ENG 2131 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Misty Mountains, Gollum, Neo-Romanticism

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: English
• Course: ENG 2131
• Professor: Rosemary Daniels

Document Summary

Intrusive narrator"s, talking starts humorous, ironic: the tone changes as the story goes on, whole nature of the book seems to change. In contrast to britain of that time which was aristocratic. 1930"s, he is not writing about post ww1 or pre ww2, the fears of ww2 fall into his writings: landscape that is haunted by the past. Merry town of dale: dark forces are constantly approaching and pushing out what is productive and merry, last homely house, implies it"s the last community before the wild lands of the. Misty mountains, but already in the wild before reaching the homely house: goblins made the mountains too dangerous to pass, spiders are a new thing in mirkwood, constant sense of encroachment. Bilbo faults: greediness, laziness, childlike innocence, material and psychic journey, changes him from a child to an adult, doesn"t lose the virtues of a child, its what saves him, retains his innocence all the way through.