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
Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader
Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader. Edited by Jane Chance. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Pp. xx + 340, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth) While it seems that many professional folklorists have had their interest in the field initially sparked by the work of Joseph Campbell, W. B. Yeats, and J.R.R. Tolkien, most tend to deny their initial attraction to these writers, stigmatizing them as popularizers. Recognizing the scholarly problems associated with these writers, I nonetheless unabashedly proclaim my engagement with the works of all three, most especially that of J.R.R. Tolkien, a great source of inspiration to me and, I am sure, to many other young scholars. Of course the personal and emotional impact of Tolkien's work says nothing about its worth as a subject of academic study, and so the question is often posed whether Tolkien's work even deserves to be studied. This question has for years plagued scholars seeking to affirm the merits of the work. There have been fruitless and dull attempts to categorize Tolkien as a writer of children's literature or a producer of anomalously best-selling dime novels. Such attempts, tinged with embarrassment at the overwhelming popular success of Tolkien's fiction, are often accompanied by dismissive remarks made apparently in the hope that wishing will make it so. As recently as 2000, Harold Bloom pronounced The Lord of the Rings "fated to become only an intricate Period Piece, while The Hobbit may well survive as Children's Literature" (Bloom 1-2). When Bloom dispatched this thunderbolt, The Lord of the Rings had been robustly in print for forty-five years, The Hobbit for sixty-two. Despite the disapproval, over the past three decades scholars such as T. A. (Tom) Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, and Jane Chance have produced and inspired a growing body of scholarly Tolkien criticism. These three scholars, along with others, have begun to wade through voluminous Tolkien correspondence and scholarly research and writing and to unfold the major goals of Tolkien's work and the sources of his inspiration. In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, the most recent addition to this body of scholarship, Jane Chance compiles eighteen essays that offer analysis of relations between Tolkien's writing and folklore, religion, and a wide range of historical literature. Inasmuch as the contributors are mostly approaching the work from the perspective of literary criticism (though of course most of the sources referred to, such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the Kalevala, are literary renderings of what may well have been oral tradition), folklorists can anticipate that the volume contains little actual folklore or reference to folklore scholarship and that the contributors often make imprecise use of the technical terms "myth" and "legend. …
Design of Fixture for Pitch Circle Diameter Run-out Check
The design of fixture is an exceptionally mind boggling and natural process, which require learning and knowledge. Fixture configuration assumes an imperative part at the setup arranging stage. Appropriate fixture configuration is urgent for creating item quality in various terms of exactness, surface complete and accuracy of the machined parts. In existing plan the installation set up is done physically, so the point of this undertaking is to supplant with installation to spare time for stacking and emptying of segment. Apparatuses are ordinarily grouped by the kind of machine on which they are utilized. Installations can likewise be recognized by a sub arrangement. For instance, if an installation is intended to be utilized for examination called as inspection apparatus. By using the new designed fixture, run-out checking become easier and process becomes simpler.