Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William Edwin Bettridge

Critical Essay by William Edwin Bettridge

SOURCE: Bettridge, William Edwin. “Tolkien's ‘New’ Mythology.” Mythlore 16, no. 4 (summer 1990): 27-31.

In the following essay, Bettridge distinguishes between myth and allegory and shows the ways in which Tolkien created in The Lord of the Rings a mythology.

Myth, as the folklorist and the student of literature normally understand it, is the presentation of dramatic and supernatural episodes to explain and interpret natural events, to make concrete and meaningful and particular an otherwise abstract and difficult perception of man or a cosmic view. It may, in its various forms, explain or raise questions about such fundamental issues as creation, divinity, religion; it may justify rituals, or guess at the meaning of life and death. In short, it provides a narrative, dramatic embodiment of man's perceptions about the deepest truths and most perplexing questions concerning his existence, here or elsewhere.

Since the study of human psychology and literary criticism came to be regarded as near sciences, the study of myth has been intense and often confusing, not to say wrongheaded. After Freud began the plumb the depths of the human subconscious, the tendency grew to see in the tales of mankind, especially those we have identified as mythic, reflections of common truths, hopes, fears, aspirations of races and of mankind generally. Working from Jung's idea of the racial consciousness, thinkers like Philip Wheelwright envisioned an archetypal imagination, something deep and primitive in all that manifests itself in the stories we make and tell and preserve.

Since the nineteenth century, the exploration of man's myths...
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