When I was a young child I read everything I could get my hands on. I didn’t really understand the concept of genres, so I devoured any book that came across my path. Fantasy, mysteries, adventure-it just didn’t matter. They were all lumped together on the meager ...

Once, there were two kingdoms, a very good kingdom, and its neighbor, a very bad kingdom. The people in the good kingdom were happy and nice, the people in the bad kingdom mean and oppressed.

One day, the bad kingdom attacked the good kingdom, and there was a terrible fight. The good king and the bad king finally met in combat.

"I have a question," said the bad king.

"Yes?" the good king asked, raising his sword.

"Why is it our kingdoms are completely different, yet close by? Why is it that we ...

So, you just wrote your first science fiction novel. Your friend read it and told you that you were the next Ray Bradbury or Gene Roddenberry. Your fertile mind fantasizes your name up there on a Borders’ wall poster right next to images of Isaac Azimov and Jules Verne. Before going off the deep end and equating yourself with Hemingway and Steinbeck, give your ego a stiff reality check.

Few of us mortals are literary Mozarts that can plop down in front of a computer screen and author a perfect manuscript ...

Most fiction is about a battle between Good and Evil. The Evil may be a sadistic schoolteacher or Adolf Hitler, but this is still Evil, and it is balanced by a protagonist who presumably seeks to overcome it. Fantasy is richer and deeper than reality, its blacks more black and its whites more brilliantly white than any black-and-white we know in our world. Here, ...

A reading of the heroic relationships in

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings



In his 1953 essay "Ofermod," J.R.R. Tolkien addresses the subject of the leader and the subordinate in the northern heroic epic. Of the subordinate's place in the Old English poem "The Battle of Maldon" he says that he was one: "...who had no responsibility downwards, only loyalty upwards. Personal pride was therefore in him at its lowest, and love and loyalty at their highest." The leader, in his role as provider "may indeed receive credit from the deeds of his knights, but he must not use their loyalty or imperil them simply for that purpose." Part of the heroic relationship, therefore, involves unswerving loyalty by the subordinate and the mastery of pride by the leader.

In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien develops several relationships in keeping with the ideas on loyalty he expresses in "Ofermod." These ideas can also be applied to the famous Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, and thus a reading of Beowulf reveals many parallels to the leaders and subordinates in Lord of the Rings. Like Beowulf and Hrothgar, the dominant figures in the many quests and battles of Middle-Earth have characters who support them and follow their lead. While none of the individual participants in these relationships is depicted as perfect, the relationship itself is shown to stem from an ideal conception of the leader and servant dynamic, and the degree to which the relationship approaches this ideal helps to define the characters ...