Digital Commons Network^™

Art And Enchantment: How Wonder Works By Patrick Curry, N. Trevor Brierly

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

Patrick Curry has written extensively on Tolkien, art and enchantment, and Art and Enchantment is his most academic in nature on these subjects, and the most fully developed and detailed. Curry describes and analyzes both enchantment and disenchantment. He focuses on art, artists and artistic movements and whether they might be more, or less, conducive to enchantment. In particular he notes that modernism is largely hostile to enchantment.

Mapping A Sense Of Humor: Narrative And Space In Terry Pratchett's Discworld Novels By Daniel Lüthi, Susan Moore

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

No abstract provided.

Harry Potter And Resistance By Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, Douglas Charles Kane

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

No abstract provided.

Potterversity: Essays Exploring The World Of Harry Potter Edited By Kathryn Mcdaniel And Emily Strand, And The Ivory Tower, Harry Potter, And Beyond: More Essays On The Works Of J.K. Rowling Edited By Lana Whited, Liam Butchart

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

No abstract provided.

Mimetic Theory & Middle-Earth: Untangling Desire In Tolkien’S Legendarium By Matthew J. Distefano, Curtis Gruenler

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

Matthew Distefano’s friendly volume extends considerably the conversation about resonances between two twentieth-century literary giants, J. R. R. Tolkien and René Girard. Distefano not only clarifies essential aspects of Tolkien’s work by reading it through the lens of Girard’s mimetic theory but also, through his particular interest in how Hobbits provide models of positive mimetic desire, highlights, extends, and one might even say enacts aspects of Girard’s theory that are easily overlooked.

Diary Of An Old Soul By George Macdonald, Annotated Edition, Tiffany Brooke Martin

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

Book Review of Diary of an Old Soul by George MacDonald. Annotated edition with introd. and notes by Timothy Larsen. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2024.

Tolkien’S Cosmology: Divine Beings And Middle-Earth By Sam Mcbride, Phillip Fitzsimmons

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

Sam McBride writes the following in his Introduction to Tolkien’s Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle-earth “Exploring Tolkien’s legendarium will show the cosmological structure of Middle-earth, but also reveal moments in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when the metaphysical impacts the physical.” (p. x) The book delivers on its promise to show the reader places within the stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings likely to be influenced by spiritual beings who are described in The Silmarillion and the other volumes of the Legendarium. McBride’s book gives the reader a convincing description of the divine …

J.R.R. Tolkien: A Very Short Introduction By Matthew Townend, Laura N. Van Dyke

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

No abstract provided.

“Perilous And Fair” In “A Bleak, Barren Land”: A Feminist Responds To Dylan Lee Henderson’S Essay, Robin A. Reid

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

Dylan Lee Henderson’s 2023 essay in Mythlore (vol. 42, no. 1) titled “A Bleak, Barren Land’: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings,” claims that “many feminist scholars [since 1971] have condemned Tolkien’s depiction of women as inadequate and denounced Tolkien himself as a misogynist” (88). In my response, I argue that Henderson’s essay reduces a fifty-plus year history of scholarship (much of it by feminists) exploring the complex, contradictory issues of Tolkien’s female characters to a single negative stereotype. I described that stereotype in my 2015 essay in Perilous and Fair (Croft and Donovan) in my conclusion …

What Will We Do With The Christmas Pudding?: Joy Davidman, William Lindsay Gresham, And "Christmas In The Workhouse", Gabriel C. Salter, Clark Sheldon

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

The poem "Christmas in the Workhouse" archived in William Lindsay Gresham's papers at first appears to be a random transcript in his files. Exploring the work's publication history and Gresham's contributions to War Poems of the United Nations, a book edited by his second wife Joy Davidman, suggests that in fact "Christmas in the Workhouse" is part of the larger story of how they informed each other's work in the 1940s.

