Understanding The Lord of the Rings

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When first published, The Lord of the Rings stood far from the mainstream: no one had seen anything like it for decades. Tolkien's almost stridently antimodern tale needed valiant defenders, vocal admirers who understood its sources and relished its monumental scale. While such champions of modernism as Edmund Wilson mocked Tolkien's archaic structure and language, W. H. Auden ...(展開全部) When first published, The Lord of the Rings stood far from the mainstream: no one had seen anything like it for decades. Tolkien's almost stridently antimodern tale needed valiant defenders, vocal admirers who understood its sources and relished its monumental scale. While such champions of modernism as Edmund Wilson mocked Tolkien's archaic structure and language, W. H. Auden -- a great modernist poet in his own right -- rose to his defense with a spirited essay on the true nature of the Hero Quest. Edmund Fuller's essay collected here discusses the nature of the fairy tale, returning to the roots of the term to remove the treacle of Disney and restore the value of realistic enchantment. Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis takes up the question of why, if you have a serious comment to make about real life, you would drape it in a never-never land of your own. He shrewdly argues that it is because real life does have mythic and heroic qualities -- in abundance.

Understanding The Lord of the Rings

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