I am convinced the world of Middle Earth, over and above whatever genuine literary merit it might possess, gives us insight into some very primal human drives and emotions. This is the world of myth and legend, an imagined (as opposed to a realistic) history, a kind of Anglo “Roots” that is more about psychology and sociology than it is about anthropology.

There is a sort of collective nostalgia about medievalism, the culture and politics of feudalism in many modern societies, Witness the obssession with the Shogunates and Age of the Samurai in modern Japanese culture. The Chinese have their age of warlords, and Western culture has its medieval and pre-medieval past. Even the Classical world looked to its Dark Ages for artistic inspiration; the time of Odysseus and the Trojan War. The Homeric heroes were not strictly kings in our sense of the word, they were Bronze Age chieftains, sea-going brigands not unlike our Vikings. They lived on remote island villages and walled towns and raided their neighbors for livestock and slaves. The sophisticated and civilized poets, scholars, statesman and warriors of Athens, and even Rome, looked back at these simpler, but more brutal, times as a kind of cleaner, more authentic expression of their national spirit. It reminds me a lot of America’s own Western Romances, and frontier myths. Its all utter nonsense, of course. How we choose to remember the past is not at all what it was like. It is all a nostalgia for a simpler, more heroic time, with all the blood, violence and misery removed, or at least sanitized.

This idealized past extends well past literature into our popular culture. Even our fairy tales and children’s stories are populated with noble kings, wise magicians, brave knights, dashing princes, beautiful princesses, sturdy yeoman farmers, jolly innkeepers and other stout stereotypes of an imagined world. Medievalism is feudalism, what takes over after the Empire collapses; it may be an improvement over the chaos of invading barbarian hordes, famine and pestilence, but it is still no picnic. Armed local family groups, usually in conflict with one another, take over land by force and compell serfs to work it for them. Not noble lords, these are more like bikers on horseback, or modern criminal gangs, squabbling for turf and imposing a protection racket on their retainers. But it is fairly stable, and the Church might be able to keep the memory of the past alive in its monasteries.

This kind of mythic past-that-never-was saturated medieval and renaissance society. It was preserved through the King Arthur mythos and then propagated by the medieval court romances and courtly love tradition, an age of alleged chivalry and nobility and lute-plucking troubadors. This is Barbara Cartland romance novels for the medieval court, something for lecherous courtiers and randy ladies-in-waiting to pass the time with in those drafty old castles on long winter nights. It wasn’t until Cervantes in 1600s Spain satirized the whole genre through his crazy-as-a-bedbug Don Quixote that it started to decline.

Tolkein is a modern expression of this world, one given some solidity and legitimacy through the quality of his scholarship and his undeniable gifts as a writer. But I wonder how much of Middle Earth is an expression of what Tolkein experienced in the trenches during the Great War. He must have seen the rise of Fascism in Europe, and later, witnessed the monstrosity of World War II through his own son’s role in it. It’s risky to speculate what motivates an artist to create, but it is difficult to resist the temptation. It is a world of beauty, grace and nobility, where evil is safely quarantined in evil men and magic, not an inescapable property and consequence of the social fabric and historical forces. It must be very compelling to a sensitive and cultivated man like Tolkein. I don’t think he cared much for the 20th century. He wanted no part of it.