Profs & Pints Baltimore: Tolkien's Fight Against Futurism

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Tolkien’s Fight Against Futurism,” a look at a beloved fantasy author as fundamentally engaged in a battle to preserve beauty, with Graham McAleer, professor of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland and teacher of a course on the morals and politics of Lord of the Rings.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-tolkien-futurism .]

As a young man in the early 20th century J.R.R. Tolkien watched an avant-garde art form known as Futurism become all the rage. Shaped by industrialization and by admiration for new machinery, Futurism celebrated speed, acceleration, and the whirl of technical innovation, earning it another name, Vorticism, in Tolkien’s England.

Although remembered mainly as a writer, Tolkien also was an accomplished pen-and-ink artist who kept abreast of the art movements of his time. He developed a distaste for Futurism and what it signified that only grew stronger as he experienced the horrors of modern warfare as a soldier at the 1916 Battle of the Somme. He regarded what Futurism celebrated as “the Machine,” representing fascist politics and apocalyptic war, and his opposition to it deeply influenced not just his art but his written works.

Gain insights into how Tolkien’s sensibilities as a visual artist shaped his worldview and writing with Graham McAleer, a scholar of philosophy who has closely studied Tolkien’s work.

Professor McAleer will look at how Tolkien’s lore can be seen as one long meditation on beauty and its problematic twin, vanity, with what separated them most in Tolkien’s mind being their respective approaches to time: Beauty is patient, vanity is not.

We’ll look at Tolkien’s argument that that impatience mars beauty and corrupts our standing in a cosmos, and we’ll consider his characterization of his own work as “cosmogonical drama” dealing with the universe’s origins. You’ll learn how his tales of Dark Lords squaring off against elven queens and genial Hobbits reflect his view that war is always a dispute about beauty.

You’ll come to see Tolkien as having grappled with a profound philosophical question that dates back to Plato, and you’ll emerge from the talk with a much deeper understanding and appreciation of Tolkien’s works. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk itself starts at 6:30)

Image: A bust of Tolkien at Oxford. From a photo by Julian Nyča / Wikimedia Commons.