Ghosts of mythic pasts: Mythic history in the works of Friedrich Gundolf, Robert Graves, and J. R. R. Tolkien in light of the First World War

The First World War devastated the Western world, sending many along different paths to meaning as a result of this great conflict of modernity. Three figures in particular, Friedrich Gundolf, Robert Graves, and J. R. R. Tolkien, all veterans of the First World War, sought meaning through their exploration of different versions of "Mythic History." After a preliminary examination of the lexical (through the Oxford English Dictionary ), theoretical (through the work of Cassirer, Levi-Strauss and Barthes), and historical (through historical examples from Lydgate and Spenser to Coleridge) meaning of the word "myth" and its connections to history, this dissertation will explore how these three figures adapted a notion of myth derived from Romanticism to provide meaning in their own post-war contexts. Friedrich Gundolf, the premier (in the sense of first and of greatest) "disciple" of the poet Stefan George, is a complicated representative of the German tradition of mythic history, one theoretically intertwined with the rise of the German ideology of Nazism. Yet, as a German Jew, Gundolf wrestled with his broad heritage in the aftermath of war, a conflict that imprinted itself on his specifically "mythic" biography of Heinrich von Kleist. The second figure, Robert Graves, is transformed by the war from a young Georgian poet to an eclectic scholar and exile, a scholar who sees in the poetic evocations of his White Goddess a mythic approach to history, an approach whose spirit also finds its way into his historical fiction and his famous portrayal of the Emperor Claudius. The third figure, J. R. R. Tolkien, who begins with the drive to create "a mythology for England," ends by creating his epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings, which can be read as a representation of the need for modernity to engage with myth and history in order to deal with modern decay. Each of these three figures, with their own war experiences, translates that experience into a new appropriation of "myth" that partakes of the larger cultural context of the war.