Hot take time: LOTR isn’t reactionary for the same reason that reactionaries love it, which is the same reason subsequent authors fail to imitate it. It is a genuine artifact of the earlier mode of thought reactionaries want to return to. Tolkien, at least to some degree, in a way that only an upper class englishman still could by the 20th century, authentically believed in the divine right of kings. He could write about the rightful king returning to his throne and making all well again and really mean it with his whole chest. Subsequent authors can and have repeated those tropes to death but it always rings hollow because deep down they cant help but find the idea quaint even as genre conventions and market forces drive them to write it again and again.
Lord of the rings, along with a lot of literature from like 50 years prior is pretty much free from the irony and lack of “earnestness” that modernism and postmodernism brought to the medium. Tolkien was a medievalist romantic (not derogatory) and he wrote like one. His style was already anachronistic in the 1930s, because it’s much more reminiscent of Goethe or Byron, whose time had already passed, while much different works like Metamorphosis or The Grapes of Wrath were being published. Only someone with both a thorough understanding of northern European medieval literature, it’s themes and forms, and a very keen imagination could’ve done what he did, and do it so well.
Hot take time: LOTR isn’t reactionary for the same reason that reactionaries love it, which is the same reason subsequent authors fail to imitate it. It is a genuine artifact of the earlier mode of thought reactionaries want to return to. Tolkien, at least to some degree, in a way that only an upper class englishman still could by the 20th century, authentically believed in the divine right of kings. He could write about the rightful king returning to his throne and making all well again and really mean it with his whole chest. Subsequent authors can and have repeated those tropes to death but it always rings hollow because deep down they cant help but find the idea quaint even as genre conventions and market forces drive them to write it again and again.
Lord of the rings, along with a lot of literature from like 50 years prior is pretty much free from the irony and lack of “earnestness” that modernism and postmodernism brought to the medium. Tolkien was a medievalist romantic (not derogatory) and he wrote like one. His style was already anachronistic in the 1930s, because it’s much more reminiscent of Goethe or Byron, whose time had already passed, while much different works like Metamorphosis or The Grapes of Wrath were being published. Only someone with both a thorough understanding of northern European medieval literature, it’s themes and forms, and a very keen imagination could’ve done what he did, and do it so well.