Weaving Wikipedia’S Middle-Earth Web, Ian F. Alexander

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

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth fantasy writing has become extremely popular, and has been extensively studied by scholars. Part of the demand for information on the subject is met by Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia with a large readership. I have extended its coverage of Middle-earth subjects to more than 200 Good Articles, divided roughly equally between in-universe subjects such as “Aragorn” and more scholarly subjects such as “Heroism in The Lord of the Rings”. Each article is required to stand alone as a notable topic in its own right, as demonstrated by its citations to reliable sources. Other sites like Tolkien Gateway …

St. Jack’S Experiment House For Juvenile Delinquents: Responding To Aslan’S Breath By Matthew Dickerson, Gabriel C. Salter

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

Matthew Dickerson raises an important point in his latest book "Aslan's Breath: Seeing the Holy Spirit in Narnia" that Lewis offers a theologically problematic example of combating evil when his heroes terrorize the bullies at Experiment House at the end of The Silver Chair. Exploring Dickerson's point, and particularly how Lewis pairs vengeance with saitre in this scene, challenges readers to see that Lewis' work for children is often more transgressive than it appears, not unlike the concerns raised about Roald Dahl's vengeful punishment scenes. Extending the popular Dahl vs. Lewis discussion shows how they both may be read as …

"Better To Reign In Hell": Ambivalence And Orcs In The Lay Of The Children Of Húrin, Matthew Thompson-Handell

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

A remarkable passage in Tolkien's incomplete Lay of the Children of Húrin, describing the Orc-band after its capture of Túrin, provides an echo of Milton's assembly of fallen angels in Book I of Paradise Lost. The description of the Orc-band also hints at the kind of ambivalence which has often been ascribed to Milton's portrayal of Satan. This in turn provides a connection with recent work on humanity in Tolkien's depiction of the Orcs.

Interview With Professor John Mckinnell Concerning Tolkien’S Lectures On Beowulf, Łukasz Neubauer

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

Professor John McKinnell attended his classes on Beowulf as a student in the early 1960s. The interview sheds more light on Tolkien as a lecturer.

Alan Garner’S Elidor: The “Anti-Narnian Fantasy”?, Laura N. Van Dyke

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

British fantasy writer Alan Garner has referred to his novel Elidor as "THE anti-Narnian fantasy," though he says this was done unconsciously. In this article, I explore why Garner positioned his work as the antithesis to C.S. Lewis's fantasy novels, and argue that in many ways it in fact complements rather than contradicts the vision Lewis conveys.

The Bright Sword And Its Sharpness: Swords, Symbolism, And Medievalism In The Lord Of The Rings, Gavin S. Davis

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

Swords are paradoxical objects that hold in tension both aesthetic beauty and repulsion, and how one goes about resolving this paradox has much to say about one’s personal ideology. This paper investigates Tolkien’s representation of swords in The Lord of the Rings as ideologically loaded objects with shifting symbolic significance between the cultures of Rohan, Gondor, and Hobbits. These changes in significance produce three kinds of medievalism, shaped by differences in their interaction the cultural imagination of the medieval sword. Through the Rohirrim, Tolkien provides a medievalism of spectacle—an idealized world of valor to be marveled at from the safe …

Book Culture And Narrative In Martin’S A Song Of Fire And Ice, Maria Damkjær

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

What do books represent in G.R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire? This article examines their role as objects and their limitations within a narrative obsessed with loss of knowledge. Books, which are handled, lost, found, read, or destroyed, are both a shorthand for a fantasy world’s material culture, but also a metafictional nod to the reality of the reader. Contemporary fantasy authors, I posit, are both fascinated by texts, and also troubled by their limited chance of survival over the very long periods that the genre tends to sketch. Deep time is hostile to book knowledge, and …

Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Beowulf: Rowling’S Beowulfian Allusions, Analogues, And Inversions, Mark-Elliot Finley

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

In this essay, I suggest Rowling’s Goblet of Fire literarily echoes the Old English epic poem Beowulf, while simultaneously updating the medieval epic to reflect the novel’s place within the modernized, Christian-influenced fantasy tradition. While cursory popular links have been made between the Old English epic with Rowling’s novel, this essay presents a sustained dialogue between Beowulf and Goblet of Fire. Both heroes engage in one-to-one combat (Beowulf with Grendel and Harry with Voldemort), venture into an unknown watery abyss (Beowulf diving into Grendel’s mother’s underwater cave and Harry rescuing Ron and Gabrielle from the merpeople in Hogwarts’s …

Pandemic Mythmaking: Covid-19 And Mythological Symbolism In Indian Folk Art, Ishani Anwesha Joshi, Sathyaraj Venkatesan

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

Through a comprehensive analysis of Durga Bai Vyam’s “Samura Manthan” and Rupsona and Bahadur Chitrakar’s “Corona Rakshasa,” this article aims to investigate how mythological stories and themes have been used in the Indian context in folk art during the COVID-19 pandemic. The investigation will offer insights into how artists have leveraged mythological symbolism to infuse their works with richer layers of meaning, thereby engaging readers in a deeper exploration of the pandemic’s impact on society and the human psyche. By close-reading the aforementioned paintings, this study aims to illustrate the evolving visual representation of cultural narratives …

Feasting At The Threshold: Eucharistic Eroticism And Homonationalism In Diane Duane's The Tale Of The Five, Taylor Driggers

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

Diane Duane’s ongoing fantasy series The Tale of the Five (1979–present) is set in a world marked by constant bodily transgressions and surprises, where a human and dragon can occupy the same body and become lovers and a one-night stand can bring one face-to-face with God. This essay will argue that Duane’s series articulates eroticism in a manner comparable to Linn Marie Tonstad’s (2016) queer re-visioning of transubstantiation and bodily and spiritual transformation through the Eucharist. Acts of eating and drinking serve to highlight how characters’ pansexual, polyamorous relations with each other and the love of the Goddess spill over …

Modelling The Fear Of God In C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles Of Narnia, Brett Roscoe

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

This article employs insights from cognitive approaches to literature to study how The Chronicles of Narnia evoke a religious affect known in the Christian tradition as the “fear of the Lord.” It first does what Guillemette Bolens calls a "kinesic analysis" of the books, focusing on the gestures, movements, and facial expressions related to the fear of Aslan, and then it interprets this fear in the context of Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, a book C. S. Lewis claims had a large influence on him. Lewis, like Otto, was concerned with religious experience, specifically with how his …

The Liberty To Bind Oneself: Chesterton And The Oath Of Fëanor, Matthew Mckenna

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

This paper does two things. First, it reads the oath of Fëanor in The Silmarillion through the lens of Chesterton’s philosophy of oaths, and suggests that Tolkien was speculatively influenced by Chesterton on this topic. It accomplishes this by an exposition of Chesterton’s philosophy of vows followed by an in-depth exposition of the oath of Fëanor throughout The Silmarillion. Its thesis is that the oath of Fëanor works according to the mode of Chesterton’s philosophy of oaths, that is, the oath compels the oath-taker to act. Viewing the oath of Fëanor through the framework of Chesterton’s philosophy of oath …

The Middle-(Un)Man Of Desire: A Girardian Reading Of Perelandra, Clinton Manley

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

The French polymath René Girard presents a compelling argument that all desire is mimetic. According to Girard, we don’t actually know what we want; instead, we imitate the desires of others. These models of desire act as mediators, indicating what objects or ways of being are worth pursuing. For Girard, desire exists in this middle place between a subject, a model, and an object. He famously argues that all great literature leverages an awareness of mimetic dynamics; the greater the work, the more mimetically perspicacious the author.

