02-16-2018, 01:05 AM | #4 | ||
Salt Miner
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: gone to Far Harad
Posts: 987
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Quote:
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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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