Category: Tolkien
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The Black Riders in Bree: Reexamining a Text Through Adaptation
One of the great things about film and TV adaptations is that they give image, movement, and voice to the scenes and characters that live primarily in the imagination, providing a shared experience of a story to a wider audience. But this is also something to be careful about as the adaptation’s visualization of a…
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Briefly Reflecting on The Hobbit (1937)
Tomorrow is Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthdays, but today is the 83rd anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit (1937). I first encountered The Hobbit through the 1977 TV animated movie (which, coincidentally, premiered on 27 November, two days before I was born), and through that to the books. I cannot understate the impact The Hobbit…
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An Introduction
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories,” he lays out the concepts of primary and secondary worlds, and how storytellers are effectively “sub-creators,” taking elements from the primary world and using those to construct new, secondary worlds in which readers, while they are reading, can have a belief similar to that which they have in the…