Given Girard’s theory, we would expect the greatest fantasy authors to erect their …

Divinity And The Void In Chinese And Thai Translations Of The Ainulindalë, Eric Reinders

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

This article treats Chinese and Thai translations of the opening lines of the Ainulinalë, not to evaluate their fidelity to the original, but to explore the surplus meanings inherent in those languages. From a close reading of the first line emerge several new variations, including a new reading of the name Eru in Chinese, and a changed linguistic register of the Thai version. In each case there is some attempt to resolve the paradox of Eru as primal deity and Tolkien’s use of lower-case “he”—which one would expect to be “He.” Lacking capital letters, the Chinese and Thai translators use …

An Aspirational Cultus? Tolkien Fandom At The Borders Of Belief, Tom Emanuel

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

This paper draws upon fan studies, sociology of religion, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation to theorize the religious implications of Enyalië (Quenya: remembrance), the emotionally charged graveside memorial which closes the U.K. Tolkien Society’s annual gathering in Oxford. Employing a framework of religion as sacred worldbuilding, the author argues that Enyalië is best understood as the “secondary liturgy” of the “secondary faith community” that is Tolkien fandom. The paper concludes that Tolkien’s fiction, his community of devoted fans, and the lineaments of religious ritual have combined, in Enyalië, to produce a fan practice which troubles the boundaries …

No Ragnarök, No Armageddon: Pagan And Christian Interpretations Of The Lord Of The Rings, Matthew Thompson-Handell

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

Critical responses to The Lord of the Rings from its publication up to 1981 (the year in which The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien was first published) often considered pagan and Christian elements in the work. To the extent that pagan and Christian views were opposed to each other, such opposition is grounded to a greater extent in the ambiguity present in The Lord of the Rings (at least in terms of its theology or world-view), than in any contradiction in the work. The distinction between ambiguity and contradiction is important, especially in the context of the significance of contradiction in …

Editorial, Janet Croft

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

No abstract provided.

Improving Access To Ophthalmic Care For Medicaid Patients In Tennessee, Rupert Congmon

Dr. Jay W. Boland Research Day

Prior AAO data has determined that 93.8% of Tennesseans live as close or closer to an ophthalmologist than to their nearest Walmart. This study intends to analyze access to care for patients in Tennessee’s Medicaid program (TennCare). TennCare comprises four different health plans administered by three different Managed Care Organizations (MCOs): UnitedHealthcare Community Plan, Wellpoint (formerly Amerigroup), BlueCare, and TennCare Select, the latter two being administered by Blue Cross Blue Shield. In the vulnerable population receiving TennCare coverage, there are concerns about care across various specialties. This project aims to quantify ophthalmologist access for TennCare patients. Tennessee ophthalmology practices were …

Neuroplasticity Of Sympathetic And Serotonergic Pathways To Improve The Recovery Of Cardiovascular Activity After Spinal Cord Injury, Aubreigh Morgan

Dr. Jay W. Boland Research Day

Spinal cord injuries (SCI) can severely impair bodily function, making early intervention crucial for recovery and preventing further damage. Injuries at or above the sixth thoracic (T6) vertebra impair neural cardiovascular regulation, leading to bradycardia, reduced blood flow, and hypotension. This is important because early intervention and participation in physical therapy are critical for recovery of motor function after SCI, and impaired cardiovascular regulation limits participation. Brainstem regions, including the raphe nuclei, contain serotonergic neurons with axons that project to the spinal cord and release serotonin (5-HT), a neurotransmitter essential for regulating heart rate, blood pressure, and motor control. SCI …

Healing In The Highlands, Olivia Rogers, Bindiya Srinath, Noorayn Shaikh, Elisabeth Denis

Dr. Jay W. Boland Research Day

This alternative break allowed students to learn about the disaster of Hurricane Helene and provided important insights into community response. While many students were from an impacted area, this experience allowed all students to understand the lasting effects of the disaster in our region. This service learning experience taught students how they can continue to help the community after the alt break whether through service or advocacy.