The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien
Will Sherwood & Julian Eilmann (editors)
Cormarë Series No. 51
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J.R.R. Tolkien's Arda illustrates how he incorporated and built on aesthetics, ideals, and philosophies that were, during his lifetime, associated with the Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien is a celebration of Romanticism's multiplicity, offering fresh perspectives on Tolkien's relationship with English, Scottish, German, transatlantic, musical, and artistic Romanticisms, working in concert to open up our discussions of Tolkien's Romantic Spirit.
By embracing this approach, the volume avoids generalisations or vague definitions of Romanticism and the Romantic, paving the way for future scholarship that seeks to understand Tolkien's stylistic and thematic connections with Romanticism.
The contributions to this volume by no means exhaust the discussion on Tolkien's Romanticism. Rather, they aim to ignite further exploration by embracing Romanticism's ever-growing cast of voices and spirits.
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Will Sherwood
Introduction
Nationalism, History, and the Other
Valentina P. Aparicio and Elliott Greene
"Anglo-Saxons on Horseback" or "Mail-Shirted Sioux or Cheyenne"?
Romantic Native Americans and Tolkien's Rohirrim
(abstract)
Lynn Forest-Hill
Tolkien, Medieval Romances and the Romantic Spirit
(abstract)
Sharin Schroeder
J.R.R. Tolkien, Walter Scott, and Scott-ish Romanticism
(abstract)
Mariana Rios Maldonado
A Dark Romantic Gaze: Otherness and Evil in Hoffmann and Tolkien
(abstract)
Language, Art, and Music
Verlyn Flieger
Words, Words, Words: Tolkien, Barfield and Romanticism
(abstract)
Chiara Bertoglio
Horns, Bullets, and Rings:
Tolkien’s "extreme fondness" for Carl Maria von Weber
(abstract)
Annise Rogers
Indirect Artistic Influences:
The Visual Art of J.R.R. Tolkien and William Blake
(abstract)
David Smith
"living shapes that move from mind to mind":
Tolkien’s Visual Romanticism
(abstract)
Imagination, Desire, and Sensation
Kacie L. Wills and Christopher Hagan
Tolkien’s Romantic Gusto
(abstract)
Adam Neikirk
Tolkien and Coleridge: Act and Desire in The Silmarillion
(abstract)
John R. Holmes
Romantic Imagination, Fancy, and kalymma in Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-stories’
(abstract)
Austin M. Freeman
‘The Backs of Trees’: Tolkien, the British Theological Romantics,
& the Fantastic Imagination
(abstract)
Brandon Wernette
"His songs are stronger songs": Aesthetic Creation, Enchantment, and the
Wordsworthian Sublime in Tolkien
(abstract)
Nature and Travel
Eva Lippold
Walking into Mordor: Tolkien and Romantic Travel Writing
(abstract)
Nick Groom
“The Ghostly Language of the Ancient Earth”:
Tolkien, Geology, and Romantic Lithology
(abstract)
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Abstracts
Nationalism, History, and the Other
This chapter aims to offer a possible solution to the long-standing debate around the use of horses by the Rohirrim in J.R.R. Tolkien’s work. By tracing the history of Anglo-Saxon studies during the long 19th century, the chapter intends to draw out the close relationship between Romantic views of Native Americans and ancient Britons. The chapter argues that Tolkien’s incorporation of horses in his creation of the Rohirrim is consistent with the historical influence that images of Native Americans had on Romantic ideas of Northern European antiquity. The first part of the chapter briefly describes the origins of studies of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic literature, relating it to theories of stadial history. After this, the chapter traces the way in which travel narratives from North America, in conjunction with the theory of stadial history, were used to fill gaps in knowledge about ancient Britons. This created a particular imagery and rhetoric that was used to describe Anglo-Saxons and Native Americans as historically equivalent. The second part of this work analyses some of the elements of this rhetoric, such as stoicism, song-singing, and love of freedom, drawing comparisons between the Rohirrim and Romantic ‘Indian’ descriptions. Finally, the third section ties these elements together by offering an explanation for the origin of the horses of the Rohirrim through views of Native Americans popularised by works like The Last of the Mohicans and the reports on the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The chapter concludes that Tolkien’s addition of horses for the Rohirrim is consistent with a discourse deeply intertwined with the origins of his profession, and which is rooted in Romantic travel narratives and historiography.
