“Frodo himself, after the first shock, found that being his own master and the Mr. “Frodo himself, after the first shock, found that being his own master and He was generally happy, even after Bilbo’s departure in the beginning of the book. Now, we know from The Fellowship of the Ring that ignoring the drowning of his parents, Frodo had a remarkably nice childhood/young adulthood. Instead, something wrong is going on up here. This means that the laws of the world remain coherent, and there is no magical ring that whispers sweet nothings into your head. Instead of plummeting head-first into the fantastic marvelous, what if we instead go into the uncanny. This sweet spot is known as the pure fantastic, a delicate knife’s edge in which the character can either plummet into the marvelous or fall back into the uncanny world. Right here is this uncertainty in that space before you chose one of the answers, leading you from the fantastic into either the uncanny or the marvelous. This explanation can be one of two possible solutions: either she has lost her mind and is hallucinating but the laws of the world remain coherent, or she is actually seeing crazy stuff and the laws have gone utterly wonky. Todorov’s fantastic deals with the dilemma encountered by characters in fantasy stories – an event that cannot be explained by the laws of the familiar world must be explained.
Which is my excuse essentially for this presentation. The truth of the text matters only in how the reader interprets the work. Death of the Author, simply, is the concept that the author is merely a scriptor. All you need to know for now at least is it was birthed into being by Roland Barthes. I’m not here to give a philosophy lecture. That doesn’t leave you without wounds of your own – whether physical or mental.įor those unfamiliar with the concept of Death of the Author – no worries. Many of his school friends were killed in that very battle, and almost his entire battalion was wiped out once he returned to England.
I won’t give his entire history, but after going into the Trenches at the Battle of Somme, Tolkien went down with trench fever, and was sent back to England. Tolkien was an unwilling participant in World War One. Furthermore, I cite the concept of the “death of the Author” as my reasons for analyzing Lord of the Rings despite what Tolkien may have intended. Instead, I wish to point out the stark similarities between Frodo pre-Ring and post-Ring with what we now know as the onset of mental illness, then life after learning to deal with it. I don’t think that is what Tolkien intended with his masterpiece. By no means am I saying Tolkien specifically wrote Frodo’s struggle with the Ring as an allegory for mental illness. Of course, this is the point where I make my disclaimer. But what if we were to instead tilt towards the uncanny? What, then, would Frodo’s mental battles with the Ring be? My hypothesis is we would classify this constant battle Frodo has with an invisible force that only he is directly affected by as a mental illness of sorts.
With Lord of the Rings, we, the readers, generally fall towards Todorov’s fantastic marvelous, in which the Ring (and Morgoth) does not operate within the laws of nature in our version of the world. This is a bit of a change from my usual garbage, but I really want to talk about Lord of the Rings. Hello everyone! I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve!