The Middle Ages, at least as reimagined by the 1960s, offered a pre-capitalist, enchanted world of communes and troubadours. Although we now stereotype the Middle Ages aesthetic as a sort of grey porridge full of nuns, this isn’t accurate. Historian Jacques Le Goff describes “big jewels inserted into the boards of book-bindings, glowing gold... See more

A Genre Which Is Trifling By Definition

If not for the encouragement of his friend C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien said he wouldn’t have finished writing The Lord of the Rings. Primarily because, Colin Duriez explains in Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship, “In the 1920s, there was no adult readership for fantasy, or literature in which the... See more

Middle-earth is marred by civilizational decline, the loss of hope among men, and a profound sense that the beauty of the past is doomed to decay. This slow fading was the author’s attempt to express something he had felt all his life, which he once described as a “heart-racking sense of the vanished past.”