...his sympathies are uncongenial to political democracy, or to Marxism.
See, I don't know why you think that, regarding democracy. I'd agree that his consistent depiction of centralized authority as malign implies he would've been against Marxism, but if you're assuming that he was unsympathetic to democracy just because he wrote about monarchies, I think that's pretty weak.
I think that the real division here is not anti-modernism versus high modernism, it's those who are primarily interested in what individuals go through versus those who are primarily interested in how things should be structured and organized. I think you are forcing a template of opinion about structure and organization onto Tolkien that really does not fit.
Tolkien felt deeply sympathetic towards, hmm, pre-feudal Northern European cultures. [...] I imagine Tolkien's sympathy was with their entire kind of life
Tolkien was fascinated by myth and the question of whether it was theologically good or bad. He wanted England to have a myth cycle of its own, and he wanted to demonstrate that such a myth cycle could accord with Catholic theology. He was steeped in Northern European language and myth from his linguistic studies, so those were the raw materials he had to work with. Creating a mythos of the past is exactly what he was setting out to do, not because he thought we were better off then, but because theological questions about myth and about representation of the past were exactly what he was interested in.
I see the deep sympathy for the way of life of the Shire, and for Rivendell and Lothlorien, but frankly, I don't see it for Rohan or Gondor. I think he portrayed them (Rohan and Gondor) as having beauty and glory, but not in the homesick nostalgia way that he portrayed the Shire and the elven places.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2002-12-19 02:24 pm (UTC)See, I don't know why you think that, regarding democracy. I'd agree that his consistent depiction of centralized authority as malign implies he would've been against Marxism, but if you're assuming that he was unsympathetic to democracy just because he wrote about monarchies, I think that's pretty weak.
I think that the real division here is not anti-modernism versus high modernism, it's those who are primarily interested in what individuals go through versus those who are primarily interested in how things should be structured and organized. I think you are forcing a template of opinion about structure and organization onto Tolkien that really does not fit.
Tolkien felt deeply sympathetic towards, hmm, pre-feudal Northern European cultures. [...] I imagine Tolkien's sympathy was with their entire kind of life
Tolkien was fascinated by myth and the question of whether it was theologically good or bad. He wanted England to have a myth cycle of its own, and he wanted to demonstrate that such a myth cycle could accord with Catholic theology. He was steeped in Northern European language and myth from his linguistic studies, so those were the raw materials he had to work with. Creating a mythos of the past is exactly what he was setting out to do, not because he thought we were better off then, but because theological questions about myth and about representation of the past were exactly what he was interested in.
I see the deep sympathy for the way of life of the Shire, and for Rivendell and Lothlorien, but frankly, I don't see it for Rohan or Gondor. I think he portrayed them (Rohan and Gondor) as having beauty and glory, but not in the homesick nostalgia way that he portrayed the Shire and the elven places.