Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

Negative Estrangement: Fantasy And Race In The Drow And Drizzt Do’Urden, Steven Holmes

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This essay introduces the concept of negative estrangement to help understand current cultural interventions into the norms of depicting fantasy races. First, this essay builds on Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement to describe the literary practice of negative estrangement, wherein artists craft “more evil” foes based on hybridized amalgamations of stereotypes to create antipathy toward a subject, be it monster or fantasy race. This practice is sometimes used in service of confronting the issue of race and racism, despite seeming to reify or rearticulate racist stereotypes.

This essay builds on Tolkien’s argument in favor of creating “more evil” foes to exemplify …

Through Fire And Water: The Exodus Of The Gondothlim, Ethan Danner

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Despite being one of the earliest Middle-earth texts and a central component of the legendarium, J.R.R. Tolkien's Fall of Gondolin has received far less attention than the tale deserves. Building upon the works of David Greenman, Bruce Alexander, and Austin Freeman and their studies comparing The Fall of Gondolin to Virgil's Aeneid as well as Tom Shippey's monograph, The Road to Middle-earth, this article seeks to expand current scholarship surrounding The Fall of Gondolin by the examination of Exodus, as both a Medieval and religious text, as a potential source for the narrative structure, characters, and themes found …