Epic and Romance in The Lord Of The Rings

In the field of comparative literature The Lord of the Rings has been most frequently studied within the contexts of romance and epic. This approach, however, leaves out important generic aspects of the global picture, such as the narrative’s strong adherence to the novel genre and to mythic traditions beyond romance and epic narratives. If we choose one particular genre as the yardstick against which to measure the work’s success in narrative terms, we tend to end up with the conclusion that The Lord of the Rings does not quite make sense within the given limits of the genre in question. In Tolkien’s work there is a narrative and stylistic exploration of the different genres’ constraints in which the Western narrative traditions – myth, epic, romance, the novel, and their respective subgenres – interact in a previously unknown but still very much coherent world that, because of the particular cohesion required by such a chronotope, exhibits a clear contextualization of references to the previous traditions. As opposed to many contemporary literary expressions, the ensuing absence of irony and parody creates a generic dialogue, in which the various narrative traditions explore and interrogate each other’s limits without rendering the others absurdly incompatible, ridiculous or superfluous.