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Shakespeare's Influence On Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien derived the characters, stories, places, and languages of Middle-earth from J. R. R. Tolkien's influences, many sources. Shakespeare's influence on Tolkien was substantial, despite Tolkien's professed dislike of William Shakespeare, the playwright. Tolkien disapproved in particular of Shakespeare's devaluation of Elves in Middle-earth, elves, and was deeply disappointed by the prosaic explanation of how Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane Hill in ''Macbeth''. Tolkien was influenced especially by ''Macbeth'' and ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'', and he used ''King Lear'' for "issues of kingship, madness, and succession". He arguably drew on several other plays, including ''The Merchant of Venice'', ''Henry IV, Part 1'', and ''Love's Labour's Lost'', as well as Shakespeare's poetry, for numerous effects in his Middle-earth writings. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey suggests that Tolkien may even have felt a kind of fellow-feeling with Shakespeare, as both men were rooted in t ...
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Middle-earth
Middle-earth is the Setting (narrative), setting of much of the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy. The term is equivalent to the ''Midgard, Miðgarðr'' of Norse mythology and ''Middangeard'' in Old English works, including ''Beowulf''. Middle-earth is the oecumene (i.e. the human-inhabited world, or the central continent of Earth) in Tolkien's imagined mythopoeia, mythological past. Tolkien's most widely read works, ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings'', are set entirely in Middle-earth. "Middle-earth" has also become Metonym, a short-hand term for Tolkien's legendarium, his large body of fantasy writings, and for the entirety of his fictional world. Middle-earth is the main continent of Cosmology of Tolkien's legendarium#Spherical-earth cosmology, Earth (Arda) in an imaginary period of the past, ending with Tolkien's Third Age, about 6,000 years ago. Tolkien's tales of Middle-earth mostly focus on the north-west of the continent. This region is suggestive of Eu ...
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Patrick Curry
Patrick Curry (born 1951) is an independent Canadian-born British scholar who has worked and taught on a variety of subjects from cultural astronomy to divination, the ecology movement, and the nature of enchantment. He is known for his studies of J. R. R. Tolkien. Other Tolkien scholars have endorsed many of Curry's views of Tolkien's work, but have found it inappropriate that he combines scholarly analysis with polemic or political advocacy. Tom Shippey agrees with Curry that critical responses to Tolkien have too often been hostile, and that enchantment differs from magic; he suggests that Tolkien would endorse Curry as the critic "closest to the secret of enchantment". Biography Patrick Curry was born in Winnipeg, Canada. He took his B.A. in psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1978. He gained his M.Sc. in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics in 1980, and his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science at University College Lon ...
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King Lear By George Frederick Bensell
King is a royal title given to a male monarch. A king is an absolute monarch if he holds unrestricted governmental power or exercises full sovereignty over a nation. Conversely, he is a constitutional monarch if his power is restrained by fixed laws. Kings are hereditary monarchs when they inherit power by birthright and elective monarchs when chosen to ascend the throne. *In the context of prehistory, antiquity and contemporary indigenous peoples, the title may refer to tribal kingship. Germanic kingship is cognate with Indo-European traditions of tribal rulership (cf. Indic ''rājan'', Gothic ''reiks'', and Old Irish ''rí'', etc.). *In the context of classical antiquity, king may translate in Latin as '' rex'' and in Greek as ''archon'' or ''basileus''. *In classical European feudalism, the title of ''king'' as the ruler of a ''kingdom'' is understood to be the highest rank in the feudal order, potentially subject, at least nominally, only to an emperor (harking back to ...
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Michael D
Michael D may refer to: * Mike D (born 1965), founding member of the Beastie Boys Arts * Michael D. Cohen (actor) (born 1975), Canadian actor * Michael D. Ellison, African American recording artist * Michael D. Fay, American war artist * Michael D. Ford (1928–2018), English set decorator * Michael D. Roberts, American actor Business * Michael D. Dingman (1931–2017), American businessman * Michael D. Ercolino (1906–1982), American businessman * Michael D. Fascitelli, (born c. 1957), American businessman * Michael D. Penner (born 1969), Canadian lawyer and businessman Education * Michael D. Cohen (academic) (1945–2013), professor of complex systems, information and public policy at the University of Michigan * Michael D. Hanes, American music educator * Michael D. Hurley (born 1976), British Professor of Literature and Theology * Michael D. Johnson, a former President of John Carroll University * Michael D. Knox (born 1946), American antiwar activist and educator * Michael D ...
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Supernatural
Supernatural phenomena or entities are those beyond the Scientific law, laws of nature. The term is derived from Medieval Latin , from Latin 'above, beyond, outside of' + 'nature'. Although the corollary term "nature" has had multiple meanings since the ancient world, the term "supernatural" emerged in the Middle Ages and did not exist in the ancient world. The supernatural is featured in folklore and religious contexts, but can also feature as an explanation in more secular contexts, as in the cases of superstitions or belief in the paranormal. The term is attributed to non-physical entity, non-physical entities, such as angels, demons, gods and ghost, spirits. It also includes claimed abilities embodied in or provided by such beings, including Magic (supernatural), magic, telekinesis, levitation (paranormal), levitation, precognition and extrasensory perception. The supernatural is hypernymic to religion. Religions are standardized supernaturalist worldviews, or at least m ...
