TY  - JOUR
A1  - Stutz, Kathryn H.
ED  - Ambühl, Annemarie
ED  - Carlà-Uhink, Filippo
ED  - Rollinger, Christian
ED  - Walde, Christine
T1  - G. B. Smith’s “Elzevir Cicero” and the Construction of Queer Immortality in Tolkien’s Mythopoeia
JF  - thersites 15
N2  - Following the death of J. R. R. Tolkien in 1973, an obituary appeared in The Times quoting Tolkien as having said that his “love for the classics took ten years to recover from lectures on Cicero and Demosthenes.” This contentious relationship between Tolkien and the Greco-Roman past contrasts with the work of unabashedly classicizing poet Geoffrey Bache Smith, a school friend of Tolkien’s who was killed in the Great War. When Tolkien collected Smith’s poems for posthumous publication, this paper shows, Smith’s engagements with the ancient world became part of Tolkien’s own philosophy of immortality through literary composition. Within his 1931 poem “Mythopoeia,” and his 1939 speech “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien articulated a unified method of mythmaking by looking back to his lost friend’s understanding of mythology as a type of ancient story-craft that enabled poets to preserve the dead against the ravages of time. By tracing a triangular path through the relationships between Tolkien, Smith, and the classical past inhabited by figures like Cicero, this paper argues that Tolkien not only recovered a “love for the classics,” but used classical texts to “recover” his lost friend, granting Smith a queer, classical immortality in return.
KW  - John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
KW  - Geoffrey Bache Smith
KW  - hauntology
KW  - queer theory
KW  - mythopoeia
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.34679/thersites.vol15.225
SN  - 2364-7612
VL  - 2022
IS  - 15
SP  - 253
EP  - 284
ER  -