Title: Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium by Mark Doyle (review)
Abstract: Reviewed by: Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium by Mark Doyle Mark Brians II Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium. By Mark Doyle. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-4985-9867-5. Pp. vii + 195. $90.00. Mark Doyle introduces this study by investigating the popularity of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work in relation to the criticism and scrutiny it has received. He begins with the intense claim that Tolkien’s work is both popular and subject to criticism for the same reason: the way in which “he speaks to the desires and fears of his twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers” (2). For Doyle, Tolkien “uses utopian and dystopian themes to intensify his audience’s longing and fears” while simultaneously eschewing “the central concern of most classic utopias” (2)—understood here as a genre comprising both utopian and dystopian works of literature. Thus, for Tolkien’s critics, Doyle intimates, his work is illegible, frustrating the discursive boundaries of utopian- and dystopian-themed works. For those who appreciate his work, Doyle argues, this is precisely where he is successful. Doyle proceeds then with a difficult project: to illustrate the ways that Tolkien’s Legendarium operates with certain utopian and dystopian qualities, but which cannot properly be understood along the formulae of classical utopian and dystopian literature. A fascinating thesis indeed, but one which I think demanded more carefulness than was shown. Arguing that Tolkien’s literary societies are utopian and dystopian requires him to so alter the definition of utopia/dystopia that they begin to act almost as mere synonyms for “good” and “bad,” and this complicates his project in ways that come to light particularly in his first chapter. Here Doyle argues that Tolkien’s work “differs from most literary utopias and dystopias because of his assumptions about what makes the good life and what destroys it” (9) and because of Tolkien’s refusal of the common tropes of the genre. Doyle writes, “While I do not think Tolkien’s societies fit the strict definition of utopias and dystopias, I believe his legendarium is replete with dystopian and utopian themes, and, to a certain extent, utopian and dystopian purposes” (15). While this begs the question of whether Tolkien is engaged in a utopian or dystopian project at all, it does present Doyle’s first pass at doing what he is really good at—discussing the politics of Middle-earth. Thus, the latter half of the first chapter begins a very intriguing analysis of Tolkien’s good and bad societies. His discussion, in particular, of the role variety plays in the politics of Middle-earth’s good societies (when compared to the saturnian uniformity of places like Mordor) underwrites a political mode ranging from the Shire to Gondolin in which “one can never be alienated from one’s work and treat it like a job” (17). Moreover his consideration of the various [End Page 155] political responses to fragility among the peoples of Middle-earth is both profound and prophetic, that they are all “subject to loss and decay” (23) and that the desire to persist against the passing away of things leads to the great political evils of figures like Isildur, Morgoth, and Sauron. The second chapter examines the ways that Tolkien “uses the different philosophical presuppositions of his sources to weave together a series of societies that are at once alien and strangely familiar” (43). He traces three streams of Tolkien’s source material: the medieval world, the Victorian Medievalists, and the Modernists. This chapter is helpful in its consideration of how Tolkien drew upon various pieces from these sources for inspiration, such as the medieval method of “bending and merging” of the “supposedly hard categories like animate/inanimate, plant/animal, and Christian/pagan” (45), and his discussion of the ways the “chateau-general” leadership of Sauron and Morgoth exemplifies how Tolkien “uses Modernist themes to more explicitly demonstrate the dangers of our current way of life” (69). His claim that Tolkien’s work subverts the Byronic hero by producing villains who are Byronic, and heroes who exhibit personal excellence without exhibiting transgression, is especially poignant. He argues moreover, especially in...
Publication Year: 2021
Publication Date: 2021-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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