J.R.R. Tolkien, writing to his son Christopher, commenting on how long and sprawling The Lord of the Rings was becoming, compared with The Hobbit:
‘It is a curse having the epic temperament in an overcrowded age devoted to snappy bits!’
And to think that he wrote this in 1944, not 2024… but perhaps the sons of Zion have always been at war with the sons of Greece, as one of the prophets says – just as Tolkien (‘Zion’), as his many letters suggest, felt himself enraged by the moral regress of a society that was technologically progressive (‘Greece’) – devising ever more sophisticated ways of killing each other. Fans of the films will forget that the book version of The Lord of the Rings ends with a dystopian vision of The Shire overtaken by industry. This was his greatest fear. And what would be the signal of a society losing its moral compass? Snappy bits… say hello to social media, Tolkien.
Still, all hope is not lost, for The Lord of the Rings was published, and found, not just a readership, but worldwide success beyond anything its author could have imagined. The epic temperament finds a home in the heart of humanity, satisfying a hunger for something truly meaningful that yet remains, stronger than ever, after all the bombs have fallen and the dust has begun to clear…
I often wonder about the great artists, writers, and composers of the last century, of the Romantic era, of the Renaissance… would they have produced the same great works had they been using personal computers? Had they been on Instagram? What epic literature has been produced over the past three decades that might hope to hold a candle to the great works of Tolkien, or Joyce, or Dickens, or the Brontës? Will today’s music artists creating flash-in-the-pan instant Instagram hits be remembered a year from now, let alone a hundred years from now, as we remember Stravinsky or Mahler? Which artists are practicing the slow work of art, playing the long game, creating something that, in Tolkien’s case, may take more than a lifetime to fully realise, but which will leave an indelible mark on human history?
Ben David Trigg 