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02-14-2018, 09:30 AM | #1 |
High King at Annuminas Administrator
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Or at least a thinking fox. Whose thoughts get recorded in the story.
Crazy thought I've never had before... The fox wouldn't have anything to do with CS Lewis' Narnia creatures, would it? Influenced by? Jab at? I wonder whatever became of the fox. Anyone up for some fanfic on it? Or an RPG? Dare we christen it "Frodo's Fox"?
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02-15-2018, 07:15 PM | #2 |
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No. Tolkien's fox was written about fifteen years earlier than the Narnia stories.
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02-16-2018, 01:05 AM | #3 | ||
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Back to the subject. I seriously doubt that the fox was a randomly chosen creature. Lewis was a medievalist: if I am not mistaken, Narnia is in fact a complex medieval-style allegory composed by Lewis and based upon his nearly-unmatched knowledge and understanding of medieval allegory. I think the fox was indeed chosen to demark the shift in story-telling. I don’t think anyone else - not on this board, and not among professional interpreters of Tolkien - has noticed this before. It’s taken me over forty-four years and perhaps a hundred readings to notice it, along with reading a lot of criticism of the scene both from folks like us and from academicians. It seems deliberately obvious: nearly everyone notices and is aggravated by the fox, but no one notes the shift it marks. It must be a signpost, an intentional marking of a particular turn in the story. Why then a fox? My guess is that C.S. Lewis suggested a fox. Hoping to substantiate it, I looked up “fox in medieval literature” on Google and found quite a bit of reference material, particularly about Reynard the Fox, “the main character in a literary cycle of allegorical Dutch, English, French and German fables. Those stories are largely concerned with Reynard, an anthropomorphic red fox and trickster figure,” as Wikipedia puts it. There are a great many other references (over 950,000 tonight), and I have not time to plow through more than a sampling. Does anyone have any idea why Tolkien would choose to mark this part of the story with a fox rather than, say, a squirrel or a badger or bird or some other creature? |
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02-16-2018, 02:06 AM | #4 |
High King at Annuminas Administrator
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No idea. Why does a fox fit best in your theory?
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My Fanfic: Letters of Firiel Tales of Nolduryon Visitors Come to Court Ñ á ë ?* ó ú é ä ï ö Ö ñ É Þ ð ß ® ™ [Xurl=Xhttp://entmoot.tolkientrail.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=ABCXYZ#postABCXYZ]text[/Xurl] Splitting Threads is SUCH Hard Work!! |
02-16-2018, 02:24 AM | #5 |
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02-21-2018, 09:02 AM | #6 | |||
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