Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity

By Patrick Curry

A spirited defence of Tolkien’s mythological creation and its increasing relevance for the real world.

Acclaimed by the largest readers’ survey ever conducted as ‘the greatest book of the century’, J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has cast the spell of its storytelling for over 40 years and continues to enthral new generations of readers. Yet it has also been widely labelled as reactionary and escapist by hostile critics.

Patrick Curry’s book shows just how mistaken they are. He reveals Tolkien’s profound and subtle advocacy of community, ecology and spiritual values against the destructive forces of runaway modernity. Tolkien’s remedy, and the project implicit in his literary mythology, is a re-enchantment of the world. In helping us to realize that living nature, including humanity, is sacred, his writings draw on ancient magical mythology, but at the same time resonate closely with the ideas of contemprary radical ecology.

Quoting extensively from Tolkien’s works, Patrick Curry argues that Tolkien addresses hard global realities and widely justified fears. In this way, his story has transcended its English roots to achieve universal relevance, and his imaginary world gives people everywhere hope for the future of the real world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Dec 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9780007507467

Patrick Curry

Dr Patrick Curry was born in Canada and has lived in London for over forty years. He has lectured widely on religious studies, cosmology and astronomy at the Universities of Kent and Bath Spa. He is the author of several books, including Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity and Ecological Ethics.

Reviews for Defending Middle-earth

[waltzmn · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

No amount of earnestness can make up for missing the point.There have been, over the decades, quite a few defenses of the meaningfulness, the relevance, the suitability for modern times of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I cannot claim to have read them all, but of those I have read, this one is certainly the most full-throated. Tolkien, to Curry, is not just significant, he is a guidepost -- a star leading us to the sacred place of a sustainable, honest, fair, complete world.Since most of the virtues Curry sees in Tolkien are very liberal virtues, some may be offended just by that. Indeed, Tolkien himself would surely be offended by some of them. But this is not the basis for my objection -- Curry's claims became monotonous after a time, but they did not bother me.But Curry just doesn't understand what Tolkien was writing. The proper defense of Tolkien is not that it is some sort of ecological version of More's Utopia; it is that The Lord of the Rings is a pure and brilliant Romance based on Christian and Northern European myth. Curry neither understands the Romance nor, frankly, the Fairy Tale, on which he bases much of his argument.By Romance I don't mean the modern love story. I mean a tale which, through the wonders that let us see thing clearly, teaches a true lesson about how the world should be. Examples include many tales that Tolkien's critics would approve of -- Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Franklin's Tale, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the many French ("Roman") tales that gave the genre its name.Curry addresses much of his work to those who condemn Tolkien. And in this he is right. We need the Romances to know how to be better people -- at least, most of us do, and the people who don't need them are not the people who condemn Tolkien. But Curry is defending Tolkien on grounds that Tolkien himself did not care to take.Again, Curry is right that The Lord of the Rings has much in common with fairy and folk tales. But Curry does not know fairy tales, except through mediation such as Tolkien and even Walt Disney (a source he faults without realizing what the alternative is). Tolkien's folk sources taught him much that gives The Lord of the Rings its feeling of deep reality, but it is the Romances that give the lessons. No author who misses that point will ever be able to defend Tolkien fully.And Curry sometimes even misses points Tolkien himself made. On page 148, for instance, Curry claims that when the One Ring was destroyed, the Three Rings faded slowly. On the contrary; their power was destroyed at once. What faded slowly was what was built with it. The analogy might be to electrical power: Anything which runs on electricity, such as your computer, will fail the moment the power goes out. But anything merely made with that power, such as a print-out from the computer, merely begins to age and decay. Evil desires power, and as long as we fight power with power, the victory will be impermanent. Only something greater can win the true victory. In Tolkien's personal view, that Something Greater was the Incarnation of Jesus, but he carefully kept that out of the book -- so much so that Curry does not seem to realize how much the Romance of Jesus (and, yes, it fits much of the definition of a Romance) stands behind Tolkien's work.Tolkien's chief point is that, in an unredeemed world, all battles against evil are delaying actions, temporary gains, pyrrhic victories. In this sense, Tolkien almost stands closer to his critics than Curry, who thinks the great battles can be won.Tolkien deserves his defenders. But he should be defended for his actual virtues, not for what reviewers fail to see in his books.