2,268 words

“Tolkien knows more about Chaucer than any living man.” — John Masefield, Poet Laureate (1930-67)

John M. Bowers’ book Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer (Oxford 2019) finally puts paid to the recently concocted mythology propagated in spurious articles like The Telegraph’s September 2009 piece “J.R.R. Tolkien Trained as a British Spy” and Elansea’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Codemaker, Spy-Master, Hero: An Un-Authorized Biography (2015), that the creator of Middle-Earth was some kind of tweed-jacketed Indiana Jones, (more…)

488 words

“I am in fact a Hobbit.”—J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a favorite author of New Left “hippies” and New Right nationalists, and for pretty much the same reasons. Tolkien deeply distrusted modernization and industrialization, which replace organic reciprocity between man and nature with technological dominion of man over nature, a relationship that deforms and devalues both poles. (more…)

471 words

“I am in fact a Hobbit.”—J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a favorite author of New Left “hippies” and New Right nationalists, and for pretty much the same reasons. Tolkien deeply distrusted modernization and industrialization, which replace organic reciprocity between man and nature with technological dominion of man over nature, a relationship that deforms and devalues both poles. (more…)

3,171 words

We owe a great debt of gratitude to J. R. R. Tolkien, who embodied the medieval bardic tradition, and penned his epic tale in rebuke of mechanized modernity. I doubt even Tolkien could have predicted that some fifty years later, his story would look more like prophecy than fable. Then again, Tolkien probably sensed Europe had entered its twilight. The Great European Civil War of the twentieth century, which Tolkien fought in during its first phase, impressed upon him that modernity, with its unrelenting industry (capitalism) and hi-tech weaponry, was destroying the West. (more…)