The Evidence of Things Not Seen:Critical Mythology andThe Lord of the Rings

Abstract

The nimbus around The Lord ofthe Rings has been strongly insisted upon by its author, many critics, and thousands of ordinary readers. Together with the novel's mass appeal and the many-headed culture industry it has begotten, this would seem to make it a useful site for an analy? sis of what the mythic signifies in contemporary culture, especially given its historical appearance after the monuments of high modernism such as Ulysses but before Magic Realism and full postmodernity. With the exception of comparative religious studies, however, the question of how the can be accommodated to the other categories of contemporary theory has never been satisfactorily addressed, at least partly because of lack of interest. From the high-water mark of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957), we have reached a point where at least one eminent scholar of religion can ask Is Myth Obsolete? (Ellwood). Any analysis of the has to acknowledge that it is nowadays most often used as a means to mark the distance of a given text or phenomenon from its cultural context rather than any useful connections to it. Because it is mythic, therefore, sympathetic critics can locate The Lord