Twentieth Century Tolkien - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

William Cloud Hicklin · 10-03-2022, 05:18 AM

Setting aside the time-period and tech tree of the fictional world, the broader point -one made by Garth and especially by Shippey in Author of the Century, is that Tolkien was part of a generation of "traumatized authors" from WW1- but unlike his contemporaries (including the young Lewis) he translated his trauma not into grimly fatalistic modernism, but rather to envisioning a world where the Machine and its industrialized slaughter wasn't there- or, at least, was the Enemy of all that was good (especially blatant in the early Fall of Gondolin with its tank-like dragons).

Nonetheless, the very 20th century trauma is there, above all probably in the permanently scarred Frodo. PTSD is not a thing in mediaeval literature!

10-03-2022, 05:18 AM	#8
William Cloud Hicklin Loremaster of Annúminas Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 2,330	Setting aside the time-period and tech tree of the fictional world, the broader point -one made by Garth and especially by Shippey in Author of the Century, is that Tolkien was part of a generation of "traumatized authors" from WW1- but unlike his contemporaries (including the young Lewis) he translated his trauma not into grimly fatalistic modernism, but rather to envisioning a world where the Machine and its industrialized slaughter wasn't there- or, at least, was the Enemy of all that was good (especially blatant in the early Fall of Gondolin with its tank-like dragons). Nonetheless, the very 20th century trauma is there, above all probably in the permanently scarred Frodo. PTSD is not a thing in mediaeval literature! __________________ The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it.