J. R. R. Tolkien, War, and Nationalism
Tolkien may not have intentionally created his fictive nations to mirror real nations, but his world certainly bears the scars of his experiences of war. The World Wars heightened his fear of losing everything that he loved about his local culture through literal obliteration or assimilation into another culture in the event of England‘s losing. Tolkien saw the nation as a social construct that potentially could minimize losses, if not wholly protect local culture from the forces that threatened to destroy it. Yet he also perceived the nation‘s limitations in its ability to protect culture. A nation could grow too large for itself, becoming obsessed with consuming other nations. For Tolkien, national property-amassing leads to a loss of the cultural identity that nationhood aims to preserve. When the forces threatening individual nations become overwhelming, those nations often need to join forces to prevent being taken over by other, more powerful countries. An examination of Tolkien‘s fiction and numerous other sources, including essays and personal letters, suggests that he felt that separate nations should co-exist without imposing on one another, and that the nation taking over others would lose its own identity, whether gradually or suddenly. Despite Tolkien‘s efforts to distance himself from what he felt modernity represented, his fiction (whether consciously or not) grapples with the mid-twentieth century ideological conflicts surrounding the nation. The resulting sense of loss and powerlessness underlies much of Tolkien‘s fiction and leads him to a concept of the nation as an imperfect protector of culture, tempered by its need to rely on other nations. INDEX WORDS: Tolkien, Nationalism, World War I, World War II, National identity, National memory, Internationalism, Individualism, Modernism J. R. R. TOLKIEN, WAR, AND NATIONALISM
J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth
Introduction by Daniel Timmons Tolkien the Bard: His Tale Grew in the Telling by C. W. Sullivan III The Dragon-Lore of Middle-earth: Tolkien and Old English and Old Norse Tradition by Jonathan Evans J.R.R. Tolkien and the True Hero by George Clark Tolkien's Versecraft in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by Geoffrey Russom The Monsters Are Talismans and Transgressions: Tolkien and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Roger C. Schlobin The Sins of the Middle-earth: Tolkien's Use of Medieval Allegory by Charles W. Nelson Is Tolkien a Renaissance Man? Sir Phillips Sidney's Defense of Poetry and J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" by Tanya Caroline Wood Weaving Nets of Gloom: "Darkness Profound" in Tolkien and Milton by Debbie Sly Gagool and Gollum: Exemplars of Degeneration in King Solomon's Mines and The Hobbit by William N. Rogers II and Michael R. Underwood "Joy Beyond the Walls of the World": The Secondary World-Making of J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis by David Sandner Taking the Part of Trees: Eco-Conflict in Middle-earth by Verlyn Flieger Women Fantasists: In the Shadow of the Ring by Faye Ringel Loss Eternal in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth by W.A. Senior Orcs, Wraiths, Wights: Tolkien's Images of Evil by Tom Shippey Bibliography Index
The Guardian of the 'Sacred Flame': The Failed Political Resurrection of Sir Oswald Mosley after 1945
The message of encouragement, in difficult times, with which Mosley raised the morale of embattled members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1938, is still remembered as a clarion call by the 'Friends of OM', the last flickering ember of the sacred flame. At no time was it more needed by the faithful than in 1945, but the full story behind Mosley's return to politics, and the extent to which he remained within a fascist perspective, has still to be written. The release of Home Office files on Mosley's political activities between 1945 and 1948, and the papers of Robert Saunders at the University of Sheffield, however, have provided much interesting new material to assess Mosley's attempted political resurrection after the second world war.1 John Hope has argued that the Union Movement acted as a transmission belt between preand postwar British fascism. He points to the significance of the internment camps in the second world war, from which new leaders emerged, who were to play an important role in the revival of neo-fascism in Britain after 1945.2 This is an interesting argument, but fascism was an interwar phenomenon and many were devastated by internment. Only the most committed wished to revive the tradition in a new form of nostalgic, mimetic or neo-fascism after the war.3 Why Mosley tried to adapt his fascism to the new realities, in a political climate well symbolized by the deep freeze of the winter of 1947, is the main focus of this article. The key to Mosley's return to politics, despite his realization that he would be regarded as a political flat-earther, was provided in an interview he gave to