The Modes of Fiction -An Introduction
Taking Aristotle as his starting point, Canadian academic Northrop Frye, in his ground-breaking book Anatomy of Criticism, classifies...
Tolkien and Frodo's Motivations
Earlier in this blog, I examined the development of the character at the heart of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins. I...
A Philological Imagination 1
Tolkien’s imagination worked in a philological way. Apart from the well-known fact that his created world of Middle earth grew out of...
The Power of Tropes
As we have seen in How Stories Really Work , there are four basic genres, each growing out of the kind of effect a writer wants to...
The Ups and Downs of Characters
If we go back to mythology and folklore, the hero of a story can have superhuman qualities and is often semi-divine in origin - in...
Frodo's Motivation
In all the vast tapestry that is Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, one character clearly qualifies, amongst the array of masterfully drawn...
'Lies breathed through silver'
Though it will probably be common knowledge to you reading this, it came as a strange shock to me when, during my early teens, I...
'Lies breathed through silver'
Though it will probably be common knowledge to you reading this, it came as a strange shock to me when, during my early teens, I...
What Aragorn Had to Lose
Aragorn, in The Lord of the Rings , is clearly an archetypal warrior figure, of the kind described in the book How Stories Really Work ....
What Aragorn Had to Lose
Aragorn, in The Lord of the Rings, is clearly an archetypal warrior figure, of the kind described in the book How Stories Really Work....