Download or read book Tolkien s Modern Middle Ages written by J. Chance and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-07-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J.R.R. Tolkien delved into the Middle Ages to create a critique of the modern world in his fantasy, yet did so in a form of modernist literature with postmodern implications and huge commercial success. These essays examine that paradox and its significance in understanding the intersection between traditionalist and counter-culture criticisms of the modern. The approach helps to explain the popularity of his works, the way in which they continue to be brought into dialogue with Twenty-First century issues, and their contested literary significance in the academy.
Download or read book Tolkien the Medievalist written by Jane Chance and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-08-27 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interdisciplinary in approach, Tolkien the Medievalist provides a fresh perspective on J. R. R. Tolkien's Medievalism. In fifteen essays, eminent scholars and new voices explore how Professor Tolkien responded to a modern age of crisis - historical, academic and personal - by adapting his scholarship on medieval literature to his own personal voice. The four sections reveal the author influenced by his profession, religious faith and important issues of the time; by his relationships with other medievalists; by the medieval sources that he read and taught, and by his own medieval mythologizing.
Download or read book Medievalism written by Michael Alexander and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now reissued in an updated paperback edition, this groundbreaking account of the Medieval Revival movement examines the ways in which the style of the medieval period was re-established in post-Enlightenment England—from Walpole and Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and Tennyson to Pound, Tolkien, and Rowling. “Medievalism . . . takes a panoramic view of the ‘recovery’ of the Medieval in English literature, visual arts and culture. . . . Ambitious, sweeping, sometimes idiosyncratic, but always interesting.”—Rosemary Ashton, Times Literary Supplement “Deeply researched and stylishly written, Medievalism is an unalloyed delight that will instruct and amuse a wide readership.”—Edward Short, Books & Culture
Download or read book Switzerland in Tolkien s Middle Earth written by Martin S. Monsch and published by Martin S. Monsch. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journey in search of Middle-earth In 1911, at the age of nineteen, J. R. R. Tolkien embarked on an adventurous journey through the Swiss Alps; with a heavy pack, he hiked over many high passes. More than fifty years later, he mentioned in a letter to his son Michael that this trip had deeply affected him. Bilbo's journey in The Hobbit from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, he said, was based on his own adventures in 1911. Tolkien himself named a few specific sources of inspiration, most explicitly the Silberhorn (Silverhorn). So I wondered: Was this perhaps only the tip of the iceberg? Following in Tolkien's footsteps, I myself set out into the spectacular mountain world with its stories, myths, and legends, in search of his sources of inspiration; and little by little, a vivid and mysterious world revealed itself to me: a world that helped shape Middle-earth. More than 100 color images accompany the author's research and discovery journey, along with 11 hiking and 3 road trip suggestions that allow readers to recreate Tolkien's experience with all its impressions themselves in the Swiss mountains. "This book is above all else an invitation to step into Tolkien's hiking shoes, shoulder his pack, and step back a century into a world which is as far from today as Middle-earth is from our world; a guidebook of impressions, a walking tour of the nature of imagination and the imagination of nature." - John Howe
Download or read book Tolkien and Alterity written by Christopher Vaccaro and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exciting collection of essays explores the role of the Other in Tolkien’s fiction, his life, and the pertinent criticism. It critically examines issues of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, language, and identity in The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and lesser-known works by Tolkien. The chapters consider characters such as Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, Saruman, Éowyn, and the Orcs as well as discussions of how language and identity function in the source texts. The analysis of Tolkien’s work is set against an examination of his life, personal writing, and beliefs. Each essay takes as its central position the idea that how Tolkien responds to that which is different, to that which is “Other,” serves as a register of his ethics and moral philosophy. In the aggregate, they provide evidence of Tolkien’s acceptance of alterity.
Download or read book Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians written by Chris R. Armstrong and published by Brazos Press. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Christians today tend to view the story of medieval faith as a cautionary tale. Too often, they dismiss the Middle Ages as a period of corruption and decay in the church. They seem to assume that the church apostatized from true Christianity after it gained cultural influence in the time of Constantine, and the faith was only later recovered by the sixteenth-century Reformers or even the eighteenth-century revivalists. As a result, the riches and wisdom of the medieval period have remained largely inaccessible to modern Protestants. Church historian Chris Armstrong helps readers see beyond modern caricatures of the medieval church to the animating Christian spirit of that age. He believes today's church could learn a number of lessons from medieval faith, such as how the gospel speaks to ordinary, embodied human life in this world. Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians explores key ideas, figures, and movements from the Middle Ages in conversation with C. S. Lewis and other thinkers, helping contemporary Christians discover authentic faith and renewal in a forgotten age.
