Apocalypse and its aftermath

. . . .Tolkien’s fantasy epic was written during the same postwar decades as the utopian histories of E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, and it too conjures a myth of struggle and deliverance, revolutionary energy and hope carried by little people against tyrannical might and unharnessed destruction. The Hobbits from the Shire had first appeared in The Hobbit (1937), which was imbued with the Arcadian and English nostalgia that pervaded that era, culminating in Brideshead Revisited (1945). Tolkien himself had been invalided out of the trenches of the First World War; but he lost his family and most of his friends from his university days in that war, and his experience can be descried in the endless combat of The Lord of the Rings. The book became a secular Bible for the hippy generation, and traces of their brand of anarchism – individualist, hedonist, pacific, antinomian – linger in the medieval and Celtic nostalgia that envelops the book’s afterlife as a touchstone of the New Age. But its present incarnation, as a film, projects into our here and now a vision of one small, beleaguered tribe and its allies overthrowing a mighty imperium in altogether changed political circumstances, without much thought of transformation, negotiation, organic exchange or development.

Some other filaments of past and present apocalypticism are worth teasing out, in order to grasp why its myth has regained moral force. Anglo-Saxon warrior epics such as Beowulf were established as the Ur-texts of English Literature by Professor Tolkien at Oxford, where Philip Pullman was a student in the 1960s. Pullman read English – unhappily – then started work as a schoolteacher in Oxford during both the first phase of the Tolkien cult and, as he often recalls with some asperity, the popular ascendancy of another Oxford visionary for
children, C. S. Lewis, and his Narnia cycle. Pullman’s highly ambitious trilogy, His Dark Materials, consciously defies both those precursors of his youth: he challenges the archaic savagery and the apocalyptic vision of Tolkien’s invented Englishness, and Lewis’s Anglican piety. He draws on a parallel, dialectical literary tradition, taking on Milton, speaking with Blake (who has, for these purposes, become an angelic presence, constantly there), shadowing Bunyan, and surpassing certainly Milton and even Blake in his defiance of Christian dualism, his rejection of the doctrine of original sin and his championing of women, children, and their energies of curiosity, sex and love. He stages several topoi of apocalyptic struggle, but in each case, makes a knight’s move in another direction.

Full story not displayed at the TLS, but still well worth reading.