Tolkien: Cult or Culture?

Abstract

For the generation after the first World War, the prevailing literary tendencies in England, as elsewhere in Western Europe, were towards the expression of the general feeling of pessimism, the representation of a dark and melancholy world with little of consolation. Power and economics were the guides, and the spiritual forces which had animated an earlier period appeared as but darkened lights. The novel, in particular, was concerned with realism, scientific humanism, and the mechanics of secular society, rather than any sense of the spiritual, which might lie behind the human condition, Severally in English letters there began to appear the members of what was later seen as an Anglo-Catholic coterie - Charles Williams, publisher, writer of spiritual thrillers and intensely personal verse; C.S. Lewis, mediaeval scholar and Christian apologist and, only towards the end, imaginative prose writer; and J.R.R. Tolkien, whose main reputation rested on his work as an Anglo-Saxonist, but who turned from the idle composition of fairy stories to the creation of an enormous prose epic, the writing of which still continues.