Download or read book Lord of the Rings written by Jane Chance and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2001-10-26 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " With New Line Cinema's production of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the popularity of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien is unparalleled. Tolkien's books continue to be bestsellers decades after their original publication. An epic in league with those of Spenser and Malory, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, begun during Hitler's rise to power, celebrates the insignificant individual as hero in the modern world. Jane Chance's critical appraisal of Tolkien's heroic masterwork is the first to explore its "mythology of power"--that is, how power, politics, and language interact. Chance looks beyond the fantastic, self-contained world of Middle-earth to the twentieth-century parallels presented in the trilogy.
Download or read book Tolkien and the Classics written by Roberto Arduini and published by . This book was released on 2019-06-14 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of this collection are twofold. First, the awareness of the importance of making scholars and critics realize how much J.R.R. Tolkien is a great literary classic, comparable to those already accepted as 'canonical'. Second, to offer a publication that could be made use of by students and teachers of secondary schools / universities.
Download or read book Neomedievalism Popular Culture and the Academy written by KellyAnn Fitzpatrick and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2019 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval in the modern world is here explored in a variety of media, from film and book to gaming.
Download or read book The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women written by Jane Chance and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-08-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of medieval women as postcolonial writers defines the literary strategies of subversion by which they authorized their alterity within the dominant tradition. To dismantle a colonizing culture, they made public the private feminine space allocated by gender difference: they constructed 'unhomely' spaces. They inverted gender roles of characters to valorize the female; they created alternate idealized feminist societies and cultures, or utopias, through fantasy; and they legitimized female triviality the homely female space to provide autonomy. While these methodologies often overlapped in practice, they illustrate how cultures impinge on languages to create what Deleuze and Guattari have identified as a minor literature, specifically for women as dis-placed. Women writers discussed include Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France, Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and Christine de Pizan.
Download or read book J R R Tolkien s Sanctifying Myth written by Bradley J. Birzer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new introduction by the author Peter Jackson's film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy - and the accompanying Rings-related paraphernalia and publicity - has played a unique role in the disemmination of Tolkien's imaginative creation to the masses. Yet, for most readers and viewers, the underlying meaning of Middle-earth has remained obscure. Bradley Birzer has remedied that with this fresh study. In J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth, Birzer reveals the surprisingly specific religious symbolism that permeates Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He also explores the social and political views that motivated the Oxford don, ultimately situating Tolkien within the Christian humanist tradition represented by Thomas More and T.S. Eliot, Dante and C.S. Lewis. Birzer argues that through the genre of myth Tolkien created a world that is essentially truer than the one we think we see around us everyday, a world that transcends the colorless disenchantment of our postmodern age.
Download or read book Tolkien Self and Other written by Jane Chance and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines key points of J. R. R. Tolkien’s life and writing career in relation to his views on humanism and feminism, particularly his sympathy for and toleration of those who are different, deemed unimportant, or marginalized—namely, the Other. Jane Chance argues such empathy derived from a variety of causes ranging from the loss of his parents during his early life to a consciousness of the injustice and violence in both World Wars. As a result of his obligation to research and publish in his field and propelled by his sense of abjection and diminution of self, Tolkien concealed aspects of the personal in relatively consistent ways in his medieval adaptations, lectures, essays, and translations, many only recently published. These scholarly writings blend with and relate to his fictional writings in various ways depending on the moment at which he began teaching, translating, or editing a specific medieval work and, simultaneously, composing a specific poem, fantasy, or fairy-story. What Tolkien read and studied from the time before and during his college days at Exeter and continued researching until he died opens a door into understanding how he uniquely interpreted and repurposed the medieval in constructing fantasy.
