Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium
2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/utopianstudies.33.1.0187
ISSN2154-9648
Autores Tópico(s)Violence, Religion, and Philosophy
ResumoMark Doyle’s Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium reads Tolkien’s work through the history of utopian and dystopian thought. The aim of this new study is not to prove that Tolkien set out to write dystopian fiction or create a blueprint for a utopian society, but that utopian and dystopian societies and settings crucially inform his legendarium. By placing his study outside of its usual fantasy context, Doyle gives us a valuable societally focused and historicized contribution to both Tolkien and utopian studies respectively, yet one occasionally marred by the author’s own unexamined value judgments.The book examines several aspects of Tolkien’s legendarium, from its utopian and dystopian literary roots, to the influence of historical religious thinking and contemporary political movements on its formation. Other chapters place Tolkien’s utopian and dystopian writing in the context or the history of the environmental movement and, less successfully, the influence of myth on the legendarium. The text concludes with a short epilogue looking at how twenty-first-century computer-game and film adaptations of Tolkien’s work have mostly failed to successfully invoke the moral spirit of Tolkien’s world.Tolkien’s dystopian settings, such as Mordor and Isengard, have been widely culturally mapped. For instance, many have traced the industrial hellscape Saruman creates back to the Birmingham mills of Tolkien’s childhood. It is, therefore, in Doyle’s exploration of Tolkien’s utopian settings and ideals that this book is most insightful and original. He demonstrates how it is not in perfectly organized societies that we discover Tolkien’s utopianism, but in the moral universe he forms: “his works provide readers with a sense of meaning, rather than relieving them of struggle” (2). Studying Tolkien in the context of contemporary political thinking, for instance, allows the reader to rethink the Shire through the Distributionists movement. This was a Catholic social movement of the early twentieth century that valued property rights in terms of human dignity, as well as smaller government, whilst being against the accumulation of wealth. This speaks not only to the social structure of the Hobbits, but also the spirit of abnegation that infuses the legendarium in general; its heroes are often at their most heroic when choosing to relinquish power or wealth. Doyle reads this abnegation at the heart of Tolkien’s work as part of the influence of medieval and early English myth and literature on Tolkien’s utopian beliefs.Doyle also understands that Tolkien was as much influenced by Victorian neo-medieval culture as he was by medieval culture itself. He further suggests that Tolkien’s evocation of the past is more than simply nostalgic or reactionary, but a deliberate attempt to connect his readers to utopian ideals that seemed more achievable at an earlier time and were based on an earlier individual relationship with society and the environment. For instance, Doyle argues that part of Tolkien’s evocation of a past time is connected to his understanding that there is less of a difference between the medieval Christian and medieval pagan worldviews than there is between the medieval worldview of a sacralized and almost animist world and a modern rational, individualist understanding of the world. For Doyle this springs from how Tolkien’s medieval-inflected Catholicism imbued his work spiritually and artistically. Time is also crucial to Tolkien’s legendarium in that his “good” societies are strongly connected to their own histories. Doyle suggests this speaks to Tolkien’s utopian societies not being alienated from the past. There is no “Year Zero” or revolutionary moment in Tolkien’s good places, as we may find in utopian literature or oftentimes in our own real world history of utopian projects.So Doyle brings a fresh mindset to the history of utopian studies in literature particularly, but there are issues with this book. The main problem is Doyle’s use of sweeping, often unevidenced, statements that undermine his arguments. An early example: “fantasy is a genre that Tolkien almost single-handedly created” (4). For Doyle, Tolkien’s original use of “epic, romance, and the novel [. . .] make a whole a new genre: that of fantasy literature” (5). There is no space in this review to list all the writers who may have been quoted as creating fantasy but, suffice to say, there are other antecedents and precursors to the fantasy genre, and other lines we can take back to its origins. One may read Neil Gaiman’s Stardust (1999), for instance, and follow it back to Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) and then back further to Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) without once scenting Tolkien’s epic romance. Another way to challenge Doyle’s assertion would be to take his definitions of the genre—epic, romance, and the novel—and locate instead William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (1896) as a starting point: a text that contains all these characteristics, and even contains a character called Gandolf!In fairness to Doyle, he is most likely referring to a commercial and cultural understanding of the genre that we can trace to Tolkien’s hugely influential Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954–55). Sweeping, uncontextualized statements such as these, however, tend to weaken his arguments throughout. Further examples include the statement that “most ancient and contemporary utopias and dystopias appear flat and artificial by comparison” to Tolkien’s creation (43). This is a contention with which readers of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), or Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13), to name but two examples, may take issue. Doyle argues that Tolkien’s utopias lack “the narrowness, authoritarianism, and tedium that characterize most literary utopias” (5), while his dystopias “have a disorder about them that makes them seem more plausible than many literary dystopias that seem preternaturally ordered” (5), but his argument fails to appreciate the strength, depth, and variety of contemporary utopian and dystopian literature.This tendency toward sweeping statements is evident in the text’s antimodernism: a response to their modern worlds Doyle and Tolkien seem to share. Throughout the text, with variations, Doyle will hold up Tolkien’s “Middle-earth in all its artistic and philosophical grandeur” in comparison to the “somewhat impoverished and materialistic worldview of most twentieth- and twenty-first-century society” (9–10). Certain thinkers, such as Zygmunt Bauman or Roman Guardini, are quoted to provide evidence for our modern spiritual enervation, but usually these opinions are stated as absolute facts. Tolkien’s utopias, for instance, “are better than our society in providing the freedom to allow for individual flourishing” (12). Which society is “our society” is not defined. The opinion that space for individual flourishing is what makes a society better, rather than an end to want or inequality, is again unexamined. An author’s biases are, of course, inherent and inescapable, but more could have been done to acknowledge these factors both explicitly and implicitly in the text.These unexamined biases are compounded by a short but unpleasant section on Tolkien and race (129–30). As Doyle discusses Tolkien’s attitudes toward race in his nonfiction writing, he almost willfully misreads a clearly racist metaphor Tolkien used as a young man. Doyle then goes on to suggest Tolkien was not a racist by referring to Tolkien’s stance against anti-Semitism, while ignoring the racialized language, for instance, that Tolkien uses to depict the villains of the Lord of the Rings. Concentrating purely on Tolkien’s letters, and without reference to his secondary world, Doyle argues “there is little evidence that Tolkien harbored racially problematic attitudes” (129). Feeling more like an attempt to prove Tolkien not a racist, rather than an honest examination of the inescapable prejudices found in Tolkien’s works, this section did not sit well.At its best, Doyle’s Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium provides sensitive new readings and a fresh approach to both Tolkien and utopian studies. Placing Tolkien within a history of utopian and dystopian writing and thinking will hopefully allow readers to read Middle-earth anew. Doyle’s stated aim is that this new framing of Tolkien’s world will allow us to reimagine utopian possibilities for our future by re-examining the dreams of another past. For those readers prepared to make allowances for certain critical weaknesses and unacknowledged biases, there is a lot of value to be discovered in this new study. Not least, a reminder that Tolkien’s legendarium contains the possibility to “create not just alternative worlds but alternative worldviews” (117).
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