“Afraid of dragons”

[ElanorGamgee]

I’m currently taking a Tolkien literature class of sorts: “Literature, Religion, and Culture.” We’ve had some pretty interesting discussions on the unique nature of Tolkien’s world and have tackled the unpopular status his works have in the eyes of many contemporary literary critics. It’s interesting to compare who Tolkien’s literary contemporaries were: Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, James Joyce, pioneers of the stream-of-conscious style. Pablo Picasso was at the forefront of the artistic movement. Freud was radically changing the way we think about ourselves. The world of art was forever changed, fragmented and unstructured, and the old traditions were made unpopular.

Tolkien published after World War I, a war that soldiers entered with strong ideals of honor and bravery and left (those who made it out) jaded and disenchanted after stalemates and mass slaughter and onslaughts of nerve gas. Tolkien, too, served in WWI, lost all of his friends in battle, and came down with a serious case of trench fever (which probably saved his life, as it got him away from the frontline)…but he did not lose those ideals. They shine forth boldly in his writing, but his values had been abandoned by his literary contemporaries. His ideals were deemed obsolete, and Tolkien’s works were largely ignored or patronized by the new literary establishment. In this way, I would say that Tolkien, like many other fantasy writers, is very much “subversive.” He and other fantasy writers dare to take ideals of the past, often in medieval or otherwise archaic settings, and present them as an acceptable way of thinking and living. Science fiction is also interesting in this regard: these writers will often carry out the mindset of our times to its logical conclusion, letting apathy toward morality and attacks on the dignity of man become a “Brave New World” or freedom-stifling trends shape the world of 1984. Fantasy looks to the past for renown, and sci-fi mourns its death.