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Fairy Tale
A fairy tale (alternative names include fairytale, fairy story, household tale, magic tale, or wonder tale) is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic, enchantments, and mythical or fanciful beings. In most cultures, there is no clear line separating myth from folk or fairy tale; all these together form the literature of preliterate societies. Fairy tales may be distinguished from other folk narratives such as legends (which generally involve belief in the veracity of the events described) and explicit moral tales, including beast fables. Prevalent elements include dragons, dwarfs, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, griffins, merfolk, monsters, monarchy, pixies, talking animals, trolls, unicorns, witches, wizards, magic, and enchantments. In less technical contexts, the term is also used to describe something blessed with unusual happiness, as in "fairy-tale ending" (a happy ending) or "fairy-tale romance". ...
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On Fairy-Stories
"On Fairy-Stories" is a 1947 essay by J. R. R. Tolkien which discusses the fairy story as a literary form. It was written as a lecture entitled "Fairy Stories" for the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, on 8 March 1939. The essay is significant because it contains Tolkien's explanation of his philosophy on fantasy, and his thoughts on mythopoeia and sub-creation or worldbuilding. Alongside his 1936 essay " ''Beowulf'': The Monsters and the Critics", it is his most influential scholarly work. Several scholars have used "On Fairy-Stories" as a route to understanding Tolkien's own fantasy, ''The Lord of the Rings'', complete with its sub-created world of Middle-earth. Clyde Northrup contends that in the essay, Tolkien argues that "fairy-story" must contain four qualities, namely fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation. Derek Shank argues that while Tolkien objects to structuralism in the essay, Tolkien also proposes that a secondary world must have ...
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England In Middle-earth
England and Englishness are represented in multiple forms within J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings; it appears, more or less thinly disguised, in the form of the Shire and the lands close to it; in kindly characters such as Treebeard, Faramir, and Théoden; in its industrialised state as Isengard and Mordor; and as Anglo-Saxon England in Rohan. Lastly, and most pervasively, Englishness appears in the words and behaviour of the hobbits, both in ''The Hobbit'' and in ''The Lord of the Rings''. Tolkien has often been supposed to have spoken of wishing to create " a mythology for England"; though it seems he never used the actual phrase, various commentators have found it appropriate as a description of much of his approach in creating Middle-earth, and the legendarium that lies behind ''The Silmarillion''. His desire to create a national mythology echoed similar attempts in countries across Europe, especially Elias Lönnrot's creation of the ''Kalevala'' in Finland. ...
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On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer
"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet John Keats. Written in October 1816, it tells of Keats' sense of wonder and amazement upon first reading the translation of the ''Odyssey'' by Elizabethan playwright George Chapman. The poem has become an oft-quoted classic that is cited to demonstrate the emotional power of a great work of art and its ability to evoke an epiphany in its beholder. Background information Keats's generation was familiar enough with the polished literary translations of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, which gave Homer an urbane gloss similar to Virgil but was expressed in blank verse or heroic couplets. Charles Cowden Clarke and John Keats both had a scrappy awareness of Pope’s translation and the most famous passages of Homer. Chapman's vigorous and earthy paraphrase (1616) was put before Keats by Clarke, a friend from his days as a pupil at a boarding school in Enfield Town who was integral in Keats’s ...
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John Keats
John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' of 1888 described his "Ode to a Nightingale" as "one of the final masterpieces". Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", " Ode on a Grecian Urn", " Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet " ...
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Myrkviðr
In Germanic mythology, Myrkviðr (Old Norse "dark wood"Simek (2007:224) or "black forest"Gentry (2002:101–102)) is the name of several European forests. The direct derivatives of the name occur as a place name both in Sweden and Norway. Related forms of the name occur elsewhere in Europe, such as in the Black Forest (''Schwarzwald''), and may thus be a general term for dark and dense forests of ancient Europe. The name was anglicised by Sir Walter Scott (in '' Waverley'') and William Morris (in '' The House of the Wolfings'') and later popularized by J. R. R. Tolkien as " Mirkwood". Etymology The word ''myrkviðr'' is a compound of two words. The first element is ''myrkr'' "dark", which is cognate to, among others, the English adjectives ''mirky'' and '' murky''.Bjorvand and Lindeman (2007:770) The second element is ''viðr'' "wood, forest".Cleasby and Vigfusson (1874:703) Attestations The name is attested as a mythical local name of a forest in the ''Poetic Edda'' poem ''L ...
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Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for ''A Study in Scarlet'', the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction. Doyle was a prolific writer. In addition to the Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the brigantine ''Mary Celeste'', found drifting at sea with no crew member aboard. Name Doyle is often referred to as "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" or "Conan Doyle", implying that "Conan" is part of a Double-barrelled name, compound surname rather than a mid ...
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