Lord Of The Rings Research Articles

Faërian Cyberdrama: When Fantasy becomes Virtual Reality

Faërian Cyberdrama:When Fantasy becomes Virtual Reality Péter Kristóf Makai (bio) "To say that the works of J. R. R. Tolkien have influenced the [computer role-playing game genre] is akin to saying that the Big Bang influenced the universe." —Matt Barton1 "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." —Clarke's Third Law 2 Without so much as a shadow of doubt, J. R. R. Tolkien single-handedly revolutionised (if not created) the genre of fantasy with his extensive ouvre of Arda, most notably in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. The success of his narrative world is evidenced by the many copycat fantasy novels his trilogy sparked. What these Tolkienesque writers seem to ignore is his theoretical foundation and personal view of Fantasy as artfully expressed in an essay about the aesthetics of fantasy fiction, called simply "On Fairy-stories." Apart from the lifetime of education displayed in the essay, the beauty of Tolkien's ars mythopoetica piece comes from the vivid defence of the power of imagination at a time when accusations of escapism were quite biting in the wake of the Great War and in the shadow of a new one, connected by the rise of the modern industrial society. But what its author perceived to be the soul-sucking mechanisation of life (and death) in Europe in fact turned out to be the very tool that enabled the emergence of the most consistent form of experiencing narrative worlds: computer games. The connexion between "On Fairy-stories" and computer games is especially thrilling since it has been noted that works like The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings "paved the way for a new type of game, one that would allow fans to go beyond reading and actually enter worlds of fantasy to play a role in their own adventures" (Barton 19). If the impact of Tolkien's narrative works on computer games is indeed as strong as Matt Barton would have us believe, the theoretical essay of Tolkien should have similar correspondences with the theories surrounding the virtual worlds we inhabit today. Far from the nightmarish visions of humankind enslaved by machines, recent tools of simulation have proved highly valuable in developing more expressive and immersive kinds of stories, which have made us more aware of ourselves as a thinking and feeling species. In fact, it shouldn't really come as a surprise that Tolkien's idea of an enchantingly [End Page 35] coherent fictional world can be grasped best in theory by the discipline of ludology/game studies, a field devoted to the study of both analogue and digital games: Tolkien was, albeit unwittingly, a key propagator of that revolution through his notion of sub-creation, the elvish skill of fantasy. To show how this could be possible, we need to point out the similarities between the concept of Faërie and virtual reality, and Faërian Drama and computer games, as well as to transpose a religiously inspired theory of fantasy fiction unto a medium thriving on technological innovation. Interfacing the theory of Faërian Drama with ludology also opens up the possibility of an integrative, interdisciplinary theory of aesthetics that stems from the power of the fictional world to present itself to the human imagination in ever more immersive manners. Furthermore, game designers can benefit from using the aesthetics of Faërian Drama to enhance their fictional worlds and allow their players a greater sense of freedom and agency by empowering the player to alter narrative threads and see its effects in the game-world. But the most haunting effect of Tolkien's fairy-tale aesthetics remains its uncanny anticipation of full-blown virtual reality, an outcome that is all the more surprising for Tolkien's conservative Christian world-view. The whole of "On Fairy-stories" is centred on the idea that fantasy should be understood etymologically, and the etymological chain points towards a coherent theory of make-believe in the human mind. Among others, the OED reveals two, equally important meanings for the English word fantasy: the better-known sense of "imagination; the process or the faculty of forming mental representations of things not...

Elladan and Elrohir: The Dioscuri in The Lord of the Rings

Elladan and Elrohir: The Dioscuri in The Lord of the Rings

Ungoliant, Ella-laraña y la Acromántula: una revisión del mito de Aracné desde lo siniestro

This paper intends to argue that the Big Spiders that populate the Middle-Earth in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien (and later, the acromantulas, in the Harry Potter series) are a review of Arachne's myth from the modern category of the sinister, one of the most important categories in the art and the literature in the 20th century. This category began in the Romanticism and had a theoretical culmination in Freud's work.

Greed and the Nature of Evil: Tolkien versus Wagner

Scholars studying J.R.R. Tolkien have often chosen to ignore the influence of Richard Wagner on Tolkien’s opus. This article starts out with showing how profound this influence was and continues by analysing Tolkien’s and Wagner’s common interest in the Old Norse Mythology of the Vikings. Examining the recently published The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrúnby Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, the author penetrates and compares the importante themes of greed and evil in these books and in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. The author takes up for discussion the radically different political views of the two artists and indicates how this is important for their respective view of power and greed.

