I always thought of Tolkien as the godfather of postmodernism. All the formal categories of the media culture are there -- the politics of seeing and being seen, air-time as symbolic capital, the travails of being a committed intellectual, and all these delightfully anti-capitalist allegories. Sure, there's plenty to object to in Tolkien -- obnoxious gender and racial stereotypes, etc. But there's also some remarkable stuff, which paved the way for the rebellions of the 1960s and anticipated the more radical works of the Information Culture in the 1980s and 1990s.
-- DRR