Tolkien, Medieval Romances and the Romantic Spirit
Tolkien’s relationship to British Romantic medievalism, such as that of Sir Walter Scott, has received critical attention and while this paper acknowledges that body of work, it focusses rather on Tolkien’s engagement with original medieval romance to differentiate its distinctive contribution to his legendarium and in so doing fills the void left by this established critical approach. This paper distinguishes the romances embedded in the legendarium, including The Lord of the Rings, and considers them as the lineal descendants of both original medieval romance and Romantic medievalism in their engagement with the cultural and political issues of their own time.
J.R.R. Tolkien,Walter Scott, and Scott-ish Romanticism
Tolkien was one of very few writers, before him or since, whose "Cauldron of Story," or tradition (in T. S. Eliot’s usage of the word), included both Walter Scott and the Beowulf poet. This essay examines how T. S. Eliot’s ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’ (1919) and Edwin Muir’s Scott and Scotland (1936) were part of an interwar critical trend that eliminated Scott and Scottish authors from the twentieth-century Romantic canon. As the century went on, fewer people read Scott, and the links to a British tradition with which The Lord of the Rings ought to be in dialog were erased. This essay attempts to place Tolkien back in Scott’s tradition, demonstrating the importance of Scott to British academics of Tolkien’s age and speculating on which Scott texts Tolkien may have read (with an extended analysis of texts dealing with middle earth, as well as an analysis of the themes and versification of Marmion in relation to Tolkien’s prose and poetry). I highlight the similarities in the two writers’ literary affinities, as well as the ways in which Tolkien’s understanding of Faërie and Middle-earth follow Scott’s. Moreover, I point out that Tolkien’s reception history may also have been influenced by Scott’s: Muir’s three Observer reviews of The Lord of the Rings find the same faults with Tolkien’s writing that Muir had found with Scott’s in Scott and Scotland. Finally, this essay addresses the question of longevity in literary traditions, noting that Tolkien is not immune from becoming a second Scott in cultural memory – but also that literary traditions are much more individual and divided than Eliot and Muir believed.
A Dark Romantic Gaze: Otherness and Evil in Hoffmann and Tolkien
Throughout their multifarious literary production, E.T.A. Hoffmann and J.R.R. Tolkien compassed exemplary creations of fantastic and fantasy literature characterized by but not limited to the use of elements from fairy tales and myths. Coincidentally, their works also responded to daedal changes in the western mind-set over the past four centuries. But rather than simply tracing direct, unequivocal similarities between Hoffmann and Tolkien, or between German Romanticism and Tolkien’s emblematic fictional world, this chapter will focus in uncovering how the former’s exploration of alterity and the uncanny can serve as an interpretative framework for reflecting on otherness and evil in Tolkien’s Middle-earth narratives. While these issues in Tolkien’s oeuvre have been addressed from a wide array of theoretical perspectives (Chance, Eaglestone, Fimi, and Shippey), the Dark Romantic gaze can provide new insights into the deployment of these themes in Tolkien’s works. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion already boast gloomy landscapes, split personalities, encounters with monsters and spectres, powerful visions and dreams. At the same time, his narratives question the location of Otherness in the nature and/or appearance of others and reframe our sundering from evil as merely superficial. It is in this sense that Hoffmann’s unique juxtaposition of Gothic ambience, supernatural horror, bourgeois every-day life, and even humour in classic texts of the Romantic fantastic such as ‘Der Sandmann’, Die Elixiere des Teufels, or ‘Der goldne Topf’ can be implemented to look at Tolkien’s legendarium anew. This chapter thus constitutes an effort to reconnect Anglophone fantasy with expressions of the fantastic across different languages and time-space coordinates; and marks a novel intervention in the field of Tolkien studies by expanding both on the presence of the Romantic spirit in his works and his connection to authors like Hoffmann beyond their shared immersion into Faërie.
