HP Lovecraft & JRR Tolkien: world creators in the century of irrationalism

Howard Phillips Lovecraft and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien are both sons and active protagonists of the XNUMXth century. It is possible to read their work and activities as an expression of the aspirations, emotional needs, but also of the fears and tensions of the man of the twentieth century, as well as establish, rightly, connections between them and the movements of twentieth-century irrationalism which, on several levels , characterize the escape from the reality of the last century: from pseudoscience to anthroposophy, from esotericism to the revival of the myths of civilizations lost and submerged by the Sea, in the times of Atlantis and Lemuria.

The Victorian โ€œGothic Revivalโ€ and the romantic nostalgia for the Middle Agesย 

William Morris's literary work is an expression of the climax of his time: the gothic revival of the Victorian era aimed at evoking a fantasy Middle Ages, an invention to be contrasted with modernity. Thus Morris re-elaborates and retrieves symbols, themes and topoi of romances and poems of the medieval age: the cyclical journey, of initiation, of the hero protagonist, the trials to be overcome represented by the "merciless lady" and the perilous wood, the romantic nostalgia for forgotten times, for remote places that belonged to a mythical past. Everyone fears that Tolkien he will make his own and present them in a new light, renewing them, in "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings".