J. R. R. Tolkien, War, and Nationalism
Tolkien may not have intentionally created his fictive nations to mirror real nations, but his world certainly bears the scars of his experiences of war. The World Wars heightened his fear of losing everything that he loved about his local culture through literal obliteration or assimilation into another culture in the event of England‘s losing. Tolkien saw the nation as a social construct that potentially could minimize losses, if not wholly protect local culture from the forces that threatened to destroy it. Yet he also perceived the nation‘s limitations in its ability to protect culture. A nation could grow too large for itself, becoming obsessed with consuming other nations. For Tolkien, national property-amassing leads to a loss of the cultural identity that nationhood aims to preserve. When the forces threatening individual nations become overwhelming, those nations often need to join forces to prevent being taken over by other, more powerful countries. An examination of Tolkien‘s fiction and numerous other sources, including essays and personal letters, suggests that he felt that separate nations should co-exist without imposing on one another, and that the nation taking over others would lose its own identity, whether gradually or suddenly. Despite Tolkien‘s efforts to distance himself from what he felt modernity represented, his fiction (whether consciously or not) grapples with the mid-twentieth century ideological conflicts surrounding the nation. The resulting sense of loss and powerlessness underlies much of Tolkien‘s fiction and leads him to a concept of the nation as an imperfect protector of culture, tempered by its need to rely on other nations. INDEX WORDS: Tolkien, Nationalism, World War I, World War II, National identity, National memory, Internationalism, Individualism, Modernism J. R. R. TOLKIEN, WAR, AND NATIONALISM
J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth
Introduction by Daniel Timmons Tolkien the Bard: His Tale Grew in the Telling by C. W. Sullivan III The Dragon-Lore of Middle-earth: Tolkien and Old English and Old Norse Tradition by Jonathan Evans J.R.R. Tolkien and the True Hero by George Clark Tolkien's Versecraft in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by Geoffrey Russom The Monsters Are Talismans and Transgressions: Tolkien and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Roger C. Schlobin The Sins of the Middle-earth: Tolkien's Use of Medieval Allegory by Charles W. Nelson Is Tolkien a Renaissance Man? Sir Phillips Sidney's Defense of Poetry and J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" by Tanya Caroline Wood Weaving Nets of Gloom: "Darkness Profound" in Tolkien and Milton by Debbie Sly Gagool and Gollum: Exemplars of Degeneration in King Solomon's Mines and The Hobbit by William N. Rogers II and Michael R. Underwood "Joy Beyond the Walls of the World": The Secondary World-Making of J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis by David Sandner Taking the Part of Trees: Eco-Conflict in Middle-earth by Verlyn Flieger Women Fantasists: In the Shadow of the Ring by Faye Ringel Loss Eternal in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth by W.A. Senior Orcs, Wraiths, Wights: Tolkien's Images of Evil by Tom Shippey Bibliography Index
Integrating Al with NiO nano honeycomb to realize an energetic material on silicon substrate
Nano energetic materials offer improved performance in energy release, ignition, and mechanical properties compared to their bulk or micro counterparts. In this study, the authors propose an approach to synthesize an Al/NiO based nano energetic material which is fully compatible with a microsystem. A two-dimensional NiO nano honeycomb is first realized by thermal oxidation of a Ni thin film deposited onto a silicon substrate by thermal evaporation. Then the NiO nano honeycomb is integrated with an Al that is deposited by thermal evaporation to realize an Al/NiO based nano energetic material. This approach has several advantages over previous investigations, such as lower ignition temperature, enhanced interfacial contact area, reduced impurities and Al oxidation, tailored dimensions, and easier integration into a microsystem to realize functional devices. The synthesized Al/NiO based nano energetic material is characterized by scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, differential thermal analysis, and differential scanning calorimetry.