Excellent comments, Trudy! Lydia Fish October 16, 2008, at 07:55 AM
It is interesting that Tolkien’s books of The Lord of the Rings are criticized by individuals of academia as not being a work of literature. Rather, they are accusing the readers of the books and its author as experiencing the phenomenon known as ‘escapism’. According to this phenomenon, Tolkien and his admirers are merely fleeing from reality.
This issue is very peculiar because when the very evil that one experiences is in the real world they live in, it is not surprising when they turn to their imagination for means of expressing the evil they experience. If this is the case, then the tradition of storytelling which is still used in certain cultures as mediums for expressing societal morals and values would also fall in realms of escapism. This is not the case with these cultures since they use storytelling as the means to explain mysteries, events that are out of the ordinary and also as a tool of socialization for that culture. Therefore Tolkien was continuing a tradition that had existed before him. Tolkien and his contemporaries in trying to explain the evils and traumas they experienced in their life time used fantasy. One can infer he knew about this tradition because he was so concerned about the lost culture and language of the Anglo-Saxons which was mostly passed down to the younger through sagas.
Tolkien and his colleagues used fantasy as a means to call the attention of their fellow men to the evil that existed in their world. It was not to escape reality that motivated Tolkien’s writing but rather the need to explain the origins and nature of evil at his time. So, he was not escaping the real world but was rather embracing it and trying to come to terms with it. This is what Tolkien tries to express to his readers through the novels so that they like him can acknowledge the destructive quality of the evil created by the modern world. Trudy Antwi October 08, 2008, at 07:37 PM
