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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
History In The Margins: Epigraphs And Negative Space In Robin Hobb’S Assassin’S Apprentice, Matthew Oliver
History In The Margins: Epigraphs And Negative Space In Robin Hobb’S Assassin’S Apprentice, Matthew Oliver
Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature
Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice demonstrates a significant effect of epic fantasy’s conventions for creating the history of a fictional world. By prefacing each chapter with an epigraph from an official in-world historical text before giving a first-person personal narrative, the novel blurs the boundaries between text and paratext, public and private, official history and personal myth-making. This structure raises questions about what is central and marginal in history, suggesting the extent to which historical narrative is constructed in the imagination by taking the facts surrounding a central event from which the historian is absent—a process much like negative space drawing …
Círdan The Shipwright: Tolkien’S Bodhisattva Who Brings Us To The Other Shore, Douglas Charles Kane
Círdan The Shipwright: Tolkien’S Bodhisattva Who Brings Us To The Other Shore, Douglas Charles Kane
Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature
Tolkien wrote that Círdan the Shipwright “saw further and deeper than any other in Middle-earth” despite being a minor, incidental character in both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. The important role that Círdan plays in Tolkien’s secondary universe can be understood by looking at him as a bodhisattva in a Buddhist tradition. Círdan’s role throughout the Three Ages of Middle-earth chronicled by Tolkien was to come to the aid of others, to reduce their suffering, and particularly to help facilitate their sailing to the “Blessed Lands” in the West (which can be seen as a metaphor for …