Why Tolkein kept his distance from the mainstream of literary Catholicism
A procession of one: even in Catholic Oxford, Tolkien followed his own path
ALAMY/ALBUM
British literary Catholicism was a house of many mansions in the 1930s, but the author of The Hobbit rarely mixed with his eminent contemporaries
One might note the conversation between two English undergrads in David Lodge’s How Far Can You Go? (1980) – this draws on Lodge’s early 1950s student days – about the respective merits of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948). The debate ends with one of them crowing: “It said in The Observer that they’re the two best English novelists going, so that’s one in the eye for the Prods.”
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