Fantasy, Escape, Recovery, and Consolation in Sir Orfeo: The Medieval Foundations of Tolkienian Fantasy

Fantasy, Escape, Recovery, and Consolation in Sir Orfeo:The Medieval Foundations of Tolkienian Fantasy Thomas Honegger (bio) A king in exile, having spent years in the wilderness, asks for the hand of his beloved lady from the king of Fairy, is finally re-united with her and, after testing the loyalty of his steward, re-claims his throne and lives ever happily with his queen to the end of his days. What reads like a somewhat modified account of Aragorn's career as found in The Lord of the Rings, is actually an accurate though simplified summary of the plot of the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo.1 Professor Tolkien knew the poem intimately and made it repeatedly the subject of his studies,2 although his scholarly influence was (as so often) exerted through the work of his students (notably Alan J. Bliss) rather than through his own publications—of which there were none on Sir Orfeo during his lifetime. Tolkien's contribution to the scholarship on the poem is thus difficult to assess. The poem's importance for students of Tolkien's fiction and its influence on his works have been easier to trace. Even so, it has as yet been overlooked that Sir Orfeo is likely to have shaped the development of Tolkien's central theoretical concepts of Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Enchantment, Eucatastrophe, and Consolation, as discussed in "On Fairy-stories"3—and thus exerted (indirectly) a profound influence on Tolkien's own literary writings, and on those of his successors. Sir Orfeo and Tolkien Studies So far, Sir Orfeo has received some attention in Tolkien studies mostly because it provides an important source for the professor's depiction of the elves and the land of Faërie.4 Thus, Orfeo's vision of the king of Faërie's hunting-party has been (rightly) identified as a likely source for Tolkien's wood-elves as they occur for the first time in The Hobbit. The relevant passage in Sir Orfeo reads as follows: "He miƷte se him bisides / oft in hote vndertides / the king of Faierie with his route / cömen hunten him al aboute, / with dim cri and blowinge, / and houndes also berkinge; / ac no best thai neuer nome, no neuer he niste whider thai bicome."5 (ll. 281-88, TS 2004, 96). Other encounters with the inhabitants of Faërie show clear parallels to passages in Smith of Wootton Major, such as Smith's vision of the elven mariners "tall and terrible; their swords shone and their spears glinted and a piercing light was in their eyes" (SWM 26), which corresponds to lines 289-96 in Sir Orfeo (TS, 97): "And other while he miƷte him se / as a gret ost bi him te / wel atourned ten hundred [End Page 117] kniƷtes, / ich y-armed to his riƷtes, / of cuntenaunce stout and fers, / with manie desplayed baners, / and ich his swerd ydrawen holde; / ac neuer he niste whider thai wolde."6 Furthermore, Smith's encounter with the dancing elves ("… he heard elven voices singing, and on a lawn beside a river bright with lilies he came upon many maidens dancing. The speed and the grace and the ever-changing modes of their movements enchanted him, . …" SWM 31) has a counterpart in lines 297-302 of Sir Orfeo (TS 2004, 97): "And other while he seiƷ other thing: / kniƷtes and leuedis come dauncing / in queinte atire, gisely, / queinte pas and softely: / tabours and trumpes Ʒede hem bi / and al manere menstraci."7 Also, the description of Orfeo's journey to the land of Faërie through a long subterranean passageway as well as the description of the land itself (TS 2004, 98, ll. 349-76) is strongly reminiscent of the access to the elven realm of Gondolin and Gondolin itself (see "Of Tuor and his coming to Gondolin" in UT 58-67). And lastly, I may point to the parallels between King Thingol's reaction to Beren's request for the hand of Lúthien (S 166-67) and that of the king of Faërie on hearing Orfeo's wish to take with him the beautiful (and presumably unchanged) Heurodis...

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and His Concept of Native Language : Sindarin and British-Welsh

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and His Concept of Native Language : Sindarin and British-Welsh

Refining the Gold: Tolkien, The Battle of Maldon , and the Northern Theory of Courage

Refining the Gold:Tolkien, The Battle of Maldon, and the Northern Theory of Courage Mary R. Bowman (bio) In a work filled with acts of courage and even self-sacrifice, few such acts in The Lord of the Rings are more memorable than Gandalf's confrontation with the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm. Blocking the Balrog with his body, his power, and his full authority as one of the Istari, he buys time for the rest of the Fellowship to escape, at the cost (however temporarily) of his own life. Like many other aspects of Tolkien's work, this scene, as Alexander Bruce has demonstrated in a 2007 article, was shaped in part by Tolkien's reading of a text important in his professional life, in this case The Battle of Maldon. Bruce argues convincingly that Gandalf's refusal to allow his enemy to cross the bridge is a pointed response to a crucial moment in Maldon when the English earl Byrhtnoth allows such a crossing. While Bruce's article is an important contribution to our growing understanding of the role of Maldon, it gives only a partial picture of that role. In addition to revising Byrhnoth's behavior in this scene, Tolkien elsewhere rewrites the actions of most of the other characters in the poem. While some of these connections have been noted in earlier criticism, some have not, and those that have need to be examined in detail in order to more fully appreciate how Tolkien's wrestling with the poem, which is evident in his other work, played out in his fiction. Tolkien's relationship with the Old English poem was long and intimate. It was surely a part of his teaching repertoire; his friend and erstwhile collaborator on the edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight produced its standard scholarly edition; and, of course, he wrote a sequel-cum-commentary, "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm's Son," a work whose drafts span a period of perhaps twenty years. (It was published in 1953 but begun in some form as early as 1930: see Honegger). The Battle of Maldon also appears, explicitly, in Tolkien's professional writing, especially in the context of discussing the nature of Germanic heroism. In particular, he refers to it in the important lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (read as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy on November 25, 1936, and published in the following year), and discusses it at greater length in "Ofermod," an essay which forms the third part of "Homecoming." It is intriguing that the composition of these academic works and of "Homecoming" roughly frame the period of the composition of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, a fact which suggests the possibility that the evolution of [End Page 91] his thinking about heroism took place on parallel tracks: in the critical writing and in the major fiction.1 Indeed, the work of Tom Shippey on "Homecoming" suggests that Maldon was the poem that most intensely encapsulated the dilemma with which Germanic heroic literature presented the Christian Tolkien: "Tolkien's problem as regards the heroic literature of antiquity was, I would say, on the one hand great professional liking, and on the other extreme ideological aversion" ("Heroes" 282). It would hardly be surprising to find it working on his imagination as he created numerous heroic characters and opportunities for heroism in his own fiction; it might be more surprising not to. In this article, therefore, I intend not only to add to the growing evidence that Maldon deserves to be included in the list of important pre-texts that Tolkien is carefully re-writing, but also to consider that re-writing as part of a larger concern with redefining the heroic. I will also argue for a view of how Tolkien resolved his conflicting feelings toward the heroism of Maldon that differs somewhat from the one Tom Shippey has offered. I share Shippey's sense that Tolkien struggled mightily with this and had to work hard to reconcile his admiration for this form of heroism with his Christian beliefs. But for Shippey, his solution in "Home-coming" was...

New Zealand cinema and the postcolonial exotic: the case of Apron Strings

ABSTRACTThe New Zealand film industry has played a crucial role in shoring up the symbolic boundaries of this settler nation. Cultural difference (most often indigenous Māori differences) has helped signal the distinctiveness of this nation within a global context. In some ways then, this persistent eye to a global market, as well as the history of British settlement, makes New Zealand cinema always already transnational. While The Lord of the Rings trilogy seems an obvious example of such transnational trafficking, the 2008 State-funded feature film Apron Strings also offers opportunities for thinking about the out-of-nation-ness of New Zealand film production. Apron Strings is the first South Asian film to be funded through official channels in New Zealand. Two diasporic media producers are responsible for the film—Samoan/New Zealand director Sima Urale and Indian scriptwriter Shuchi Kothari. If, as Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim argue, ‘diasporic or postcolonial “transnational” cinema is consistently located on the margins of dominant film culture’ (2010: 10), what of those diasporic film-makers who work within a national film industry? How might Apron Strings rework these centre/margin relations to reveal the transnational dimensions of settler colonial identity?

Semiotic analysis of a media text the Lord of the Rings : The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Lord of the Rings movie by Peter Jackson was an interesting genre for semiotic analysis. This brief analysis was looking at the manner of intertextuality, style and form, as well as a syntagmatic analysis. It also discussed the aspect of signs and the signified. The signs employed by filmmaker Peter Jackson in constructing this media text can be categorized into social codes, technical codes and representational codes. Key words: Semiotic; Analysis; Lord of the Rings; Fellowship Resume: Le film Le Seigneur des Anneaux de Peter Jackson est un cas interessant pour l'analyse semiotique. Cette analyse breve se penche sur la maniere de l'intertextualite, le style et la forme, ainsi qu’une analyse syntagmatique. Elle a aussi examine l'aspect de la signalisation et des signifies. Les signes employes par le cineaste Peter Jackson dans la construction de ce media texte peuvent etre classes dans les codes sociaux, les codes techniques et les codes de representation. Mots-Cles: semiotique; analyses; Le Seigneur des Anneaux; communaute