Words, Words, Words: Tolkien, Barfield and Romanticism
The romanticism of the 20th century’s pre-eminent romantic author, J.R.R. Tolkien operated at the most basic level, that of words and combinations of words. In this regard Tolkien shared the outlook of his fellow-Inkling Owen Barfield, whose influential Romanticism Comes of Age expressed many of the same principles Tolkien advocated in his essay ‘On Fairy-stories’ and put into practice in The Lord of the Rings. This paper explores the relationship between the two authors, not to show how either influenced the other but how both recognized and responded to the need for a practical approach to imagination.
Horns, Bullets, and Rings: Tolkien’s "extreme fondness" for Carl Maria von Weber
In a 1968 interview with BBC, J.R.R. Tolkien admitted to "always [having] been extremely fond of the music of Carl Maria von Weber"; Tolkien owned a biography of Weber and demonstrated his knowledge of many details of the composer’s life.
Weber is considered as one of the first composers of the German Romanticism, and one whose works (particularly in the operatic field) contributed to – quite literally – setting the stage for the enchanted world of the German Romanticism. In particular, in his operas we find such themes as an overwhelming presence of nature and of the supernatural, magical creatures and objects and pseudo- Medieval settings; these would impact not only on later Romantic operas (especially in Germany, obviously including the operas by Wagner) but also, in general, on the Romantic aesthetics.
In the light of Tolkien’s interest in Weber and in his music, this paper makes comparisons between some subjects, episodes, characters and characterizations of Weber’s operas and those found in Tolkien’s works, highlighting both the possible influences and the differences between their respective perspectives.
Indirect Artistic Influences: The Visual Art of J.R.R. Tolkien and William Blake
Like many others, my first experiences with Tolkien and Blake were through their literary work, and thus my understanding and knowledge is textual, rather than through visual art analysis. Both were builders of huge world myths, and the Romantic literary comparisons between the two artists are well documented both within and outside of academia. However, the much less discussed visual art of these artists appears to have common qualities, and whilst there is no proof that Tolkien’s visual art was in any way directly influenced by Blake’s visual art, there are indirect connections that deserve further study than they previously have been given.
"living shapes that move from mind to mind": Tolkien’s Visual Romanticism
Though Tolkien valued verbal and literary art more highly than visual aesthetics, his conscious allusions to visual theories proposed by Goethe and Romanticists such as Coleridge and Blake indicate the value he perceived in visual art to create art that facilitated individual transformation. In ‘Leaf by Niggle’ Tolkien’s Romanticism resists the atomistic values that preceded the Romantics and that he recognized in his own day. Coleridge’s Romanticism of privileging both the individual and the general derived from a devotion to the contemplation of nature, which resonated with Tolkien. Like Blake, Tolkien averred the virtue of attention to minute particulars as well as the unity of the whole, which appears in the assemblage of Niggle’s Tree. Transcendence begins by apprehending a greater unity encompassing individuality, which translates into a necessary self-effacement in favor of a naturalistic interconnectedness. This self-effacement extends to include aesthetic considerations as well selfish desires and thus enables the transcendence of others by encountering the visual sublime.
Imagination, Desire, and Sensation
John Keats famously writes in a 27 October 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse of the "camelion Poet," who "lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated." Keats takes the word "gusto" from the writings of William Hazlitt and adapts the concept to his own ends. Tied up within this idea is the identity of the poet, the "man of genius," and Keats’s own fascination with a "Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!" This is nowhere more embodied than in his Romantic fascination with eating and drinking, which is demonstrated in his letters to be intimately connected to the psychology of identity, as he writes to Woodhouse in September 1819, "Perhaps I eat to persuade myself I am somebody."
