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/lit/ - Literature

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22031467 No.22031467 [Reply] [Original]

Did the trope of the past being more wild and magical the further back you go start with lord of the rings or does it have a different origin?

>> No.22031735

Indigenous myths, on every continent, describe the long past as a time when animals and humans could communicate and magic abounded. Globally, pieces of traditional folklore often open with some variation of "Long ago, when we lived side-by-side with beasts and man still knew the secret words..."

>> No.22031763

The melancholy mystical nostalgia of a magic past (a theme of the human condition) was done by Yeats first (of people I've read), probably because they had the same writer, William Morris, as their main influence. William Morris has the theme of the chastity and simple harmony and brutality of the past (he adapted northern stories that influenced Tolkien), but it isn't yet a metaphor for his own lost past (and love) like in Yeats and Tolkien. Tolkien has the seemingly original (in western literature) concept of the past getting more esoteric the farther back you go which I haven't seen elsewhere beforehand but clearly influenced Hayao Miyazaki and Neon Genesis Evangelion.

>> No.22031777

Why are tolkiendrones so stupid?
Do tolkiendrones think tolkien invented everything in the world?
Next they'll be saying that tolkien invented characters fighting with swords

>> No.22031782

>>22031735
personally, in western lit I don't find the garden of eden idea as abstract as what tolkien attempts to show in the silmarillion (and successfully implies in lotr). Western lit doesn't seem to start to have a really "mystical" past until wordsworth

>> No.22031874

>>22031467
Merre olde England

>> No.22031888

>>22031782
Literature maybe not, but anthropologists and linguists have concluded that the original Germanic word for "bear" was verboten because uttering the name would summon the creature. There are little hints everywhere in the folk tales of that same attitude. That kind of stuff was suppressed as pagan by the church though.

>> No.22032911

>>22031467
It obviously began when stories were first told.