Few characters change more in their depiction throughout 'traditional' Arthurian literature than Morgan le Fay, who transitions from the benevolent and supernatural Queen of the Isle of Apples to the ...mortal sister of King Arthur with a complicated relationship to her brother and his court. These two versions of the Arthurian enchantress are represented in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini and the French Vulgate Cycle, and they parallel two of Tolkien's prominent female characters in The Silmarillion: Lúthien and Aredhel. Establishing parallels between Monmouth's Morgen and Tolkien's Lúthien demonstrates both a connection to the Celtic tradition and a departure from that tradition through a positive portrayal of female power. While Morgan le Fay has often been portrayed as a sinister antagonist to Arthur and his court, recent scholars have reframed her role in the narrative as a challenge to the individual and systemic flaws within Camelot. Applying this perspective to Aredhel's narrative allows for a new interpretation of her character, her brother Turgon, and the fall of Gondolin.
Tolkien scholars have long studied the many connections between Beowulf and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. This essay explores the novel's representation of heroism and monstrousness and the ideal of ...kingship in relation to the Old English poem. Parallel descriptions between heroes and monsters illustrate that neither Beowulf nor Thorin is immune to monstrousness, but analyzing their actions in light of Hrothgar's advice to Beowulf illustrates that both characters distinguish themselves as great kings and heroes. Moreover, how these characters resist evil varies greatly and reveals a core distinction between the Beowulfian and Tolkienian hero, and even highlights the importance of hope in Tolkien's works and his emphasis on what he termed eucatastrophe, rather than the elegiac tone of Beowulf.
This paper considers the issue of the norm in the context of learner corpus research and its implications for foreign language teaching. It seeks to answer three main questions: Does learner corpus ...research require a native norm? What corpus-derived norms are available and how do we choose? What do we do with these norms in the classroom? The first two questions are more research-oriented, reviewing the types of reference corpora that can be used in the analysis of learner corpora, whereas the third one looks into the pedagogical use of corpus-derived norms. It is shown that, while studies in learner corpus research can dispense with a native norm, they usually rely on one, and that a wide range of native and non-native norms are available, from which choosing the most appropriate one(s) is of crucial importance. This large repertoire of corpus-derived norms is then reconsidered in view of the reality of the foreign language classroom.
There appears to be a slight movement toward altering the ethnicity of famous characters, as seen in the casting of Dev Patel as David Copperfield and Sir Gawain in visual adaptations of those same ...texts. The reenvisioning of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as a streaming series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022–), features Black actors in primary roles, sparking interest in the adaptation despite racist internet backlash for its casting. Ahdieh presents a well written set of novels, centering on belonging instead of marginalization based on race and gender. Since the American Dream was marketed to Caucasian immigrants, Ahdieh has updated this concept for a new generation of vampire-lovers, one that is multiracial and comprehends the impact of colonization on America. In her discussion of race in the fantastic, Elizabeth Anne Leonard observes that “Because the fantastic is not ‘high’ culture but ‘popular,’ what it has to say about race is especially significant; it can represent or speak to the racial fears of a large group” (3).
Most of these valuable chapters say something a lot like what Stevens says in those much-quoted poems: A and B, normally considered opposites or mutually exclusive, are—as Stevens shows, or in ...Stevens’s poetry—interdependent, inseparable, included in each other, part of a larger whole, or even, deep down, the same. ...in Douglas Mao’s carefully speculative piece on Stevens and Karl Mannheim, Stevens’s utopian imagination depends on realism, even on realpolitik: both emerge from each other—dare we say, dialectically—in the twentieth century’s “ongoing history of ideas in conflict” (40). ...they will help you, if you are the sort of critic who regularly reads this journal, bring Stevens into present-day conversations that often proceed without him, conversations about urbanism (for example) or about race and whiteness, about ecology and nature as they are more usually understood, about the transhistorical idea of lyric (or, if you prefer Virginia Jackson to Jonathan Culler, about “lyricization”). By the 1940s, as Charles Altieri puts it, Stevens would try to split off “the life of poetry entirely from the space of ideas that claim determinate content,” treating ideas as experiments, attitudes, building blocks, way stations, half-truths (194). Wolfe’s argument may look like one more attempt to run those old dualities, reality and imagination, up the critical flagpole together to see if anyone salutes, but Wolfe’s framing has useful consequences. (Someone should write an essay about “Stevens, Fantasy, and Science Fiction”; I would, if asked.) By the end of this volume we have been introduced to a double handful of au courant framings for Stevens, careful and useful ways to bring him into contemporary conversations about cognition, globalization, philosophical ethics, post-avant-garde poetics (as per Andrew Epstein) and much else.
