2.2 Re-building Myths

Whereas the role of mythological motifs is analogical, describing the modern world in the light of a readily available set of models, works that are mythical do not offer myths as analogies, but make them their principal subject-matter or structural principle.

White, Mythology in the Modern Novel: A Study of Prefigurative Techniques, 7

Considering this distinction made by John J. White together with the fact (again) that Tolkien fiercely rejected direct allegory as well as explicit analogy, the conclusion is that The Lord of the Rings was a mythical work, for the story not only included its own myths but also took place around them. It looks pretentious for a modern writer to have presumably created new myths, for myths are always related to antiquity as time is considered to be the highest authority to validate their nature as myths. The interesting point in Tolkien regarding myths is that he was somehow coming back to the very exact moment when present-day England was about to develop its former legends, to a zero-start. He was at the start line of a 100 flat-metres race, side by side with Virgil, Chaucer, the writer of Beowulf, Snorry Sturluson, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and many others, ready to be the one to give England a mythology of its own.

A myth introduced by a modern novelist into his work can prefigure and hence anticipate the plot in a number of ways. Although an awareness of sources is declining, the ideal reader can still be expected to be familiar with most prefigurations beforehand, just as the novelist himself was when he wrote the work. And because it is better known than the new work, the myth will offer the novelist a short-hand system of symbolic comment on modern events.

White, Mythology in the Modern Novel: A Study of Prefigurative Techniques, 12

The modern character has sometimes been regarded as a reincarnation of the appropriate god, as playing the role of a mythological figure, or as engaging in an imitation of him.

White, Mythology in the Modern Novel: A Study of Prefigurative Techniques, 18

The only problem is that none of Tolkien's characters save hobbits could be considered as a 'modern character', that is to say, someone resembling any contemporary average citizen. Hobbits are accomodated (some of them wealthy) countryside inhabitants, much too social and culturally advanced for the rest of races taking part in the War of the Ring. Hobbits have overcome the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Middle-Age (Feudalism), and would be about to enter the Industrial Revolution. Of course if we could use allegory, many characters would be taken as reincarnations instantly.
That's why The Lord of the Rings cannot be compared, for instance, to James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce made an allegory to the ancient Greek myth presenting a single character in a daily 'odissey', a man/hero facing/fighting the usual adversities of contemporary times. Just by reading the title, as White says, the reader can prefigure a story from the former myth. But Tolkien WAS NOT explaining present-day reality through myths, or at least that wasn't his purpose. He 'spiced' every possible analogy with 'universalism'; neither happenings nor characters were detailed 'pictures', but idealistic representations.

If myth and modernity are counterpointed in fiction, the myth is bound to be set up as the norm against which our age should measure itself.

[...]

As a result, a twentieth-century novel, set in a contemporary society but with a mythological motif running through it, can become so distorted that the modern tale is intepreted allegorically, as a veiled myth.

White, Mythology in the Modern Novel: A Study of Prefigurative Techniques, 23

The first quote matches Tolkien's intentions perfectly, but in LotR myth and modernity are not exactly counterparted IN fiction, but THROUGH fiction. The Lord of the Rings is set before the world as we know it, our world, existed. Middle-Earth in the Third Age is not an allegory of our contemporary world, but an idealised picture of what would be right and what is completely wrong in it.

2.2.a Norse & English Mythological Heritage

And in the poem I think we may observe not confusion, a half-hearted or a muddled business, but a fusion that has occurred at a given point of contact between old and new, a product of thought and deep emotion.
One of the most potent elements in that fusion is the Northern courage: the theory of courage, which is the greatest contribution of Early Northern Literature.

Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, 20

Of English pre-Christian mythology we know practically nothing. But the fundamentally similar heroic temper of ancient England and Scandinavia cannot have been founded on (or perhaps rather, cannot have generated) mytholiges divergent on this essential point. 'The Northern Gods', Ker said, 'have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason' - mythologically, the monsters - 'but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation'. And in their war men are their chosen allies, able when heroic to share in this 'absolute resistance, perfect because without hope'. At least in this vision of the final defeat of the humane (and of the divine made in its image), and in the essential hostility of the gods and heroes on the one side and the monsters on the other, we may suppose that pagan English and Norse imagination agreed.

Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, 21

There are two very noticeable stories behind these words: the Gotterdammerung and The Silmarillion. Firstly, the ultimate fight when all that is known, Odin included, will disappear whatever the efforts to preserve it. The Gotterdammerung is in Tolkien what the elves fight against, so desperately that they even challenge the Valar. Again the lies of Morgoth: making the elves believe they could control time becoming the masters of Middle-Earth, when at the end, even the gods, the true masters of all that is, will inevitably disappear. Morgoth simply turned unescapable fates into curses to the eyes of both Men and Elves. The ability of (sub-)creation and recovery to elves, and the chance of a temporary existence to men not to stick to the material world and suffer, were the true gifts of Ilúvatar that Morgoth inverted (Mastery/dominion over creations and eternal life). And that's how the Norse dual struggles, 'men against gods' and 'men and gods against monsters' are also present in The Silmarillion: Féanor the Noldor Elf challenging the Valar, Féanor challenging Morgoth, and both Féanor and the Valar fighting against Morgoth.

What's the conclusion for this puzzling qualitative as well as quantitative difference? Strange as it may seem, the answer is by no means a matter of writing-style nor length. Fairy-tales shared common 'nameless' places, that is to say, extremely generic ideas or moral concepts. Fairy stories, as Tolkien saw them, were themselves independent 'named' places, they acquired elements from the background and made them unique. For instance, the tales of the Three Little Pigs and the Little Red Riding Hood have the countryside and a man-eater wolf in common. But neither the place nor the wolf have a name of their own. In The Lord of the Rings there is Middle-Earth, Gondor, Rohan, Mordor, and a battering ram with the shape of a wolf, Grond. The forest from The Sleeping Beauty or Snow White is a forest, it has no context of its own (no name, no geography), whereas the forest near Mordor is called Fangorn, the Mirkwood, and it's inhabited by living-trees with a particular history.