Mitologia na Contemporaneidade: o Legendarium de J.R.R. Tolkien

Abstract

The mythology of progress, as called Paolo Rossi, based on the belief of the continued betterment of mankind and the benefits of science and, more recently, the technique, was one of the decisive guides to the project of modernity in Western societies, and although shaken during the last century, still exists in the actual imaginary. Given this, JRR Tolkien once said: It is a curse having the epic temperament in an overcrowded age devoted to snappy bits! This discomfort with their own time is, according to Agamben, the characteristic of the contemporary par excellence, one that does not fully accommodates with your time, realizing the shadows that this entails. In this context, the Legendarium, term given by the author to his literary set, developed mostly during the first half of the twentieth century, proposes a fictional world grounded in fantasy and in mythic, seemingly anachronistic with his time, but paradoxically contemporary. Therefore, this paper intends to reflect on aspects of contemporary imaginary through the analysis of literary JRR Tolkien, focused mainly in the works The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) and The Silmarillion (1977).