Dr. Glen Gill: Metaphor and Cosmology in The Lord of the Rings

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythic realm of Middle-Earth, the setting of The Lord of the Rings, we find Northrop Frye’s Shakespearean concept of “the Green World” writ large: a magical domain that represents a vision of fulfilled human desire and dream, and thus clarifies our relationship to the so-called “real” world. In this presentation, Dr. Gill explains how Tolkien created a fantasy world so well-ordered, so imaginatively alluring, that comparing (even preferring) it to our own world becomes inevitable.

GLEN ROBERT GILL is Associate Professor of Humanities at Montclair State University. He is the author of Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth (2007) and the editor of Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature (2010). He has also published essays on Frye, C.G. Jung, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and J.R.R. Tolkien. He is currently editing A Cultural History of Myth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury) and The Routledge Companion to Myth and Literature.