The Lord of the Rings: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder. Edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, Shadows and Chivalry: Pain, Suffering, Evil and Goodness in the Works of George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis (Studies in Christian History & Thought). By Jeff McInnis and Inklings of Heaven: C. S. Lewis and Eschatology. By Sean Connolly

The Lord of the Rings: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder. Edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, Shadows and Chivalry: Pain, Suffering, Evil and Goodness in the Works of George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis (Studies in Christian History & Thought). By Jeff McInnis and Inklings of Heaven: C. S. Lewis and Eschatology. By Sean Connolly

'The Lord of the Ring' as a Bible text -Based on the linear allegory of narration

'The Lord of the Ring' as a Bible text -Based on the linear allegory of narration

Third person: authoring and exploring vast narratives

The ever-expanding capacities of computing offer new narrative possibilities for virtual worlds. Yet vast narrativesfeaturing an ongoing and intricately developed storyline, many characters, and multiple settingsdid not originate with, and are not limited to, Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Marvel's Spiderman, and the complex stories of such television shows as Dr. Who, The Sopranos, and Lost all present vast fictional worlds. Third Person explores strategies of vast narrative across a variety of media, including video games, television, literature, comic books, tabletop games, and digital art. The contributorsmedia and television scholars, novelists, comic creators, game designers, and othersinvestigate such issues as continuity, canonicity, interactivity, fan fiction, technological innovation, and cross-media phenomena. Chapters examine a range of topics, including storytelling in a multiplayer environment; narrative techniques for a 3,000,000-page novel; continuity (or the impossibility of it) in Doctor Who; managing multiple intertwined narratives in superhero comics; the spatial experience of the Final Fantasy role-playing games; World of Warcraft adventure texts created by designers and fans; and the serial storytelling of The Wire. Taken together, the multidisciplinary conversations in Third Person, along with Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin's earlier collections First Person and Second Person, offer essential insights into how fictions are constructed and maintained in very different forms of media at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contributors: Rafael Alvarez, Richard A. Bartle, Michael Bonesteel, Stanford Carpenter, Monte Cook, Paul Cornell, Anne Cranny-Francis, Sam Ford, Chaim Gingold, A. Scott Glancy, Richard Grossman, Pat Harrigan, Matt Hills, Kenneth Hite, William H. Huber, Adriene Jenik, Henry Jenkins, David Kalat, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Norman M. Klein, Tanya Krzywinska, David Lavery, Robin D. Laws, Sarah Lewison, Henry Lowood, William E. McDonald, Matthew P. Miller, Jason Mittell, Stuart Moulthrop, Kate Orman, Sean O'Sullivan, Lance Parkin, Robert M. Price, Ren Reynolds, Trina Robbins, Ken Rolston, Dave Sim, Greg Stafford, Tamiko Thiel, John Tulloch, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Walter Jon Williams

Brand Wellington: When city imaging is GLAM’ed: A personal view

Wellington has transformed from the earnest and staid capital of Aotearoa/New Zealand and into the poster city for Richard Florida's Flight of the Creative Class. While The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson's Weta are accredited with instigating this transition, my article takes a wider view, exploring the role of a museum in reshaping the branding of place. I present more than the conventional ‘case study’ in the international creative industries literature. Instead, I demonstrate the role of GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) in intervening in understandings of work, leisure, knowledge and urbanity. While other cities may not experience the branding windfall of a Hollywood film, the planning instigated in Wellington to prepare for a popular cultural opportunity is instructive. In aligning creative industries, popular culture and city imaging theory, GLAMs move from a serious but understated part of place branding to a facilitator for economic and social change.

Film-Induced Tourism in the High Country: Recreation and Tourism Contest

Political, economic, and social changes have increased the importance of tourism in diversifying and sustaining rural areas. This article examines the impact of film-induced tourism on recreational use of the South Island High Country, New Zealand. Changes to the High Country's economic and administrative environment, coupled with image presented and reinforced in the filmed media (prominently in The Lord of the Rings and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), has amplified landholders' opportunity to engage in tourism. However, the different (and to some degree incompatible) activity and user profiles of traditional recreationists and new tourists has implications for the High Country.

