...Shippey points out that much Modernist writing depends heavily on literary allusion, and especially allusion to the literary inheritance of Greece and Rome. Ulysses is the obvious example here, followed closely by Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Joyce refers occasionally to Irish myth and legend, and Eliot quotes the Upanishads, but those references are not central; if you really want to get to the heart of those texts, you must know Odysseus and Tiresias. (Shakespeare too.) Even Yeats, for all of his invocations of Irish legend, expects his readers to know about Leda and the swan and to grasp the significance of the death of Agamemnon. The essential works of the classical tradition are the lingua franca for the most ambitious and demanding writers in English-language Modernism. (As they were for Milton, who effectively defines ambition for so many writers that follow him.)Tolkien doesn’t care about any of this.
He alludes frequently to works of what he regarded as his own tradition, the ‘Shire tradition’ of native English poetry…. Tolkien’s heroes and his major debts came from the native and Northern tradition which Milton never knew and Eliot ignored: Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Sigurd, the Eddic gods — a tradition seen by most modernists as literally barbarous (the possession of people who speak incomprehensible languages).
In brief, “Tolkien was as educated as [the literati] were, but in a different school.”
Educated in a different school. And the key point here — Shippey hints at this, but is not quite as explicit as he might have been — is that Tolkien never expects his readers to know any of what he knows. To fully appreciate Ulysses you need to know the Odyssey, but the reader of The Hobbit need not be aware of Snorri Sturluson’s “Tally of the Dwarves” in his Skaldskaparmál:...
Jacobs comes to the following conclusion:
The great Modernist writers have a tendency to flatter their learned readers and disdain the others; they are in many respects principially elitist. (As has often been noted, Leopold Bloom is Joyce’s hero but he couldn’t have read Joyce’s book about him.) There’s none of this in Tolkien; the astonishing range of allusions to medieval writing in The Lord of the Rings is certainly meant to provide a kind of felt (not directly perceived) coherence to the reader — Shippey is great on this — but its primary purpose is to satisfy Tolkien’s own imaginative needs. There was, I think, something creatively liberating about having been educated in a school — Germanic and Anglo-Saxon philology — that virtually none of his readers ever attended.
There are writers and composers and artists and film-makers who not only wear their learning on their sleeves but seem to snort contemptuously at anyone who can't "keep up". They and their fans particularly seem to say, "What, you didn't get what I just did? Well, you're a barbarian." Tolkien's world-building, per Shippey and Jacobs, doesn't require you to be steeped in everything Tolkien knew about languages, literary traditions and cultures in order to get what he's doing within his stories. Knowing all that stuff may deepen or enrich your appreciation of what Tolkien did (or your animosity toward what he set out to do because, of course, every classic author, musician, poet, composer has detractors as well as admirers), but it's a testament to Tolkien's approach that his work doesn't demand you know his influences in advance to even know what he's doing.
That is a fairly good distinction between high modernists and more "pop" writers. George Steiner semi-lamented the loss of "literacy" in the book In Bluebird's Castle but detractors such as John Borstlap and the late Richard Taruskin did not pay attention to Steiner's observation/proposal that in place of "literacy" drawing on Greek and Roman literary traditions there was a new literacy, a musical literacy in which "kids these days" were conversant in an astonishing variety of musical styles and forms no one in previous generations could have been exposed to because mechanical recording didn't exist back then.
Whereas James Joyce and T. S. Eliot (I still like Eliot's poetry even if I've never mentioned him much here) wore their influences on their sleeves and Eliot paraded his learning via montage and stream of consciousness, musical eclecticists who have tried anything similar have ben dismissed as composing "pastiche". High modernist literature could engage in pastiche as long as it had all the requisite snob appeal of academic obscurity. Musical pastiche has been another matter, although I suppose it's not as though musical pastiche hasn't been done brilliantly. Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal after John Dowland, for instance, is brilliant and draws upon Dowland as a foundation for a thoroughly "modern" musical work. That is, of course, Britten wearing his learning on his sleeve.
The emergence of a new meta-literacy in pop music particularly and music more generally may be anathema to those whose idea of "culture" depends on being so steeped in Greek and Roman art and literature that a single strategic line evokes entire bodies of work that make the alert ready go "I see what they did there." That does not make the musical literacies of the last fifty years uncivilized. Just because many scholars of music do not navigate toggling back and forth between Bob Dylan, Xenakis, Ellington, Scott Joplin, Haydn, and Macedonian folk song in their literary output doesn't mean a whole bunch of us aren't doing that in our daily lives, even many music critics actually do that, it's probably more the case that for tenured academics their body of literature and reception history hasn't come close to "catching up" with the plethora of musical allusions that permeate the musical landscape of the 21st century.
I've got some ideas about that related to M H Abrams' classic work The Mirror and The Lamp but I'll write about what I think about the revenge of the mirror on the lamp in the age of mechanical recording, and the return of mimesis with a vengeance some time later, I hope. Romantic and romanticist music theory about art as "lamp" in the literate/sheet music tradition runs into a brick wall when the "mirror" of mimesis in music and cultural appropriation shows up because, as scholars of pop music already know, there's a sonic color line and if scholars of classical music refuse to concede such a thing even exists then they want theorists of the mirror to be judged by theorists of the lamp (let readers understand). Some of us think a path forward is abandoning the "lamp" theory of the arts and "expression" and retrieving the "mirror". But I am trying to save those thoughts for later.
