythology, & ends by simply wanting to 'write a really long tale'.

There is a big distinction to be drawn between allegory and mythology. A "mythology for England" is not allegory. I don't see any reason to think that Tolkien's attitude toward allegory ever changed significantly; if anything, his dislike for it lessened in later years (cf. Smith). I think that the denials of allegory in the second foreword can be traced almost entirely to the literary reception of LotR, and its frequent misconstrual. Tolkien's writing was always, pre- and post-LotR, "heroic" rather than "ironic".