The Great Tolkien

 From The Imaginative Conservative:

My encounter with this writer of genuine significance was unexpected. I was in the United States for the first time—my new homeland—pursuing doctoral studies in California, and I was rather perplexed: the world, the people, the customs—everything was still new and unfamiliar. I was irritated by the attitude of my fellow graduate students, whose ideological and political views and behaviors seemed wrong to me. Yet one of their favorite authors, someone they all seemed to warmly admire and know quite well, was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. I read his trilogy, enjoyed it, and found in it a strong connection to my own reading traditions and personal tastes.

I wanted to learn more about him and became even more puzzled: here was a Catholic professor in Protestant England, originally from South Africa, and a well-recognized expert in “exotic” fields—Old English language and pre-medieval literature, as well as pre-Christian Scandinavian and Irish cultures, among others. It took several years before I understood him as part of a literary movement with a clear structure, one that included highly esteemed intellectuals such as Clive Staples Lewis (a prominent literary critic and historian, prose and poetry writer, and Christian apologist), Dorothy Sayers (creator of captivating detective novels, but also a highly competent translator of Dante and author of a radio play about the life of Jesus), Charles Williams (a complex novelist with an expressionist style and a literary critic with religious undertones), and others still.

But the most difficult question remained: why were these left-leaning young people so passionate about a “dusty,” deeply traditional author like Tolkien, with his dragons, knights, and wizards? After some time, I began to understand what his admirers saw in Tolkien, and from that moment on, I began to understand the author himself much better. These young radicals and progressives, as they were, still had a thirst for spirituality and imagination. They were searching for alternative roots—different from the utilitarian and contractual world in which they had grown up. They sensed these roots, even vaguely or confusedly, in Tolkien’s writings. It was, in fact, a compensation for the romanticism they lacked.

Very well—but in that case, Tolkien was deeper and more complex than I had initially thought. Beneath the colorful surface, there were layers that only gradually reveal themselves to a thoughtful reader. First, there is the mythological layer: a reinvention of mythology, we might say, because this scholarly author didn’t merely reuse the legends of the distant North—he rewrote them in a spectacular and often extremely intricate way. Then comes the allegorical level, which carried significant political implications. Tolkien’s thinking descends from the “distributist” movement that flourished in England between 1910 and 1930, theorized especially by Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. This brief political movement opposed both socialism (meaning state and central control over the economy and politics) and large-scale capitalism (which implied vast differences in class, wealth, power, and influence). (Read more.)

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