To date, the relationship between these aspects of Romantic gusto and the centrality of eating and drinking to the life and cultural identities of the inhabitants of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth remains unexplored. In this essay, we examine The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings alongside Tolkien’s own letters, in order to illustrate the ways Keats’s Romantic gusto is embodied in the relationships between food and drink and identity in Tolkien’s life and work. This is displayed in the mingling of cultures and individuals across Bilbo’s table, especially in the way these interactions shape the relationship between himself and the dwarves. Looking to Tolkien’s own life, we see a creative identity shaped by gusto in his literary friendships with the Inklings, who regularly gathered to eat, drink, and share their writing. Our essay crosses the disciplines of literary studies and psychology in order to best demonstrate how Tolkien’s work and creative process intersect with Romantic literature and the psychology of identity and culture found in Romantic gusto and dietetics.
Tolkien and Coleridge: Act and Desire in The Silmarillion
This paper begins by discussing the connection between Romanticism as a literary movement and transcendental philosophy. From here, I connect Julian Eilmann’s work on Tolkien’s Romanticism to Tolkien’s popularity with general readers, speculating that perhaps this reflects a Romantic "longing for the infinite" in modern ‘disenchanted’ readers. To make an alliance with Romanticism more concrete, Tolkien’s works should not merely appeal to readerly sentimentality, I argue, but should be linked to the realization of a supersensual (but objective) reality. To do this, I introduce Coleridge’s notion of the Reason as a supersensual organ which apprehends Platonic Ideas, drawing on recent work by the philosopher Peter Cheyne and other Coleridgeans. I also connect Tolkien’s writings to something I call the translucence of art, which allows for the apprehension of Ideas via aesthetic experience. After some discussion of the commensurability of life and art, I connect the possibility of this apprehension to readerly (and ludic) immersion. I then explicate the Coleridgean notion of Ideas as "living powers" through the Valar as the "powers" of Arda, discussing the role of a Coleridgean conception of immersion in The Silmarillion.
Romantic Imagination, Fancy, and kalymma in Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-stories’
While most discussions of Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-stories’ in light of Romanticism deal with his supposed debt (or reaction) to Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief,” other recognizably Romantic tenets may be discovered in Tolkien’s essay. This essay examines three: (1) the philological relations of the words imagination, fancy, and fantasy; (2) the relation of poetic creation to God’s (Tolkien’s subcreation); and (3) poetry’s power of “removing the veil” (Gk. kalymma) from reality.
‘The Backs of Trees’: Tolkien, the British Theological Romantics, & the Fantastic Imagination
This paper argues that Tolkien continues a specific approach toward humanity’s engagement with God, society, and nature begun by a group of Romantic thinkers extending through William Morris, John Ruskin, George MacDonald, and G.K. Chesterton. These men are not only fantasists but critics of society, applying their philosophical and theological beliefs to the problems of the industrial revolution and the endemic transformations of culture. This group is characterized by sacramental ontology, anti-industrialism, medievalism, optimism, and an emphasis on the fantastic imagination.
J.R.R. Tolkien lays out an aesthetic theory in ‘On Fairy-stories,’ when he describes the Enchantment to which Fantasy aspires. The imaginative aesthetic creation involved in the production of fantasy is also on display in Middle-earth. We see aesthetic creation’s influence on Nature in the Great Music of the Ainur and also in the figure of Tom Bombadil whose song grants him mysterious influence over the Old Forest and Barrow-downs. He is at once a part of and more powerful than Nature by way of his song. In this essay, I intend to show how the Wordsworthian sublime is a foundational aesthetic structure that persists throughout the entire legendarium.
