Literary Criticism
The title There and Back Again represents an archetypal Hobbit outlook on adventures. Frodo looks upon the going "there and back again" as an ideal throughout The Lord of the Rings similar to the Greek concept of nostos.
One critic has suggested that the Red Book modernizes the medieval ploy of giving one's work more authority by pretending it comes from antiquity.
Tolkien's Red Book, pastiche of scholarship though it is, functions as such a medieval 'spurious source', but the 'authority' it imparts is by an appeal not to the tried-and-true but to the modern mystique of 'scholarly research'.
Read more about this topic: Red Book Of Westmarch
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“Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
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