Lord of the Rings :: essays research papers

It is easy for the reader who enters the enchanted realm of Tolkiens accept work to be lost in the magic of the Middle-Earth and to forbear to carry questions. Surrounded by elves, hobbits, dragonens and orcs, wandering the pristine fields and woods, described with such loving care they seem almost real, it is easy to forget there is another world outside, the world in which John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, an Oxford don, lived and wrote his monumental serial publication of fantasy novels. It is, after solely, natural to want to unravel humdrum reality. writings that offers a simple pleasure of a diametric time, a different place has nothing to be ashamed of. Tolkien in the same turn out describes "escape and comforter" as one of the chief functions of the fairy-tale by which termination he understands also what we would call "literary fantasy" today. "Escape and consolation" seem to be self-evident terms. What is there to discuss? Perhaps all that I hav e to do today is to praise Tolkiens fertile predilection and to step modestly aside.But the sentence I just quoted suggests that asking questions about the fairy-tale realm is not so some(prenominal) unnecessary as dangerous. You risk not merely boredom and disenchantment but the true expulsion from the Fairyland. Why? Is there, perhaps, more to the magic land than meets the eye? What if the "escape" it offers is fake what if Middle-Earth lies not "in a galaxy long ago and far away", as Star Wars put it, but much closer to home, right on the border with Tolkiens war-stricken England of the 1940s and perhaps scour not so far from our own turbulent Middle East. What if the hike up away we travel, the more inevitably we come home? These are the questions I want to discuss today.And if the result of this inquiry will be the release of the key to the gates of Paradise, Im willing to take this risk.Therefore the focus of this pour forth will be the question that To lkien himself emphasized as central to our science of works of fantasy what is "the effect produced now by these old things in the stories as they are" (32) in other words, how are the elves, orcs, the Dark cleric and the magic ring relevant to the here and now? However, I do not believe that the answer to this question should be sought in the circumstances of the authors own life.