The Pleasure of the Perilous Woods: Byron's Literary and Cultural Legacies

This Byron Society talk by William Sherwood charts the impact of Lord Byron’s literary and cultural productions on J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth. Although scholars have found liberal traces of John Keats’s and William Wordsworth’s literary and linguistic aesthetics in Tolkien’s writing, it is by starting to read against the latter that Byron’s place in Middle-earth can start to be understood. From solitary wanderers and brooding masculine figures to a melancholic disillusionment with modern societies living through global warfare, there are many unacknowledged threads that place Tolkien’s characters and fictional civilisations within the traditions strongly associated with Byron’s writing and cultural afterlives. This begs the question: to what degree is Tolkien truly Byronic?