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.
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.