book in both Germany and Australia in 2004. For The Lord of the Rings, this kind of honor is too

numerous to mention one by one. It is generally acknowledged that this novel which fits readers of all stages opened the door of magnificent fantasy for both readers and critics.

As Flieger says, “Tolkien’s works are charismatic and infusive, not for its fantasy but for its reality, for his world shows us what our things in our world are. The Lord of the Rings is not so much a fantasy product of Tolkien’s strange world as something coming from the real world directly. It is a sigh symbolizing and pointing out a kind of inevitable, potential reality and truth. It shows its strong endorsement of the human environment. It is its imagination, its aesthetic taste and its feature rooting by literature tradition and closely related to human emotions that helps this Medieval Stories win wide praise of modern readers.” (1999:12)文献综述

1.2 The Significance of J.R.R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 Jan 1892 – 2 Sep 1973), who is known better as J. R. R. Tolkien, was an English author, poet, philologist, and a college professor. His name first came to public with his classic high-fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion (Tolkien, 1977) and caused a big stir in literary world.

Tolkien served in the army in 1916 and was delivered back to England for his trench fever four months later. Then he got started to create his fantasy world Arda (Middle Earth is a piece of continent of Arda) at the end of the World War I, memorizing his friends who didn’t make it survival during the war. At the age of 33, Tolkien began to teach English Language and Literature at Merton College, Oxford. As the youngest professor of the history of Oxford, Tolkien dedicated almost 40 years of his whole life to academic career and literary production. In these four decades, his extraordinary achievements on medieval ancient English study brought him high reputation which played an important role on his literature criticism.

Based on ancient linguistics and literary tradition, Tolkien gradually transferred his strong interest about language, history and literature into the series of fairy tales of The Silmarillion, which ultimately drive the publish of The Lord of the Rings. Mythology in Tolkien’s works is full of anfractuosity while connecting with each other perfectly, ranging from the magnificent creation

myths to the wonderland of romantic epic saga. Readers can always be amazed by his strange imagination and rich connotation. Those noble and grand themes of the work are being sung by every single inpidual in the book, oppositely, the role of these tiny characters’ shine dazzling light under the book’s glorious background.

The Lord of the Rings were all published before the 1960s with the background of industrial civilization, World War I and World War II. Tolkien witnessed the expansion of desire and the degeneration of human beings. Tolkien experienced World War I, World War II and the industrial civilization on his own, therefore, he has a deep understanding of the expansion of desire and fall of human nature which is the most important thread of The Lord of the Rings. In modern society, people are blindly run after temptations like power and interest. These are modern “the One Ring” that testing people all the time. He did not describe these in his work directly, instead he created the Mid-Earth World full of darkness and evil. So actually readers can feel it through the escaping virtual world that maybe Tolkien is saying that The Lord of the Rings is more like a cautionary tale which warns people that desire would destroy themselves if they don’t get rid of the relentless desire.

1.3 To Escape Is to Glorify Bravery, Wisdom and Goodness in Poignancy This thesis starts off with main character—Frodo’s trip heading for the Mordor Volcano to destroy the One Ring. The light-hearted young man Frodo anticipates a quiet life in Hobbiton of the Shire. One day, peace started to collapse while Terror begin to spread, since the Dark Lord Sauron has returned and started to seek for his precious ring. The troublous circumstances conspired to catapult Frodo to a venture fraught with dangers that is beyond his imagination. Frodo, the reluctant hero, has to set off for the quest, which to him is almost a death march. He never thought about being incredible or being a hero. So he acts like a coward just like most ordinary hobbits would do. He tries to escape from the mission at the very beginning pretending that everything Gandalf told  him is just a lie. In the journey, he feels blank and frustrated and frequently wracked with self doubts and panicky with obstacles he could hardly ever imagine. It is exactly the continuous afflictions and trying experiences Frodo suffered that brings him to a higher standard—where he eventually identified his own strength and started to take the initiative against the Darkness. Everyone is  ready 来~自^吹冰论+文.网www.chuibin.com/