Abstract

The fourth chapter shows how the tradition of Modernism in which one might place Lubetkin (with writers T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis) would itself be demonised by writers within the Romantic-Modern tradition, exploring how fear and hostility provoked by the Promethean energies of the USSR (and by the New Linguistic Doctrine of the Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr in particular) manifest themselves in perhaps the most memorable demonisation of a symbol of Enlightenment: the all-seeing Eye of Sauron on its pyramid. Deeply committed to the discipline of philology that had inspired Schopenhauer (and the radical empiricism that followed), J. R. R. Tolkien is revealed to be an unlikely combatant in the great culture war between these two estranged philosophies that defined the era of High Modernism.