/lit/ - Literature

>>17273448
He was writing mythology, not fantasy. Tolkien was an extremely sensitive, religious, and creative man who was sent to the trenches and had a series of painful experiences that affected him for the rest of his life. He then becomes a professor at Oxford where he became even more deeply acquainted with European myths, the stars aligned in his own life and he ends up writing a unique and very unusual book, accidentally creating the genre of 'modern fantasy' in the process. The man was a complete one-of-a-kind and any attempt to either somehow replicate or even to transcend his work by modern writers always come out as utter shit. His books are a mythology for the English which look like a basic fantasy series on the surface. They also function as a meditation on the overwhelming force of evil and how the good has to align itself with hope as a necessary condition for victory. It is Tolkien's own interrogation of mythology to understand the nature of his own faith in the face of the 'animal horror' of reality. IMO Tolkien will be read for centuries to come and perhaps be considered a kind of 20th-century Milton at some point in the future. Modern fantasy writers genuinely don't deserve to be on the same shelf in the bookshop as Tolkien.