After first considering Thomas More’s reputation for friendship, this article will trace references to friendship across More’s writings from his earliest letters and poems until the year of his imprisonment, 1534. In sum, the article suggests that a clearer understanding of More’s own “virtue politics,” to invoke James Hankins’s magisterial study of Renaissance humanism in Italy, must account better for the centrality of friendship in More’s thinking, writing, and life. Thomas More, a leading humanist and citizen of England, sees and understands himself consistently as a friend—of himself, of others, and of his own country.
This article attempts to reconstruct Tolkien's understanding of utopia, through his letters and his familiarity with utopian literature-particularly Thomas More's Utopia. It positions Tolkien's writings in relation to Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope and within the broader twentieth-century crisis of utopia, marked by the disillusionment caused by the rise of totalitarian ideologies. It argues that Tolkien opposes utopian ideals with a theological vision of hope, grounded in divine providence and the "eucatastrophic" joy produced by fairy stories. To account for the distinctive nature of imagined places and societies in Middle-earth, the article turns to the theologically infused sense of eutopia found in Thomas More's Utopia, and introduces the term Fa & euml;rian eutopia to describe Tolkien's sub-created worlds.
