Patrick Curry

• 1. Introduction

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  Patrick Curry was born in 1951 in Winnipeg, Canada. His academic training moved across two continents and through disciplines that have little obvious connection to each other. He writes about Tolkien's fiction, astrology, divination, the ecology movement, and a quality he calls enchantment. Among Tolkien scholars, his views have attracted both strong endorsements and pointed objections. Why does his criticism command respect from some of the field's leading voices while provoking reservations from many of the same readers? His trajectory from Winnipeg to Tolkien scholarship is less accidental than it looks.

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• 2. The Independent Path

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  The University of California, Santa Cruz awarded Curry his B.A. in psychology in 1978. Two years later, he completed an M.Sc. in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics. His Ph.D., in history and philosophy of science, came from University College London in 1987. Three degrees, three fields, and a progression that moved from the science of the mind toward the question of how any knowledge is justified. All three were taken at institutions far from Winnipeg, and none led to a conventional academic post. He works as an independent scholar.

  From 2002 he lectured on cultural astronomy and astronomy at Bath Spa University. From 2006 he also taught cosmology and divination at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is editor-in-chief of The Ecological Citizen. He writes book reviews for British national newspapers. He has produced two poetry collections, Lockdown and Desire Lines.

  Curry has described himself as having "a long relationship with Buddhism (Sōtō Zen)," taught by Kōbun Chino Otogawa. He appeared in interviews on two of the extended DVDs from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy. That was an early sign of how central Tolkien would become to his public reputation. He is a contributor to Blackwell's 2014 A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien. Defending Middle-Earth, his first book on Tolkien, appeared from Floris in 1997.

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• 3. Defending Middle-Earth

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  Juliette Wood, reviewing Defending Middle-Earth for Gale Academic, called Curry's use of Tolkien's fantasy in the ecology debate both interesting and wide-ranging. The book engaged with the ecology movement and what Wood described as its "resacralisation of the environment" and "neo-pagan overtones." Curry presented arguments on both sides of the debate. Wood found it unfortunate that he then took a side and launched what she called "a diatribe" against Tolkien's critics.

  Stratford Caldecott, reviewing the same book for The Chesterton Review, identified what he saw as Curry's essential qualification: he loved the source material. Caldecott credited Curry with doing an excellent job of rebutting "accusations of right-wing or authoritarian conservatism" against Tolkien. Rather than seeing Tolkien as a conservative, Curry painted him as "more of a Green subversive." Tolkien, in this reading, opposed the global "monoculture" that makes every place resemble every other.

  Adam Schwartz, reviewing the book for the journal VII, was more divided. He described Curry as insightful on Tolkien's subversion of prevailing modern norms. But he also argued that Curry's "ideological commitments cloud his comprehension of Tolkien's radicalism." The deeper problem, in Schwartz's reading, was that "scholarly analysis and political advocacy are distinct discourses," and blending them produces an unsatisfying result.

  Houghton Mifflin reissued Defending Middle-Earth in 2004 with a new Afterword. A decade later, Curry gathered his Tolkien essays into Deep Roots in a Time of Frost. The collection prompted a review that pressed every aspect of his argument.

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• 4. The Case for Re-Enchantment

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  Tom Shippey, writing in the Journal of Tolkien Research, reviewed Curry's 2014 essay collection Deep Roots in a Time of Frost. He identified three governing themes. The first was "the nature of enchantment and the need for re-enchantment." The second was "opposition to modernism and the hopes for post-modernism." The third was "the strange nature of critical responses to Tolkien." Shippey endorsed the last of these as clearly true, if remarkable.

  Curry argues that modernism remains "a major and continuing threat." He attributes this to "the co-dependent power of corporate and finance capital, the modern political state and modern science." Shippey wrote that he was "not happy with this." He agreed with Curry about early literary modernists like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, but not about modernism as a continuing danger.

  Shippey noted that Curry is most passionate about enchantment, and yet found it the hardest theme to follow. He wrote that he cannot always follow Curry or see what he means. All the same, he agrees with Curry in some degree. They share the conviction that enchantment is not the same as magic. Shippey finds "wonder" in early science fiction, something he predicts Curry would link with modernity. Shippey also disputes Curry's use of Max Weber's concept: he does not accept that the world has been disenchanted.

  Shippey concluded that if Tolkien were alive, he would endorse Curry as the critic "closest to the secret of enchantment." For all their disagreements, that judgment placed Curry at the center of a long argument about what Tolkien's fiction is actually doing. Curry would press the case for enchantment further in 2019, in the book Enchantment: Wonder in Modern Life.

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• 5. Wonder in Modern Life

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  Bernice Martin, writing for The Times Literary Supplement, reviewed Curry's 2019 book Enchantment: Wonder in Modern Life. She noted that Curry appears to have come to Buddhism through the New Age movement from what seemed a Christian background. The book takes that personal journey as its starting point.

  Curry's critique centres on what he calls the reductive "modern secular and technocratic culture." He draws on three kinds of material: personal experience, collective events like Princess Diana's funeral, and Tolkien's writings. Martin admired the way Curry handled those sources and wove them into a sustained argument for what is missing from contemporary life.

  Curry's 1989 book Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England was published by Polity Press and Princeton University Press. It examined how a discipline now dismissed as superstition once commanded serious authority among educated people. That early inquiry set the direction for a career spent asking what modernity has decided not to value, and why.

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