Tolkien the Modernist: "Beowulf" and Monsters

From Verlyn Flieger's book Splintered Light:

For all his sympathy with the poet [of Beowulf], he adds the perspective of his own century to his understanding of the Middle Ages in defending the poet's use of monsters as Beowulf's opponents. His reading of the monsters is psychological rather than allegorical. Grendel and the dragon are both monsters, true; but they are not the same kind of monster. In distinguishing between them, Tolkien is a modern, however powerful his inclination toward the past. "In a sense," he says [...] "the foe is always both within and without.... Thus Grendel has a perverted human shape.... For it is true of man, maker of myths, that Grendel and the Dragon, in their lust, greed, and malice, have a part in him." The monsters are within us as well as outside us. The hostile dark is a part of man, not just his besieging foe. The dragon may be the instrument of final defeat, but Grendel carries his own threat to humanity, for he moves in the shape of a man. And though the youthful Beowulf is victorious in his meeting with Grendel, that inner darkness, no less than the dragon's external threat, is always there to be battled.

The recurrence of these references to darkness, to the precariousness of the light, to the monsters, is forceful evidence of the emotional pull of the dark for Tolkien. His own reading of Christianity tends to emphasize the tragedy of the Fall and its consequences. [...] Tolkien's ability to enter in to the mood and spirit of Beowulf is persuasive evidence that he was acquainted firsthand with the battle [against the dark] and that, as Humphrey Carpenter comments, his experience had taught him that "no battle would be won forever." He could not have seen so deeply into the poem or experienced such near-identification with the poet unless Beowulf had struck a sympathetic chord in his own nature. It would seem clear that however he may qualify the pagan point of view, his heart is with the tragedy.

Tolkien the Modernist: "The Sea-bell"

From Verlyn Flieger's book A Question of Time:

The pairing of fairy-stories and war is more complex, for they would seem to be opposites. The easy, surface reading builds on the opposition, inferring from Tolkien's words a purely escapist impulse, a retreat from the horror and boredom of the trenches into the magical world of Faerie. Beneath the surface, however, his words suggest a deep but unmanifest connection between these apparently unlikely things. In the way that extremes can sometimes meet, War and Faerie have a certain resemblance to one another. Both are set beyond the reach of ordinary human experience. Both are equally indifferent to the needs of ordinary humanity. Both can change those who return so that they become "pinned in a kind of ghostly deathlessness," not just unable to say where they have been but unable to communicate to those who have not been there what they have seen and experienced. Perhaps worst of all, both war and Faerie can change out of all recognition the wander's perception of the world to which he returns, so that never again can it be what it once was. [...]

"The Sea-bell," then, can be read and comprehended in several mutually reinforcing contexts. Generically it can be ranged alongside Coleridge's "The Ancient Mariner," Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," Elliot's The Wasteland as once of a number of romantic and modern poems of desperation and loss, as a statement of despair. Artistically it is a powerful expression of the dark side of Tolkien's work,
standing as both as a corrective to [James M.] Barrie and as the bleak, alternative fate that might have haunted Frodo's dreams [in the house of Tom Bombadil]. On a personal level it can be read as a statement about his own bereavement at the loss of Faerie. And in a larger context, one both personal and historical, it can be understood as an echo and a reminder of all the loss that war and peace and change and living in the world can bring.

Tolkien the Modernist: "Writing out of himself..."

From Verlyn Flieger's book A Question of Time:

A story need not be about a particular war in order to show its effects. Nor does it have to have a contemporary setting in order to mirror contemporary thought. Indeed, quite the contrary. The most effective commentary on an age or an event is as often as not oblique rather than direct. The nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" says as much about the perils of kingship as does Lydgate's Fall of Princes, and Huckleberry Finn is as telling a piece of social commentary as Das Kapital. Tolkien is too often dismissed out of hand as an anachronism, a contemporary Pre-Raphaelite trying to pretend that the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment never happened. On the contrary, any thoughtful reading of his work that looks below the surface will show that he is in fact quite a modern thinker, dipping into the past for the stuff of his story but reworking it for the age in which he lived and felt. [...] His creative energies kept pace with the times, consciously and unconsciously recording for his audience their world and worldview, their defeats and renewals, their despairs and hopes. We write what we are, and Tolkien wrote not just out of his scholarship but out of himself and out of his response to this best and worst of times that is the twentieth century. Writing out of himself, he dared to be of a time not his own, and in doing so he made a profound and lasting comment on his own time.

