Miéville has never claimed that his politically informed, anti-authoritarian, radical SF is a literary innovation. Instead, he locates his work within an older tradition; he is, as he has explained, ..."staking out remembered territory" rather than exploring new ground (qtd. in Gordon, "Revelling" 367). Miéville's overall literary project can thus be seen as a form of radical remembering, a recovery of a forgotten or neglected generic past, which he uses to write back against conservative versions of the genre, from Tolkien's nostalgic evocation of a rural, orderly, and hierarchical England (and the less important but widely-disseminated work of his many imitators), to Jules Verne's evocations of capitalist expansion and industrial triumph over nature in works like Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1871) and The Mysterious Island (1875), to Robert Heinlein's evocations of a militarized free-market neo-liberal future in works like Starship Troopers (1959) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966).
Despite being a constant presence throughout the three ages of Middle-earth chronicled in J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium, Círdan seems to be no more than a minor, incidental character in both The ...Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien scholars have shed little light about Círdan's importance in the legendarium, in some cases even belittling his role. Here, Kane discusses the important role that Círdan plays in Tolkien's secondary universe.
In 1970, United Artists (UA) announced that John Boorman was to develop a film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Boorman collaborated on the screenplay adaptation throughout the ...first half of 1970 with Rospo Pallenberg, as well as hiring a small team of designers and production managers to assist in the development of a provisional budget. However, archival documentation makes it clear that UA never committed to a production of the project, only an exploratory adaptation. This article uses the John Boorman papers, housed in Indiana University's Lilly Library, to demonstrate how Boorman's work on adapting The Lord of the Rings is an instrumental case study on the wider film industrial process of unproduction, in which projects are more typically financed for development rather than production. It concludes that greater archival research is required in order to reframe scholarly understanding of the industrial processes of Hollywood and other film industries in order to raise questions about why so few film projects ever enter active production.
Inkpen explores the character of Tom Bombadil in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. He is an enigma who will not be improved by philosophizing. Bombadil enters the story for three brief episodes and ...then exits only to be mentioned in mysterious terms a handful of times in subsequent chapters. For Tolkien, Bombadil served quasi-allegorical and literary functions.
This article focuses on the symbolic use of dragons in several works by J. R. R. Tolkien and The Golden Legend, a popular compilation of saints’ lives by Jacobus de Voragine. In the medieval ...tradition, as recounted by Voragine, dragons serve as symbols of powerful evil through which the inherent weakness of postlapsarian (“after the Fall”) humans can be emphasized. The sudden, miraculous defeat of dragons also illustrates what is possible through faith and the grace of God, anticipating Tolkien’s notion of eucatastrophe, the unexpected reversal in fortune that characterizes the best fairy tales, which is now recognized as a key component of his own approach to mythopoeia.
Scholars investigating Tolkien's linguistic universe have usually focused on his Elvish languages or, if they want something even more challenging, they have tried their luck with the few known ...samples from Black Speech or Khuzdul in order to reconstruct the principles of those enigmatic tongues. The Hobbits and their languages have played a very minor role in all these discussions, not least since the general impression seems to be that there is nothing interesting to be said about this inobtrusive, loveable, quaint, but also (linguistically) not very exciting people. It may thus come as a surprise that the Hobbits' linguistic history contains something of a mystery. This linguistic puzzle, like Poe's Purloined Letter, lies hidden in plain sight in the seemingly clearly and squarely set out history of the Hobbits. Here, Honegger will attempt to investigate this mystery and to illuminate some of the complexities of Tolkien's linguistic universe.
Abstract
This article conducts a corpus-based comparative study of explicitation, one of the translation universals widely explored, by investigating the use of connectives in two versions of the ...Chinese translation of
The Lord of the Ring
s from Taiwan and Mainland China. The two versions are compared with the originally produced Chinese text and their source text to find out whether explicitation through the use of connectives occurs in Chinese translation and to what extent such explicitation is influenced by the source text. A quantitative plus qualitative method is adopted to analyze the connectives in the two Chinese versions and compare them with their counterparts in the source text and the non-translated target text. The results show that explicitation occurs in both versions and that the Taiwan version exhibits a higher degree of explicitation than the Mainland version. Such findings may result from different pedagogical and regional translation norms, especially with greater importance attached to faithfulness in translation in Mainland China.
Five mini-essays proposing hypotheses on topics in J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis scholarship. 1. The Expansion and Contraction of Tolkien's Imagination: how and why his burgeoning sub-creation began ...to contract and systematize in his later years. 2. A Hobbit in the Legendarium: Tolkien's original conception of the relationship between The Hobbit and The Silmarillion may have been to have Bilbo visiting a land of fable. 3. Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moore: Lewis's devotion to Mrs. Moore may have been a sense of metaphysical and spiritual obligation. 4. But did he ever read the book?: How Edmund Wilson and Michael Moorcock could have reviewed and criticized Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings while getting basic facts wrong. 5. The Problem of Eowyn: Many scholars' objections to Tolkien's treatment of Eowyn and Lewis's of Susan extends beyond authorial intent to the effect of the story on readers.
From forest fires to droughts to sea inundations to once-a-century storms happening every other year - we can no longer deny the science that we've studied for the past 50 years. ...like Frodo and ...friends, the A\J editorial team persevered through their own versions of Mordor and the other trials and tribulations, hacking and slashing the wordier contributions (ahem...), and delivering a compelling coherent 'whole' crafted together from a series of science fiction stories that leaned heavily on the 'science' to help avoid the siren's call for cliches. Today, in 2021, 50 years after our founding, we are now certain that a storm of impacts, a great storm, is coming our way as a result of anthropogenic climate change. In 2071, it is our fervent hope that human society will have exited the worst period of the 'great climate storm' - and will have learned how to replant humanity in harmony with nature.