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
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or criticism:
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)