Vander Stichele and Penner's analysis of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, for example, examines sociocultural factors as they relate to its portrayal of the Crucifixion; they conclude that the ...film's visual style-i.e., its emphasis on graphic violence-functions to portray a uniquely "American Gospel." Romanowski's Cinematic Faith: A Christian Perspective on Movies and Meaning, connects the dots between pop culture trends, movie-going, and faith to contribute to theoretical discussions in the field.8 Dark, as well, author of Even/day Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons, practices a-Christian media critique by finding God in these unexpected places.9 Downing writes, "Christian scholars have extracted spiritual insights from popular Hollywood movies in which Christianity has no apparent role. Here, I suggest that by drawing on a sacramental view of media in our analysis and critique-and aided by the related concept of transposition-Christian media critics might perceive meaning that goes otherwise unnoticed and underappreciated in film, television, music, books, and so on. ...I argue that such a perspective can function apologetically, in a limited sense, by equipping film/media critics to engage secular audiences in the pop-culture spaces where they spend time.
This essay introduces the concept of negative estrangement to help understand current cultural interventions into the norms of depicting fantasy races. First, this essay builds on Shklovsky's concept ...of estrangement to describe the literary practice of negative estrangement, wherein artists craft "more evil" foes based on hybridized amalgamations of stereotypes to create antipathy toward a subject, be it monster or fantasy race. This practice is sometimes used in service of confronting the issue of race and racism, despite seeming to reify or rearticulate racist stereotypes. This essay builds on Tolkien's argument in favor of creating "more evil" foes to exemplify heroic action from Tolkien's essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" as part of the structure of negative estrangement. It also builds on the sense of how, as Helen Young describes, fantasy can seem safer for the cultural work of exploring issues of race due to its apparent rhetorical distance from the real world. In allowing the non-realistic reification of fantasy races, the issue of racism can be addressed substantively without audience rejection. The work of R. A. Salvatore is productive as a case study to understand this literary practice. R. A. Salvatore has written over 30 novels focusing on the dark elf, "drow," character of Drizzt Do'Urden. In his writing, Salvatore demonstrates a fundamental paradox between the desire of artists to craft anti-racist narratives and the need to depict "evil" fantasy races in mass market action fantasy prose. Since 2020, the Wizards of the Coast game Dungeons & Dragons has been in the process of active revision and rewriting its handling of fantasy races. Part of the purpose of this essay is to highlight the ways that the fantasy genre is continuing change its handling of the depiction or conception of fantasy races.
As much as J. R. R. Tolkien valued the heroism expressed in "The Battle of Maidon," with its record of warriors who died to maintain their oath, he challenged the notion of utter adherence to a sworn ...oath in The Silmarillion. The over-arching narrative of The Silmarillion tells of Fěanor and his seven sons who swear an oath to reclaim the three Silmarils from any "Vala, Demon, Elf or Man as yet unborn, or any creature, great or small, good or evil, that time should bring forth unto the end of days, whoso should hold or take or keep a Silmaril from their possession" (Silmarillion 83). The extended story ultimately highlights the bitter regret that can come from seeking to fulfill an oath that, the more it is pursued, the more harm is done. As such, we can better understand the perspective of Elrond in The Lord of the Rings, as Elrond saw first-hand the ultimate end of the oath of Fěanor: in language reminiscent of the Old English poem "The Wanderer," Elrond observes that efforts not to break an oath can break one's heart instead.
Neidorf discusses Bertha S. Phillpotts's 1928 essay on "Wyrd and Providence in Anglo-Saxon Thought," highlighting J.R.R. Tolkien's 1936 lecture to the British Academy, Beowulf: The Monsters and the ...Critics which altered the trajectory of Beowulf studies. It has been deemed "the single most influential article ever written on Beowulf in the poem's 200-year critical history." Beyond its influence on Beowulf scholarship, Tolkien's lecture has come to be studied as an important literary work in its own right, which displays its author's rhetorical talents and reflects his developing ideas about fantasy literature. The lecture is not a conventional piece of academic writing: aside from a few salient exceptions, Tolkien engages with the scholarly tradition he inherited only in an indirect and allusive manner.
