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Contrast between good and evil in the lord of the rings
Good and evil in the lord of the rings
Contrast between good and evil in the lord of the rings
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Elements of The Lord of the Rings in Final Fantasy VIII
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy is arguably the most influential work of fantasy literature in modern times. Its epic tale of good against evil and its surreal world of magical and unusual characters and places have captured and enchanted readers since its publication half a century ago. The story of the struggle to destroy the One Ring still influences numerous tales of adventure in literature, film, and role-playing games. Since the advent of role-playing video games, the Final Fantasy series has endured in a genre where many other games seem to blend together. It marks a standard in the world of role-playing games in much the same way The Lord of the Rings marks a standard in fantasy literature. This essay shall examine these two epic adventures and show some of the ways in which Final Fantasy VIII draws upon elements from The Lord of the Rings.
At the center of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is the basic struggle between good and evil, manifested through the battle over the One Ring. The story draws upon traditional Christian theology and ideas about good and evil, right and wrong. Goodness in The Lord of the Rings is represented by selflessness and an interest in the good of all, with a willingness to give of oneself for the good of the whole. However, the border between good and evil is not always clear, and characters are not necessarily completely good or completely evil. Selfishness, greed, and hunger for individual power are destructive forces for evil within individual characters, and characters must use their own moral compass to choose whether to strive for good or give in to the temptation of evil. Even...
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...Merry and Pippin or Zell Dincht. Perhaps it is the vulnerability in characters like Frodo Baggins or Squall Leonheart; seemingly 'regular guys' who are thrust into extraordinary situations and who persevere for the forces of good in the world. Regardless, both The Lord of the Rings and the Final Fantasy series are works that have managed to grow beyond the narrow bounds of their genre, and both will likely remain influential standards by which other works are judged.
WORKS CITED
Final Fantasy VIII. SquareSoft/Electronic Arts. 1999.
Final Fantasy: Worlds Apart. Final Fantasy VIII home page. <http://www.ffnet.net/ff8/index.html>
Tolkein, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. New York: Ballantine Books, 1954.
---. The Return of the King. New York: Ballantine Books, 1955.
---. The Two Towers. New York: Ballantine Books, 1954.
Has anyone ever heard of Odysseus being a hero? However it's hard to believe he his he has many pros and cons in being a hero but he does a lot to save his crew from these magical seraphic woman in a deserted island singing a deadly song. Although it was hard for him he had faith in his crew to never stop believing.
These theoretical concepts developed by Dr. Jung are what caused the hypothesis and negativity of my original consideration of him to be replaced by a deep respect and, in fact, an almost gleeful fascination with his work. I am discovering that quite a few people find that Jung has a great deal to say to them. This tends to include writers, artists, musicians, film makers, theologians, clergy of all denominations, students of mythology, and of course, and many psychologists
According to The return of The Kings, “known as The Lord of the Rings, was so immediately successful that a new, larger printing was required, and soon another, still larger printing became necessary. The Hobbit, under wartime pressure of paper shortages, went out of print in 1942, and its subsequent popularity largely derives from the success of The Lord of the Rings” (Kroeber). According to The return of The Kings, The Lord of The rings was successful because people read it and liked it. JOHN RONALD REUEL TOLKIEN (always called Ronald by his family) was born on 3 January 1892, at Bloemfontein, South Africa, where his father Arthur had taken a position with the Bank of Africa (Firchow). The Tolkien family had been prosperous piano manufacturers, but the business had failed. Mabel Suffield, Arthur’s wife, was the daughter of a once successful drapery manufacturer in Birmingham, England, who had gone bankrupt and survived by selling disinfectant to shopkeepers around the city. According to the Background, Sauron always sought pleasure in whoever has interest in the ring and whoever had possession of the ring was called the ring Barer. Sauron is a giant eyeball sitting on top of a tower. From there, he watches every move anyone takes but he is mainly looking for the ring bearer. Once Sauron finally obtained possession of the ring, he then transformed into his omnipotent transformation meaning he makes all that is afraid of fear, fear him. He was then so powerful to the point that no man can defeat him only women. The first of Tolkien’s four children was born in November 1917. After the Armistice Tolkien joined the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary, and in 1920 he was appointed Reader in English Language at Leeds University, whe...
Frodo’s experiences are universal to humankind. For some, a fight against your own evil that tries to bring you down can relate to both Frodo and the humankind. Facing challenges and tasks that you may not w...
...ith the help of sorrowful experiences. Odysseus had to face the sight of watching his dog, Argos, die. This made Odysseus take things into perspective, and appreciate things more. Also, Odysseus lost some of his hubris when he found out what had been happening to his wife. She has been taken advantage of my the suitors, and almost got remarried. This also made Odysseus realize how good he had it before his whole journey occurred.
J.R.R. Tolkien Research Paper As many have grown up during this generation, they have been dazzled by the work of J.R.R. Tolkien as well as the artistic interpretation of this trilogy by Peter Jackson. This movement started when Tolkien created The Hobbit and then later the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s. However, there are those who have criticized both the books and the cinema for being sexist and/or racist. Tolkien is not sexist because he develops his female characters by revealing their individualism and dynamic features, and is also not a racist because much of the criticism comes from Peter Jackson’s interpretations and because racism is harshly looked upon more in this generation than it was back in the 1940’s.
