Tolkien, Race and Cultural History From Fairies to Hobbits

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ISBN: 9780230219519 | 0230219519
Cover: Hardcover
Copyright: 12/15/2008

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Fimi explores the evolution of Tolkien's mythology throughout his lifetime by examining how it changed as a result of his life story and contemporary cultural and intellectual history. This new approach and scope brings to light neglected aspects of Tolkien's imaginative vision and contextualizes his fiction.

List of Figures	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. x
Conventions and Abbreviations	p. xiv
Introduction	p. 1
His 'private and beloved nonsense': The Silmarillion and the 'Silmarillion'	p. 1
A Victorian beginning and a modern end	p. 5
'I hold the key': constructing a 'biographical legend'	p. 6
How It All Began ...	p. 9
In the Beginning Were the Fairies ...	p. 13
Fairy-things and fairylands	p. 14
The creation of a saga	p. 20
Fairies and elves in Tolkien's children's literature	p. 23
'Fluttering Sprites with Antennae': Victorian and Edwardian Fancies	p. 28
'Flower-and-Butterfly Minuteness': the fairy painting imagery	p. 28
Peter Pan and the Cottage of Lost Play	p. 34
Fading, passing departing: the fairies' farewell	p. 38
The Fairies, Faith and Folklore	p. 40
'Natural' fairies and romantic religion	p. 40
Brownies, nymphs, mermaids and the 'elementals'	p. 45
Fairies, folklore and the 'mythology for England'	p. 50
Ideal Beings, Ideal Languages	p. 63
The Cat and the Whiskers: Tolkien's Linguistic Creation	p. 69
A multi-lingual novel	p. 69
Examining the corpus	p. 72
'Linguistic Aesthetic': Sounds, Meaning and the Pursuit of Beauty	p. 76
Theorizing language invention: A Secret Vice	p. 76
The theory of 'inherent linguistic predilections': English and Welsh	p. 80
Language attitudes	p. 83
Sound symbolism and sound experiments	p. 88
Ideal Languages and Phonetic Spelling	p. 93
The myth of a universal language	p. 93
Aspects of linguistic creativity: language change and language decay	p. 101
Invented alphabets, universal alphabets and the phonetic spelling	p. 104
From Myth to History	p. 117
The Claim to History	p. 123
A changing cosmology: from a flat to a round world	p. 123
Reconsidering the 'framework' of the mythology	p. 125
A Hierarchical World	p. 131
'Race' and racial anthropology	p. 132
Tolkien's views on Nazi Germany, race and language	p. 135
Focusing on Middle-earth: constructing new hierarchies	p. 141
Racial mixture: the problem of the Half-Elven	p. 151
The face of evil: the origin and appearance of the Orcs	p. 154
Tolkien and the charge of racism	p. 157
Visualising Middle-Earth: Real and Imagined Material Cultures	p. 160
The idea of European prehistory and historical 'cultures'	p. 163
The culture of Gondor: ship burials and winged helmets	p. 165
'Chambers', 'Windows' and the Anglo-Saxons	p. 176
Victorian countryside and relics of the industrial revolution: the material culture of the Shire	p. 179
Romancing archaeology	p. 185
Epilogue: From Fairies to Hobbits	p. 189
Mistakes and inconsistencies	p. 189
The rise of the hobbits and the fairies' fate	p. 194
'And Wither Then?': Stepping into the Road	p. 200
Notes	p. 204
Bibliography	p. 217
Index	p. 232
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Tolkien, Race and Cultural History From Fairies to Hobbits

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Author Biography

Table of Contents

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