Tolkien, 50 years on

 "Something very much of that nature has taken place when it comes to Tolkien. His exclusion of distantiating irony and moral confusion from his works was not a naive choice, but a bold and experimental one, carried through with steely discipline. Tolkien’s world is the product of a lifetime of imaginative work. He writes of it, “I do not remember a time when I was not building it.” It is consciously escapist; indeed, it was this escapist fantasy that sustained Tolkien through life in the trenches of the Somme. Where many modernists greeted the Great War as a moment of disenchantment and disillusionment, a young Tolkien, who fought in it, took it as a spur to a mission of re-enchantment for a world desperately in need of myth.

His project, which he sketches out in a letter in 1951, was quite simply to create a mythos for a culture that he felt lacked one:

Tolkien’s contribution is doubly unique. On the one hand, he conceived the idea of giving to the English-speaking world a mythic cycle of its own, as Homer was to the Greeks, yet one that was fully the invention of modern literature. His second move, no less radical, was to apply to this world an exacting, almost Victorian moral and aesthetic discipline. Whilst historical folklore is full of absurd, grotesque and obscene scenes, Tolkien’s work is suffused with ethereal beauty, tragic heroism and a spirit of nobility."

more in the essay by

    Sebastian Milbank
 

Tolkien, 50 years on | Sebastian Milbank | The Critic Magazine