The Marriage of the Living and the Dead (Or, A Reply to a Rant, and a Realization)

The Inklings (esp Tolkien and Lewis) did not see fantasy as an escape from reality, but as a way to get at Reality so that we can see reality better. Lucy and her siblings didn't stay in the wardrobe forever. They came back to war-torn England, and that is the point: not to stay in wonderland, but to come back from it and use what you learned there in the "real" world. Tolkien knew this incredibly well; that is what the whole "Scouring of the Shire" was about. What was the point of going through the salvation of Middle-earth if you can't even go back and save the Shire in the end? My final claim will always be that fantasy (insofar that it takes us to Reality) is more real than reality as it is given to us.

However (da da dum), I have come to a realization. I discovered (just yesterday) that, in regards to literary pursuits (and not necessarily spiritual or intellectual pursuits), I am not a student of Lewis (gasp!). I am, in fact, a student of Tolkien. Here is why:
Though the closest of friends, Tolkien and Lewis fundamentally disagreed on a philosophical level that influenced their fiction. Lewis was a firm Platonist. In his mind, there is the "real" world, and then there is the Real world, a transcend realm of abstract ideals by which the "real" world has its being (insofar as it "partakes" of the Real world, i.e., a tree's "treeness" is determined by how much it "partakes" in the ideal Tree of the Real). The Real world is the "magic," and the only way to get to that world is by a transportation (or, as Lewis put it, a "transposition") into it: so the kids had to go through a wardrobe (or a train station, or a picture, etc.) to get to Narnia; so Elwin Ransom has to go to another planet in the Space Trilogy. In order to get to the Real, one had to escape to the Real. As a Platonic Christian, Lewis saw the Real as God, and one must escape to Him in order to get to Him (and, conversely, bring Him back into this world, such as in That Hideous Strength). Though the "magic" (the Real) can be brought back to this world, it is fundamentally separate from the world.
That is where the two part. Tolkien was (in contrast to Lewis) a staunch Aristotelian. To him, all things are made up of two elements: the accident and the substance, i.e., the outward manifestation and the inner disposition. It is similar to Platonism in that there is a "real" and a Real, and the "real" has its being insofar as it partakes of the Real. The difference, however, is that, in Aristotelian thought, the Real is not separate from the "real." On the contrary, it is intimately a part of its being. Everything is substanced with the Real, although its outward manifestations may differ (all trees look different, but they are still all trees). Thus, in Middle-earth, everything is substanced with the music of the Valar. The "magic" is not a fantasy world you escape to; it is in the "real" world, in the now, in varying degrees (with evil being that which completely rejects it). It is not merely abstract; it is concrete as well. That is why in the LOTR (both the books and the movies) it all seems so real. You feel like you are reading/watching ancient history (or something you wished was history), not merely a fantasy. The "magic" is (and this is the amazing thing) not seen as magical. It is just there, simply a part of reality, all reality, including the good and the bad (for the music of the Valar knows both joy and sorrow, from the majestic trumps of Manwe, to the mournful horns of Ulmo; and all are beautiful because they are of the music). Tolkien did not like that Lewis made the Real, made the "magic," something separate that you had to escape to and bring back. In his mind, the Real/"magic" is (and forever has been) in the world and a part of the world right now, as real as any river or tree, bird or beast, man or woman.

I (as I discovered yesterday) hold to the latter. Reality is not something that is completely separate from us that we have to "get at" and bring back. It is with us right now, as we speak, in this very room; Immanuel, i.e., God is with us. The Fall marred the world's ability to present it, and muddled our vision to see it; but it is not totally silent, and we are not completely blind. We catch a glimpse of glory every once and a while, a stab of joy here and there. Christianity has always believed in the sacramental, that God is enmeshed with as well as independent from creation, that the finite can (and does) contain the infinite. As a Christian (esp. as a Christian writer), I believe this wholeheartedly.
And I find this exciting, because as a writer in love with the fantastic, I find myself struggling to tell my story so that it can find relevance and be taken seriously in a world dominated by Realism (which I do not despise like I used to, but that is another story). In a unexpected move, God pointed me to someone I had set on the back burner in my mind, i.e., Tolkien. Of course, the unexpected is typically God's modus operandi.
Perhaps an argument can be made that the Inklings "copped out," that they chose to attack modernity from the outside instead of engaging it from the inside (like Elliot or O'Connor). Perhaps you can say that about them all, except for Tolkien. I here proclaim that he (as best as I understand it) was a true paradox: he was a Fantastic Realist, i.e., his Aristotelian philosophy allowed him to create a realist fantasy! He found (or was found by) the secret to bridging fantasy and realism, to the marriage of the living and the dead: sacramental theology makes the "magic" real--not idealistic, not fluffy, not abstract, not disconnected, not contrived, not naive; but actual, dense, concrete, relevant, mysterious, and ancient. The key to making a realist fantasy is, not to escape to a magical world, but to live in one.