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But philological analysis does not dominate this study (as it did Road to Middle Earth). If The Lord of the Rings and its satellites are rooted in antiquity, they also are grounded in the modern world. Indeed, Shippey begins his book with the provocative assertion that "the dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic." He cites as examples, in addition to Tolkien, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, among others. Like Tolkien, Shippey observes, all of these writers "are combat veterans present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatic events of the century." And far from turning to fantasy as an escape from reality, they found in this literary mode a means of communicating what they had experienced, for which the tools of "realism" proved inadequate.
Tolkien's works reflect the distinctive character of his time in other ways as well. When Shippey reveals Bilbo Baggins as a reluctant and desperately bourgeois adventurer, embodying Britain's postwar malaise, most readers will wonder how they could have failed to see that all along. Precisely because he is quintessentially modern, Bilbo enables contemporary readers to connect with a legendary past: he is their stand-in, anti-heroic, bemused by the vast forces unleashed in the quest for the Ring.
Indeed, Shippey notes, anachronism, or "a superficial clash of styles," is a primary tactic in The Hobbit: battle scenes transposed from World War I, dwarves spouting business jargon, and a dragon who can be sarcastic and colloquial one moment, archaically fierce the next. Tolkien's intent, argues Shippey, is not only to bring a fantastic world within reach but also to show a fundamental unity between the present civilization and its heroic ancestry.
Tolkien was also modern in his portrayal of evil. Obvious representations of external evil forces—Sauron, the Ringwraiths, and the Orcs, for example—have led some critics to dismiss Tolkien's moral universe as simplistic. Well, Tolkien did believe in good and evil, the one sharply distinguished from the other, but his depiction of moral conflict is inescapably modern. Many of the characters in Tolkien's works are "eaten up inside"; the work of destroying the Ring nearly undoes Frodo, the ostensible hero. He is not a pure victor, then, but a kinsman of Charlie Marlow (Heart of Darkness), coming to grips not only with a foreign horror but with the evil in himself. As the trilogy's unforgettable image of addictive evil, the Ring is "part psychic amplifier, part malign power."
To acknowledge Tolkien's overlooked "modernity," Shippey insists, is not to deny that in other respects he was resolutely anti-modern. Tolkien was steeped in the English tradition to a degree almost unrecoverable today; he felt a special affinity with the Pearl-poet (whose poems he famously translated) and the Beowulf-poet. The Pearl-poet's extensive descriptions of humans laboring in an enchanted natural landscape suggested a setting for modern inner turmoil: "Tolkien's myth of stars and trees presents life as a confusion in which we all too easily lose our bearings and forget that there is a world outside our immediate surroundings."
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