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J. R. R. Tolkien was a professional philologist and an author of fantasy fiction, starting with the children's book The Hobbit in 1937. The Andrew Lang Lecture was important as it brought him to clarify his view of fairy stories as a legitimate literary genre, rather than something intended exclusively for children. [2]
"On Fairy-Stories", the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture at St Andrew's University, is a defence of the fantasy genre. "A Secret Vice" talks about creating imaginary languages, giving background to Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is a study of the medieval poem of the same name.
In his essay "On Fairy-Stories", Tolkien discusses the function of dreams in fantasy, stating that [7] [T 1] in dreams strange powers of the mind may be unlocked. In some of them a man may for a space wield the power of Faërie, that power which, even as it conceives the story, causes it to take living form and colour before the eyes.
Devin Brown, writing in Mythlore, argues that storytelling itself is "the ultimate time travel machine", noting that Tolkien's 1939 essay "On Fairy-Stories" stated that a defining characteristic of a fairy story is "its ability to transport the reader outside of time to realms otherwise inaccessible". [12]
Tom Shippey notes that Tolkien made equivocal statements about fantasy, such as in his essay "On Fairy-Stories". Tolkien was similarly equivocal about the nature of evil, as seen through the One Ring, created by the Dark Lord Sauron to dominate the whole of Middle-earth; it behaves both as an inanimate object, and as a thing with constantly ...
Fantasy before Tolkien: The Blue Parrot by H. J. Ford, for Andrew Lang's 1907 The Olive Fairy Book. J. R. R. Tolkien was an English author and philologist of ancient Germanic languages, specialising in Old English; he spent much of his career as a professor at the University of Oxford. [13]
Each story has its feet firmly planted in the real world, but serves as an epicenter for swirling fantasies. In one story, "The Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies," Sparks makes use of a tragic plot point that sets off many classic fairy tales – the untimely death of a protagonist's parent – and applies it to the father instead of the mother.
The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey comments that "the themes of the Escape from Death, and the Escape from Deathlessness, are vital parts of Tolkien's entire mythology." [8] In a 1968 BBC television broadcast, Tolkien quoted French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and described the inevitability of death as the "key-spring of The Lord of the Rings ...