Narrative models in Tolkien's stories of middle-earth

• Jaume Albero Poveda ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Valladolid

     Universidad de Valladolid

     Valladolid, España

     
• Localización: Journal of English Studies, ISSN 1576-6357, Nº 4, 2003-2004, págs. 7-22
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In The Lord of the Rings (1954), there is an attempt to unite the two worlds which captivated Tolkien's imagination: the fairy tale world of children's stories which he was drawn to as a child, and the sagas and medieval myths that were the subject of his study and teaching at university. The hobbits are where these two narrative universes meet. In The Lord of the Rings, these two worlds, being difficult to reconcile, collide. On the one hand, we have the hobbits, those everymen with whom the reader can identify easily. They are characters created in The Hobbit (1937) that have a narrative world of their own, as in fairytales, and that are generated with a low mimetic mode. On the other hand, we have the chivalric heroes with a great literary tradition, who belong to the high mimetic mode. Tolkien's fiction is less successful in those episodes in which the hobbits are absent.