Middle Earth seems almost consciously designed as a fictional, and some feel, allegorical, substitute for the technological, fragmented world of the twentieth century. In the last few decades, Tolkien has thus become a "cult figure" for those who feel spiritually displaced from the great meaningless heritage of man's sullied rule on earth and the terrifying proportions that this rule has ended in, the atomic age. If modern audiences and critics alike hunger for a world where "Frodo lives," they do so because The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy draw on the satisfying, imaginative feast of moral subsistence. The great heroes of Middle Earth— Bilbo, Frodo, Aragorn, Sam Gamgee—appear to flourish, as Robert Lowell tells us of an American hero, Colonel Shaw, "in man's lovely, / peculiar power to choose life and die," and modern readers seem moved to rejoice in finding this glorious potential alive in beings and places removed from the confused machinations of Washington and Moscow. In Tolkien's stories, not only in the celebrated trilogy but also in lesser known tales,
Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) and
Smith of Wooton Manor (1967), the anxieties of husking the empty ambiguities of contemporary life are relieved by the knowledge that good can and must still conquer over evil, although the perilous ordeal may be just painful and nasty enough to make the effort real.
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