Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, JRR TOLKIEN, Myths and Stories

[Penner]

Has anyone seen the kind of maps where people would overlap Middle Earth with Europe?

[Penner]

Here is one of the US and Middle Earth:

[GloryofGreece]

Theres a good two hour documentary on Tolkien on Youtube that has some of his family and other literary critics on there. Good stuff. It was cool to see how much he was found of the older ways and didn't much like industrialization and combustion engine specifically. Uglying up the place.

[DrYouth]

The Lord of the Rings has deep archetypal power.
The personal shadow in Gollum and the greater shadow in Sauron are as powerfully resonant as any narrative I can think of.
The call to individuation and the maturation of the heroes along the hero's journey make the story deeply compelling.
This is why we all love this tale.
Unlike Lucas and the Star Wars narrative, Tolkien did not invoke the archetypes with intention...
The archetypes are part of the human psyche and so emerge in all powerful narratives whether the author is conscious of them or not.

[Speaker to Animals]

"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author."

"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision."

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #142

This one really gets to the point:

"The only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human 'literature', that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily it can be read 'just as a story'; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it."

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #109

I think you read into it too much, DrY. While it's true, you can't escape the fact that he was expressing Catholic doctrine regarding the dangers of power (unconsciously at first), his main goal was to simply write a story that is self-consistent and stands as it's own sub-creation. You really should just read it at face value. Explore the world he created.

[Alexander PhiAlipson]

The Lord of the Rings has deep archetypal power.
The personal shadow in Gollum and the greater shadow in Sauron are as powerfully resonant as any narrative I can think of.
The call to individuation and the maturation of the heroes along the hero's journey make the story deeply compelling.
This is why we all love this tale.
Unlike Lucas and the Star Wars narrative, Tolkien did not invoke the archetypes with intention...
The archetypes are part of the human psyche and so emerge in all powerful narratives whether the author is conscious of them or not.

Mmmm, word salad with je ne sais quoi dressing.

[heydaralon]

I hate Tolkien and LOTR. I watched those movies almost a decade and a half ago. I rewatched one. Big mistake. I felt like I needed an AIDS test after watching that shit. Why are all the villains ugly and one dimensional? Why is the acting so over the top and hammy? Why is half the movie about dwarf homoeroticism? Why are these movies reliant on CGI and plot holes, and deus ex machina plot resolutions? Fuck Lord of the Rings.

[Speaker to Animals]

I hate Tolkien and LOTR. I watched those movies almost a decade and a half ago. I rewatched one. Big mistake. I felt like I needed an AIDS test after watching that shit. Why are all the villains ugly and one dimensional? Why is the acting so over the top and hammy? Why is half the movie about dwarf homoeroticism? Why are these movies reliant on CGI and plot holes, and deus ex machina plot resolutions? Fuck Lord of the Rings.

Read the book before you judge the story.

Lord of the Rings was a big deal for Gen X growing up. Reading that stuff was a right of passage, along with D&D's Tomb of Horrors and Against the Giants. The movies were popular because of that, mostly. The same reason Ready Player One blew up.

[heydaralon]

I hate Tolkien and LOTR. I watched those movies almost a decade and a half ago. I rewatched one. Big mistake. I felt like I needed an AIDS test after watching that shit. Why are all the villains ugly and one dimensional? Why is the acting so over the top and hammy? Why is half the movie about dwarf homoeroticism? Why are these movies reliant on CGI and plot holes, and deus ex machina plot resolutions? Fuck Lord of the Rings.

Read the book before you judge the story.

Lord of the Rings was a big deal for Gen X growing up. Reading that stuff was a right of passage, along with D&D's Tomb of Horrors and Against the Giants. The movies were popular because of that, mostly. The same reason Ready Player One blew up.

I will confess, I never read the trilogy, though I did listen to an audiobook of the hobbit back in the day. People always praise Tolkien for creating a world, and languages. I've never been impressed with his world building personally. Where is the religion of middle earth? That would have been a huge part of any society. I'm also not a fan of Manichean type stuff. All the bad guys wear black, are ugly, and have very little in the way of nuaned motives for their behavior. They are just ugly evil dark guys for the sake of being ugly evil and dark. Haven't read the trilogy so I can't debate you on the merits of the books, but thats my impression from the movies and hobbit.

[Speaker to Animals]

I hate Tolkien and LOTR. I watched those movies almost a decade and a half ago. I rewatched one. Big mistake. I felt like I needed an AIDS test after watching that shit. Why are all the villains ugly and one dimensional? Why is the acting so over the top and hammy? Why is half the movie about dwarf homoeroticism? Why are these movies reliant on CGI and plot holes, and deus ex machina plot resolutions? Fuck Lord of the Rings.

Read the book before you judge the story.

Lord of the Rings was a big deal for Gen X growing up. Reading that stuff was a right of passage, along with D&D's Tomb of Horrors and Against the Giants. The movies were popular because of that, mostly. The same reason Ready Player One blew up.

I will confess, I never read the trilogy, though I did listen to an audiobook of the hobbit back in the day. People always praise Tolkien for creating a world, and languages. I've never been impressed with his world building personally. Where is the religion of middle earth? That would have been a huge part of any society. I'm also not a fan of Manichean type stuff. All the bad guys wear black, are ugly, and have very little in the way of nuaned motives for their behavior. They are just ugly evil dark guys for the sake of being ugly evil and dark. Haven't read the trilogy so I can't debate you on the merits of the books, but thats my impression from the movies and hobbit.

Well, Lord of the Rings is really one book that publishers later broke up into three "novels". It's not actually a trilogy. And The Hobbit is a children's tale. He wrote it for his young boys. It's very different from Lord of the Rings.

Another good one from that year was Poul Anderson's Broken Sword.