From Utopia to Faërian eutopia: Thomas More, Ernst Bloch, and J. R. R. Tolkien

This article attempts to reconstruct Tolkien's understanding of utopia, through his letters and his familiarity with utopian literature—particularly Thomas More's Utopia. It positions Tolkien's writings in relation to Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope and within the broader twentieth-century crisis of utopia, marked by the disillusionment caused by the rise of totalitarian ideologies. It argues that Tolkien opposes utopian ideals with a theological vision of hope, grounded in divine providence and the “eucatastrophic” joy produced by fairy stories. To account for the distinctive nature of imagined places and societies in Middle-earth, the article turns to the theologically infused sense of eutopia found in Thomas More's Utopia, and introduces the term Faërian eutopia to describe Tolkien's sub-created worlds.