Abstract
Many scholars have argued that Tolkien’s war-related trauma emerged in various forms throughout his Middle-earth legendarium. However, few have considered how he used the process of “sub-creation,” or fantasy world-building, to process the 1918 flu pandemic that emerged just as World War I was ending. This project compares Tolkien’s sub-creation to the experimental poetry and fiction of his modernist contemporaries, emphasizing that Tolkien was aligned with other writers of his time in exploring pandemics’ principal characteristics: their historical concealment beneath war narratives; their pervasive, miasmic form; and the omnipresent dread, madness, and despair they produce at both the individual and the collective level. Examples discussed include the devastating Great Plague hidden in Tolkien’s appendices to The Lord of the Rings, the ‘viral weaponry’ employed by Sauron, and the madness of figures such as Húrin and Denethor. I ultimately conclude that Tolkien differed from his modernist contemporaries in that his ability to situate instances of illness and contagion within the vast history of a secondary world enabled him to more effectively capture pandemics’ subtle, yet extremely detrimental effects on societies over time. This conclusion points to fantasy literature’s unique role in highlighting pressing social, political, or biomedical issues that may not receive enough recognition.