Related Papers
Master's Thesis
Of Shadows, Wights, and Balrogs: Todorov's Fantastic and Burke's Sublime as Constituting Elements of Enchantment and the Faërie in The Lord of the Rings
2021 •
Michaela Schneider-Wettstein
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is still ranging among the most popular books in the United Kingdom decades after its publication. The story of the quest to destroy the One Ring in Mordor is one of hardship, deprivation, and pain, but why is a story of misery so successful? Tolkien’s Enchantment is one of the dominant factors of the novel’s success. I argue that Tolkien’s Faërie is Tzvetan Todorov’s fantastic (and fantastic-marvelous), and I will further illuminate how Tolkien’s art relates to elements of the fantastic to accomplish Enchantment. Moreover, Tolkien creates an air of uncertainty by implementing the principles of Burke’s notion of the sublime. Hence, Todorov’s theory of the fantastic and Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime are constituting elements of Tolkien’s Faërie and Enchantment in The Lord of the Rings. Sublimity and the fantastic as theoretical frameworks help to understand the mechanics of Enchantment and the Faërie in the context of immersive functions of the text and its (inner) credibility. To support my argument, I will first connect Burke’s notion of the sublime, Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, and Tolkien’s Faërie to illuminate what this means for Tolkien’s idea of Enchantment before I will discuss specific examples from the text. The premise is that The Lord of the Rings is read as history and therefore the reading is literal. Keywords: Tolkien, Todorov, Burke, fantasy, Romanticism, fantastic, sublime, The Lord of the Rings, Enchantment, marvelous, Faërie
Innocence Revisited: Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Works of C. S. Lewis
2016 •
Heather Hess
Tolkien as Lover of the Logos
Mark Sebanc
Between
“Suspension of Disbelief” vs. “Secondary Belief”: fictional worlds in Coleridge and Tolkien
2024 •
Paolo Pizzimento
This article aims to analyse S.T. Coleridge’s theory of suspension of disbelief and poetic faith, which seems to overshadow a conception of the literary work as displaying a “separate universe” capable of reconfiguring the experience of everyday reality. This theory, particularly through the mediation of Owen Barfield, exerts a considerable influence on J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-stories, which enters subtle controversy with Coleridge and opposes the suspension of disbelief with his “Secondary Belief”. The difference between the two authors can shed light on dissimilar conceptions of the ontological status of the fictional worlds.
“Music Makers” and World Creators
2020 •
Michaela Hausmann
Can the South-East Sicily Horticultural District benefit of migrant workers to achieve an efficient internationalization pattern?
2012 •
Gian Luigi Corinto
Tolkien Studies
The Expression of Faërie
2020 •
Simon J Cook
A reading of Tolkien's essay 'On Fairy-stories'
Christian Scholar's Review
Aristotle and Tolkien: An Essay in Comparative Poetics
2019 •
Gene Fendt
One hyperbolic way of reading Aristotle's Poetics is as sifting out all other forms of art and writing from a discussion which aims to understand tragedy (and then comedy which is the lost book). At the other extreme, and more plausible, is to read Poetics as a complete aesthetic theory in nuce; the nut in the shell being the dramatic arts of tragedy and comedy. The nut synecdochically includes and opens up to the entire tree of not only literary, but all mimetic arts, for the means of all the arts are included in tragedy, as are their (often less inclusive) objects. That Aristotle's text can be read in both directions--analytic separation and synecdochic synthesis--is probably a good indication that he is doing both things. J.R.R. Tolkien's essay 'On Fairy-Stories' seems to be playing a similar double game. A first reading might lead one along the path of sorting fairy stories from all other forms of literature, as well as art; the singular distinctiveness of fairy stories kath auto is the realm to which it tends. This seems to be the manner of most Tolkienists. A second reading might tempt one to see how Faërie is being used as synecdochic nut for not only the tree of story--or all literature--but for all kinds of artistic making, so, an entire aesthetics is its tendence. How do these "aesthetics" with distinct centers agree, and not?
The Year's Work in English Studies
XII * Literature 1780-1830: The Romantic Period
2013 •
Yasser Khan
Outer and Inner Landscapes in Tolkien: Between Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dostoevskij
Guglielmo Spirito
T he beauty of the earth is the fi rst beauty. Millions of years before us the earth lived in wild elegance. Landscape is the fi rst-born of creation. Sculpted with huge patience over millennia, landscape has enormous diversity of shape, presence and memory. Th ere is poignancy in beholding the beauty of the landscape: oft en it feels as though it has been waiting for centuries for the recognition and witness of the human eye. In the ninth Duino Elegy, Rilke says: Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window… To say them more intensely than the Th ings themselves ever dreamed of existing. Unable to penetrate the earth, light knows how to tease suggestions of depth from its surface. Where radiance falls, depths gather to the surface as to a window. Th ere is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience the ancient, outer ease of the world. Th e earth is not only outside us; it is within. When we emerge from our offi ces, rooms and houses, outdoors we are also at home (cf. O'Donahue 32-37). Or perhaps not, if we are as forlorn as Merry at Harrowdale: He sat for a moment half dreaming, listening to the noise of water, the whisper of dark trees, the crack of stone, and the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound. He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fi re. (LotR 822)
