Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium

Mark G. Doyle is professor of English and chair of the Humanities Department at Marion Military Institute.

• Introduction: Tolkien’s Popularity and Its Relationship with His Utopian and Dystopian ThemesChapter 1: Tolkien and Traditional Utopias and DystopiasChapter 2: The Sources of Tolkien’s Utopian and Dystopian VisionChapter 3: How the Environment Becomes Creation in Tolkien’s SocietiesChapter 4: Tolkien’s Utopian and Dystopian MythologyChapter 5: Tolkien’s Utopian and Dystopian PoliticsEpilogue: The Struggle for Tolkien’s Utopian and Dystopian Legacy

Mark Doyle’s Utopia and Dystopia in Tolkien's Legendarium contributes to the growing body of scholarly work demonstrating how deeply Tolkien’s literary imagination is rooted in social, ethical, philosophical, and religious traditions from the middle ages to the 20th century. In prose that is at once academically rigorous yet accessible to all readers, Professor Doyle gives the lie to naive assumptions that Tolkien’s legendarium as a whole springs from (or coddles) simplistic idealism or dewy-eyed romanticism. The author analyzes Tolkien’s works within the larger history of utopian and dystopian literary genres from Victorian medievalism to 20th-century modernism and postmodernism. Properly respectful that the sources of Tolkien’s environmental ethic are more religious and Catholic than secular and Romantic, Professor Doyle mediates the false dichotomy of pagan/Christian exposed in Claudio Testi’s Pagan Saints in Middle-earth and satisfyingly situates Tolkien’s religiously inspired environmentalism in the context of papal encyclicals touching on society, the good life, and the good creation of a good Creator. His book can be read profitably alongside Marc DiPaolo’s Fire and Snow and Susan Jeffers’s Arda Inhabited, whose themes are corroborated and extended in this book. Uniquely, Doyle explores elements of anarchism, distributionism, and Toryism in Tolkien’s political philosophy, which espoused an ethic of freedom that is not antinomian but recognizes that authoritarian controls aiming at the construction of utopias invariably have results opposed to their idealistic aims, to the detriment and destruction of the good. The book is essential.