Mariana Rios Maldonado & Andoni Cossio – Romantic Imagination in Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Tolkien

Re-enchantment in the Romantic Imagination of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and J.R.R. Tolkien

Studies on the presence of Romantic elements in J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary production have steadily risen to prominence, especially since the publication of Julian Eilmann’s landmark monograph J.R.R. Tolkien: Romanticist and Poet (2017) and, more recently, the edited collection The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R Tolkien (2024). Our paper seeks to contribute to this scholarly upsurge by presenting a comparative analysis of Tolkien’s works and those penned by one of the most prominent authors of Spanish Romanticism, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870). Akin to the Kunstmärchen of German Romanticism and Tolkien’s Fairy-stories, Bécquer’s Leyendas—e. g. “El Monte de las Ánimas” (1861), “Los ojos verdes” (1861), “El rayo de luna” (1862), and “El Miserere” (1862)—retell or (re)invent Spanish legends via an authorial figure who acts as a mediator between the past (historical or feigned) and the present. Like Tolkien’s, Bécquer’s prose works reference an idea of the past in order to romanticize the world within the text—through which Bécquer recreates a fantastic vision of Spain. This romanticization is conjured in Bécquer’s storytelling through the depiction of a perilous realm inhabited by ghosts of medieval knights, spectral monks, spirits of good and evil, the author, and ourselves as readers; it is our world, with its beliefs and landscapes, re-enchanted. Whilst the notion of re-enchantment has been readily addressed in Tolkien scholarship, our paper will deploy Eilmann’s reframing of re-enchantment via Tolkien’s concept of “recovery” as a Romantic venture. This helps us explore the points of convergence and uniqueness between Bécquer’s writing and specific episodes of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the wider legendarium. We therefore seek to establish a connection that transcends barriers in time, language, and space by interpreting these authors’ oeuvres as the expression of a shared Romantic practice where reality and Faërie coalesce.

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