Tolkien

Tolkien's work makes for an interesting case study when examining the suggestion that "along with the wish to revere the medieval world goes an apparently irresistible urge towards satire, parody and other forms of comic subversion of it"[1]. This is due to the fact that he wrote both literary criticism of medieval texts and fictional `alternate medieval mythology', and used humour in both. His reverence for medieval literature is obvious in his defence of Beowulf [2] …

…Tolkien reveres the early medieval poem of Beowulf, is it really the medieval world of the poem that he attempts to subvert with his humour? Is the humour linked to the medieval subject matter at all, or is its presence coincidental? In this essay I will explore Tolkien's use of the comic in the Beowulf essay and The Hobbit in order to try and discover whether it is the medieval world which is his target.