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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
"No Pagan Ever Loved His God": Tolkien, Thompson, And The Beautification Of The Gods, M. Fontenot
"No Pagan Ever Loved His God": Tolkien, Thompson, And The Beautification Of The Gods, M. Fontenot
Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature
Alexei Kondratiev award for best student paper, Mythcon 49. Many scholars have commented on the influence of Catholic mystic Francis Thompson’s poetry on J.R.R. Tolkien’s early forays into creative writing. However, few critical studies have addressed possible connections between Tolkien and Thompson’s prose work. This paper suggests that if anything is comparable between Tolkien and Thompson, it is their respective understandings of art, creation, and the significance of artists, regardless of the form of poetic (or prosaic) expression these sentiments induced. Thompson’s essays on art, paganism, and the immortality of beauty come together to form backdrop against which we might …
On Superhero Stories: The Marvel Cinematic Universe As Tolkienesque Fantasy, A.G. Holdier
On Superhero Stories: The Marvel Cinematic Universe As Tolkienesque Fantasy, A.G. Holdier
Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature
By considering the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a case study, I bring Tolkien’s explication of mythopoesis in “On Fairy Stories” to bear on the current popularity of superhero films to argue that such works qualify as cinematic examples of Tolkienesque fantasy tales. After summarizing Tolkien’s criteria for the genre in Nietzschean aesthetic terms, I both demonstrate how the builders of the MCU have crafted a sub-created fictional world and defend the existence of fairy stories in visual media from Tolkien’s own criticism of such a possibility.