Fantasy is a still developing literary genre and having a better understanding of its structure and how it generates meaning may help literary scholars to better understand why the genre seems to have such growing popular appeal. Fantasy has sometimes been criticized for over-reliance of tropes and narrative formulas. Even among those who are sympathetic…
Author: Ed Wolf
Dragon Tales
Few, if any, of the many figures of myth and literature seem to match dragons as the most prolific and mighty beasts of imagination. A brief look into various cultures can show the never-ending fascination that these creatures impress upon the human mind. Variations of dragons can be observed in myths from both East and…
Leaves by Tolkien
The first work by Tolkien set in Middle-Earth, The Hobbit, was first published as children’s literature (which it largely is, if compared with his other much darker tales) gaining wide acclaim and awards in that category. The lore of Middle-Earth was then still not fully formed in Tolkien’s mind. Upon writing The Lord of the…
At the beginning…
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he…
Myth in Poetry: Larkin
Phillip Larkin’s distrust of myth, allusion and tradition, as announced by the poet himself (O’Neill and Callaghan, 2011, p. 167), while he admitted that this was perhaps careless on his part, it does set him apart and against the vast majority of the Western literary tradition: Homer and Virgil and the obviously mythological subject of…
Myth in Poetry: Heaney
Seamus Heaney’s first four works progressively evolve a myth of his own (Johnston, 1997, p. 140), a myth of violence and of national and human identity. To understand Heaney’s mythical goddess, we shall first look into ‘The Tollund Man’ poem from his Wintering Out (1972) sequence. In this poem, the narrator, who ‘will stand a…
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