Alongside Thomas Weiskel’s seminal book, The Romantic Sublime, I will read some of Wordsworth’s most sublime poems to show the important role imaginative creation plays in the moment of the Wordsworthian or “metonymical” sublime. I will examine moments of aesthetic creation in The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and other texts of Tolkien’s legendarium to show how the Wordsworthian sublime of imaginative creation in Tolkien’s universe is often so privileged that it manifests as a kind of magic, as in the character of Tom Bombadil or the creation of the world. I will explore how character, Nature, and ultimately author are contiguously associated: one never completely effaces any other in the creation of Tolkien’s universe, and the sublimity exhibited in that creation allows readers to lose and find themselves in a world of great imagination.
Walking into Mordor: Tolkien and Romantic Travel Writing
Travelling and journeying are major themes in Tolkien’s works. Whether going on an adventure or on a final trip to the Undying Lands, his characters travel frequently. In the Romantic era, travel was accorded a similar importance – the concept of the Grand Tour, the development of travel writing as a genre, and the interest in aesthetic landscapes all contributed to make travelling a major cultural event.
This paper makes comparisons between Tolkien’s idea of journeying in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and the portrayal of travel in Romantic writing, exploring why and how people travel – and what they notice on the way. It analyses the many similarities between Tolkien’s writing and Romantic travel writing, including a similar appreciation (and description) of landscapes, and the sense that travel is not only a physical but also a spiritual journey, in which the travellers learn something about themselves. In particular, the paper draws on women’s travel writing, such as Mariana Starke’s travel guidebooks and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, arguing that useful comparisons can be made between Tolkien’s male perspective and their female experiences. This analysis provides a perspective on travel as a continuing motif in literature, and shows which elements of Romantic travel writing Tolkien adopted, and which elements he changed, charting a journey from the eighteenth to the twentieth century which still influences our conceptions of travel today.
"The Ghostly Language of the Ancient Earth": Tolkien, Geology, and Romantic Lithology
William Wordsworth writes frequently about stones, rocks, megaliths. He ponders the stories that stones can tell in ‘Michael’ (‘There is a straggling heap of unhewn stones’), and poets who ‘in their elegies and songs / Lamenting the departed call the groves ... And senseless rocks’ in ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (later The Excursion, Book I). He writes of casual inscriptions in ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’, the ancient stone circle Long Meg and her Daughters in his Guide to the Lakes, and of course ponders Stonehenge in ‘Salisbury Plain’.
In her influential, if flawed, book Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (2012), Mary Jacobus makes a case for a number of objects, attributes, and activities that preoccupy Romantic poetry (particularly the poetry of Wordsworth) and which can change our perception of the world. This has since become a major area of interest in contemporary philosophy, notably in cultural environmentalism and in object-oriented ontology (OOO), both of which have swiftly generated a significant and wide-ranging bibliography.
Although it would be a major undertaking to approach the entire corpus of Tolkien’s work in this way, several important points can be made to form an introduction to such an approach by building on Jacobus’s work and bringing it up to date with more contemporary thinking. This paper will therefore investigate one aspect – stones and rocks in The Lord of the Rings – arguing that Tolkien engages with a theme in Romantic poetry that, once neglected, now appears to be central to their conception of the natural world and the place of humans within it. From the enigmatic stone ruins that litter Middleearth to the new brick-built mill in Hobbiton, from the natural wonder of the bejewelled Glittering Caves to animate (and inanimate) beings such as trolls, to magical artefacts such as the palantíri and Silmarils, Tolkien develops a poetics of minerality that forms a bedrock to his work, part of the same stratum as Romanticism.
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Cover
Cover illustration by Jay Johnstone,
table of contents | abstracts | cover | announcements | more
Announcements
Review of The Romantic Spirit (2nd September 2024)
Video presentation of The Romantic Spirit (21st March 2024)
New publication, The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (17th March 2024)
Call for papers — The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (20th February 2020)
422 pages, Walking Tree Publishers 2024, Cormarë Series No. 51, Editors: Will Sherwood & Julian Eilmann
, ISBN: 978-3-905703-51-1.
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