Web planet: How the changing Internet divided "Doctor Who" fan fiction writers

This paper analyzes the debate that arose in online Doctor Who fandom surrounding the switch to moderated submissions for "A Teaspoon and an Open Mind," the fandom's main fan fiction archive. As has been the case with many classic texts of science fiction and fantasy, from The Lord of the Rings on, the new adaptation of the cult series Doctor Who was the cause of much tension and conflict within the fandom. It has opened up the franchise to a vast new audience unschooled in the fandom's ways or the ways of fandom at large, and the change in archive policy served as an arena where many of these tensions came to a head. An in-depth analysis of this debate leads to the argument that the cultural logics of fandom and of participatory culture might be more separate than they initially appear. Some fans wholly embrace the ideals of Web 2.0 and argue for the archive as a nonhierarchical, communal space where all content is equal regardless of what standards it might not meet. Yet while their rhetoric resembles the ideas of academia about the potential of fandom as an educational space, other, more veteran fans reject academia, instead using the discourse of private enterprise and property rights, more commonly associated with the producers of texts than with their fans and poachers, to argue for the rights of site moderators to regulate content.

Seven Paths of the Hero in Lord of the Rings: The Path of Transcendence

Frodo's path transcends that of any other hero in literature. He is seemingly the least, always aware of his own fears, his own limitations, yet he accomplishes more than any of the apparently greater figures such as Elves and Dwarves, Kings and Wizards. When the great quest is complete, and everyone is satisfied at the accomplishment, Frodo alone knows no peace, for he can never again be whole. The Lord of the Rings is wise enough to recognize that there can be no happy ending for Frodo. Like Hamlet, Frodo can find no peace on earth. He has been too damaged in the process and has passed beyond all the normal hopes and desires of our world. At the end he is left to journey away with the Elves to a world that will undoubtedly fit him no better than this one. Beyond that, we presume he must find some new answer unique to Frodo, some way to transcend the limitations of life, as must each of us.

Narrative-critical approach as hermeneutical framework for a creative dialogue between biblical sources and secular extra-biblical sources: The Lord of the Rings as an entry into the Book of Revelation

This essay is motivated by the challenge that biblical texts have very often lost their affective power to address and transform the lives of readers today, because they are either not read at all or they are not fully understood as the world of the text is too far removed from the world of the reader. There are however wonderful contemporary texts that do affect readers� lives and the question arose if the contemporary texts cannot be read together with the biblical texts, to bring them �to life� again?A hermeneutical approach needed to be found that could create the necessary space for non-biblical literary texts to be used to interpret and elucidate biblical texts. The narrative approach provides this space for the two texts to enter into creative dialogue, given that the two texts coincide sufficiently in the significance for the two implied authors, the reference of the texts and in the situation of the implied readers.

Intertextual Patterns in J.R.R.Tolkien’s <i>The Hobbit</i> and <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>

The thesis that every text is a „mosaic of quotations. from other texts becomes particularly obvious when examining literary fantasy, which refers to the implied readers. previous reading rather than to real life. An analysis of Tolkien.s work shows that differences of style and narrative technique can be described as due to the choice of different pre-texts. In The Hobbit, fairy-tale and epic discourses are juxtaposed with everyday speech pattern through irony and parody. In The Lord of the Rings, elements of the nineteenth-century novel like circumstantial realism and pathetic fallacy are supplemented by archaic rhetorical patterns. The concept of intertextuality also enables us to examine the relationship between text and reader.

A transformation of fantasy novel's narrative according to media : computer game 「The Lord of the Rings」

A transformation of fantasy novel's narrative according to media : computer game 「The Lord of the Rings」

An Interview with James Hannigan

James Hannigan is a composer with involvement in a variety of media industries. Starting his career at Electronic Arts in the mid-1990s after a short stint in television, James worked on various EA Sports titles ( FIFA/F1 series) and hits such as Origin’s Privateer: The Darkening (1996) – one of the earliest games to use live action – along with others of the era such as Warhammer (Mindscape, 1996). James later returned to freelance work and based himself at Pinewood Studios in West London, securing four BAFTA nominations for video game music, and winning with EA in 2000 with Theme Park World . His credits include: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , Primeval (ITV), Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest , Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix , Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs , Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 , Red Alert 3 Uprising , Freelancer , Republic , Evil Genius , Brute Force , Catwoman , Reign of Fire , Conquest , Grand Prix 4 , Mr. Bean , Lost In Space and many others. Our discussion focused on his music for the Harry Potter games, but also branched out into other areas.