The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien
R.R. Tolkien surely ranks among the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. But on the surface, his writing seems very different from the experimental style that defined so much of that period’s literature. There is something deeply conservative about the orderly, sometimes near-biblical prose of The Lord of the Rings which is lacking in the more experimental work of authors such as William Faulkner or T.S. Eliot.
A new three-volume collection of Tolkien’s poetry, edited by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, proves nonetheless that there was something experimental about his writing—and perhaps even postmodern. Even if Tolkien did not understand his literary enterprise as distinctively modernist, many of the techniques he deployed—the creation of a secondary world, for instance, or his invented languages, and above all the metatextual integration of poetry and prose—nonetheless bear a resemblance to the experiments in letters conducted by his more avant-garde peers. Furthermore, his choice of subjects reveals similarities with the other great writers of his time, concerning everything from the cataclysm of war to the pain of spiritual alienation.
Postmodernism is more often associated with black-turtlenecked intellectuals smoking cigarettes in Parisian cafés than tweedy Oxford dons puffing on pipes. But Gerald Russello, the late editor of The University Bookman, drew a connection between conservatism and postmodernism, especially in the thought of Russell Kirk, this publication’s founder and another of the twentieth century’s great Christian writers. He argued that Kirk’s emphasis on imagination and sentiment constituted a rejection of modern rationalism. In his book The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, Russello wrote:
“Sentiment assumes a larger importance in Kirk’s work because of his assertion that the coming (post)modern age will be an Age of Sentiments, superseding the old, modern, liberal Age of Discussion. The Age of Sentiments will be more concerned with the power of image on the heart, rather than that of logical discourse on the mind. Kirk thought that rhetoric—the creation of image through language—was a critical art for conservatism to perfect. And according to Kirk, rhetoric is only effective at creating those images if it pays careful heed to the sentiments of both the speaker and the audience.”
This is exactly the kind of conservative postmodernism Tolkien mastered. His works, from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to The Silmarillion and his more unfinished tales, are almost perfectly designed to capture the hearts of his readers. Bilbo infiltrating the dragon Smaug’s lair, or Samwise and Frodo trudging through Mordor on their quest to destroy the Ring, or the elf Glofindel single-handedly challenging a balrog of Morgoth are all images created through language that animate the sentiments and enliven the moral imagination. In fact, I would argue that no twentieth century author was better at “the creation of image through language” than the Professor.
Read more at The Russell Kirk Center.
