Perhaps the one place where political events in Tolkien's own life affect the narrative is in the episode at the very end of The Scouring of the Shire. In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. Perhaps in that sense, Galadriel does remain a heroic figure, if more passive than Eowyn, she retains her total independence and a modicum of power, being one of the last two Ring holders with Gandalf. As with so many of my pieces you don’t get to see the characters, instead it is these objects and their positioning as well as other subtle detailing that creates an open-ended image that is designed to be interpreted however you see it playing out in your head, you pick up the pieces and run with it! The curse that surrounds the Pirates who turn to skeletons in the moonlight is another factor that I wanted to explore.

Tolkien accelerates the story engine towards an end that has already been prepared and enabled in the first 2 parts of the series, letting it feel like one, big piece. Sure I'd read The Hobbit, but that didn't prepare me for the breadth and depth of The Lord of the Rings. The banality of evil, the attractiveness of the dark side is, as mentioned in „Black, white, and…“ above, is one of the driving forces of the saga and without Tolkiens´experiences, it might have stayed much more superficial and have never reached that deep level of human soul and psyche vivisection. What was appealing here was that contrast between the norm and the world of the Hobbits, the fact that really detailed environments happened to be so much smaller and you would only know that this was the case when a character such as Gandalf came into shot. Especially since my parents used to give me fun facts all the time and now I get to pass them on to my best friend, who doesn’t know what’s going to hit him, poor thing.

To enable personalised advertising (like interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. His ideas weren’t unique, and while his approach may have been unusual, it was only because he spent a lifetime obsessively trying to make something artificial seem more natural, despite the fact that the point of fantasy (and fiction in general) is to explore the artificial, the human side of the equation, to look at the world through the biased lens of our eye and to represent some odd facet of the human condition.

Proust has a couple of long discussions about this, describing in great detail how the narrator's initial mental pictures of Balbec, Venice and the Guermantes family come just from the sounds of their names. A. Salvatore who try and fail to derail this configuration) and the concepts of good and evil that go along with them, which leads to the stagnation and diminishment of their genre. When you are piecing together imagery that involves unifying a large number of individual objects a key challenge is to get the scale right or risk confusing or killing a piece. This is the story of Frodo who goes on an impossible quest to destroy a very powerful and magical ring.In the case of Sam and Frodo, I suppose that it could be argued that Sam sometimes has a man-crush on Frodo, but it is not truly reciprocated nor acted on other than their relationship involving more hugs and handholding than other friendships in the book. I saw multiple Harry Potter movies before I got my hands on them at the local library, or even was at a proper reading level to comprehend them. The symbols he uses go back before the Germanic invasions of Britain around 1000 because his goal is precisely to recreate the mythology that existed in England, Scotland and Wales before this period of instability and wanton destruction. Written in stages between 1937 and 1949, The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-selling novels ever written, with over 150 million copies sold.