Download or read book The Fantasy of the Middle Ages written by Larisa Grollemond and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This abundantly illustrated book is an illuminating exploration of the impact of medieval imagery on three hundred years of visual culture. From the soaring castles of Sleeping Beauty to the bloody battles of Game of Thrones, from Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings to mythical beasts in Dungeons & Dragons, and from Medieval Times to the Renaissance Faire, the Middle Ages have inspired artists, playwrights, filmmakers, gamers, and writers for centuries. Indeed, no other historical era has captured the imaginations of so many creators. This volume aims to uncover the many reasons why the Middle Ages have proven so flexible—and applicable—to a variety of modern moments from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century. These “medieval” worlds are often the perfect ground for exploring contemporary cultural concerns and anxieties, saying much more about the time and place in which they were created than they do about the actual conditions of the medieval period. With over 140 color illustrations, from sources ranging from thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts to contemporary films and video games, and a preface by Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton, The Fantasy of the Middle Ages will surprise and delight both enthusiasts and scholars. This title is published to accompany an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 21–September 11, 2022.
Download or read book Tolkien and the Modernists written by Theresa Freda Nicolay and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-05-21 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lord of the Rings rarely makes an appearance in college courses that aim to examine modern British and American literature. Only in recent years have the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien and his friend, C.S. Lewis, made their way into college syllabi alongside T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. This volume aims to situate Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings within the literary period whose sensibility grew out of the 19th-century rise of secularism and industrialism, which culminated in the cataclysm of world war. During a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture, both Tolkien and his contemporaries--the literary modernists--engaged with the past in order to make sense of the present world, especially in the wake of World War I. While Tolkien and the modernists share many of the same concerns, their responses to the crisis of modernity are often antithetical. While the work of the modernists emphasizes alienation and despair, Tolkien's work underscores the value of fellowship and hope.
Download or read book The Real Middle earth written by Brian Bates and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2003 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intelligent popular history of the magically enchanting early English civilisation on which Tolkien based his world of Lord of the Rings.Tolkien readily admitted that the concept of Middle-earth was not his own invention. An Old English term for the Dark Age world, it was always assumed that the importance of magic in this world existed only in Tolkien's works; now Professor Brian Bates reveals the vivid truth about this historical culture. Behind the stories we know of Dark Age king and queens, warriors and battles, lies the hidden history of Middle-earth, a world of magic, mystery and destiny. Fiery dragons were seen to fly across the sky, monsters haunted the marshes, and elves fired poisoned arrows. Wizards cast healing spells, wise trees gave blessings, and omens foretold the deaths of kings. The very landscape itself was enchanted and the world imbued with a life force. Repressed by a millennium of Christianity, this belief system all but disappeared, leaving only faint traces in folk memory and fairy tales. In this remarkable book Professor Brian Bates has drawn on the latest archaeological findings to reconstruct the imaginative world of our past, revealing a culture with insights that may yet help us understand our own place in the world.
Download or read book The Gospel According to Tolkien written by Ralph C. Wood and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers have repeatedly called The Lord of the Rings the most important book of our age--absorbing all 1,500 of its pages with an almost fanatical interest and seeing the Peter Jackson movies in unprecedented numbers. Readers from ages 8 to 80 keep turning to Tolkien because here, in this magical kingdom, they are immersed in depth after depth of significance and meaning--perceiving the Hope that can be found amidst despair, the Charity that overcomes vengeance, and the Faith that springs from the strange power of weakness. The Gospel According to Tolkien examines biblical and Christian themes that are found in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Follow Ralph Wood as he takes us through the theological depths of Tolkien's literary legacy.
Download or read book Tolkien s Theology of Beauty written by Lisa Coutras and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-03 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Lisa Coutras explores the structure and complexity of J.R.R. Tolkien’s narrative theology, synthesizing his Christian worldview with his creative imagination. She illustrates how, within the framework of a theological aesthetics, transcendental beauty is the unifying principle that integrates all aspects of Tolkien’s writing, from pagan despair to Christian joy. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christianity is often held in an unsteady tension with the pagan despair of his mythic world. Some critics portray these as incompatible, while Christian analysis tends to oversimplify the presence of religious symbolism. This polarity of opinion testifies to the need for a unifying interpretive lens. The fact that Tolkien saw his own writing as “religious” and “Catholic,” yet was preoccupied with pagan mythology, nature, language, and evil, suggests that these areas were wholly integrated with his Christian worldview. Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty examines six structural elements, demonstrating that the author’s Christianity is deeply embedded in the narrative framework of his creative imagination.