Free will can be wholly responsible for my motivation to write this paper. I was really hoping for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to come out in time to be used as the film for analysis, but to my disappointment, it opened in theaters the day this paper was due. So, I chose to write instead on The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The films, though not really about our freedom to choose, inspired me to look into the topic of whether it is in our nature to willingly choose the path of evil to gain personal fulfillment. Our motives are not as clear cut as the archetypes portraying good and evil are in the film, but part of me thinks their embodiment in such fantastical creatures as elves, hobbits, orcs, and demons say something about the human desire to approach our weaknesses with understanding and strengths with humility. For if we learn from our mistakes we may grow stronger, while withdrawing from our arrogance, might we refrain from ruling out perfectly possible and desirable changes as impossible. This is the essence of our freedom.
The struggle between good and evil is an ever present theme of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The struggle exists in all of Middle-earth, as the followers of Sauron wage war against the realms of free men and their allies, as well as in individual characters. Boromir, a tragic hero of Tolkien’s work has essentially good qualities marred by his corrupt desires for power and the Ring. The character of Gollum has an on-going internal struggle between the part of him that is corrupted by the Ring and his originally innocent self, Smeagol, who struggles to be good. However, as long as good and evil both exist, redemption is also possible. If Gollum, for example, was portrayed as only evil, and the Smeagol part of him did not exist, the reader would never hope for his redemption, knowing it was already impossible. However, redemption can always be found throughout Tolkien’s work. Reflecting his Christian beliefs, Tolkien often depicts characters redeeming themselves through death. The conflicted characters of the Lord of the Rings demonstrate that if both good and evil exist in a person, redemption is possible at the cost of some sacrifice.
James’ focus on the mystic experiences that religion entails was characterized by four circumstances. These four circumstances were ineffability, a noetic quality, mystical states are transient, and people can’t control when the experiences come and go. For ineffability, the experience must be had by a person and cannot be transferred to another. By noetic quality he was stating that the mystical state came as a state of knowledge to the individual. James goes on to ask if these states are “windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world” (Varieties, 428).
A timeless topic--fate and free will--still captivates society today. Fortune cookies, physics, and horoscopes all contribute to the obsession people have with this controversial debate over who manipulates life; fate or free will. No one is sure who really pulls the strings, but everyone has an opinion on the matter. Many famous plays center on this topic, and one such play that features characters’ views on fate and free will is Romeo and Juliet. This legendary play, written by William Shakespeare, has been beloved by people for centuries, as they contemplate who is the guiding force in life? The play discusses just this, while depicting the lives of Romeo and Juliet: two desperate teenagers each trapped in their own worlds, seeking love and freedom. The two “star-crossed lovers” are from feuding households, and each has their own distinct problems. Romeo jumps from girl to girl, never finding anyone to reciprocate his feelings until he meets Juliet. She is hidden from the world, and with every decision being made for her, she wants to control her own life, which she does with marrying Romeo. Although fate and free will are both undeniably found in the lives of Juliet and Romeo, it is ultimately fate and the way it manipulates the events, time, and the characters that brings about the untimely death of the two iconic teen lovers.
The death of the two lovers in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet seems preventable. Misinformed characters spur a series of unfortunate and ill-timed events that lead to Romeo and Juliet taking their own lives. The audience is constantly aware of Romeo and Juliet’s looming death and always hold knowledge that the characters do not. Shakespeare incorporates this dramatic irony in numerous places in the play which keeps the audience on edge and gives the same sense of fate that the characters experience
For many years, the idea of what it means to have a “religious experience” has been greatly debated. Philosophers and great thinkers alike have grappled with many questions, such as what constituted a “religious experience” and the difference between that and a mystical experience. Part of this great debate involves two philosophers from a similar time period, William James and C.D Broad, who each saw these experiences, despite some similarities, as having different epistemic values. Broad offers that these religious experiences can provide strong validation of a higher existence, while James take more of a perennialist view, in which all of the religious traditions of the world have on common belief about the world; therefore, his idea of mystical experiences don’t truly support the idea of a supreme being. I believe that neither James nor Broad are completely correct and rather the epistemic value of religious experiences lies somewhere in between their views.
Jung's analytical psychology can be divided into two parts: theory and practice. The focus of this prose will be on the former, which pertains to the structure of the psyche and the laws of psychic processes and phenomena and includes his theories of archetypes and the unconscious (Jacobi, 1942; Jung, von Franz, 1964). His practice involved the inclusion of his theory in therapy and consisted of four methods: association method, symptom analysis, anamnestic analysis, and analysis of the unconscious (Jacobi, 1942). The goal of all four of these methods was to reveal the patient's unconscious to themselves as well as the therapist. Jung found that one of the easiest and most effective ways of revealing a patient's unconscious was through the actions of archetypes in the patient's dreams (Jacobi, 1942). However, Carl Jung's idea of archetypes was not an entirely original one. Literature suggests Plato’s Forms, Kant’s Categories, Schopenhauer’s Prototypes, as well as Greek mythology and symbolism heavily influenced Jung.
Stevens, A. (2006). The Archetypes. In R.K. Papadopoulos (Eds.), The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications. New York, NY: Routledge.
A fantasy is an imaginary world where all things imaginable can be brought to life. J.R.R Tolkien portrayed fantasy through his use of skilled craftsmanship and a vivid imagination, which was presented in each piece of literature he wrote. In Tolkien's two stories The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings we see the theme of fantasy brought to life through three essential elements, heroism, magic and retribution. Heroism is shown through the character's courage and bravery in situations where conflict arises and this enables them to be seen in a new light. Magic is a form of extraordinary power seemingly through a supernatural force; it is used in a combination of combat and mystical items to aid the companions on their journey. Retribution is paid to the evil forces for the wrongs society had to endure while they were allowed to dominate. This system allows opportunity for physical and mental development in the characters and the aspect of fantasy to come to life.