A good author with which to start would be J.R.R. Tolkien, arguably the most influential author of modern fantasy. Tolkien had written an extensive collection of myths and legends that he later incorporated into The Lord of the Rings as its mythological background. When seeking a publisher for both works together, he wrote a lengthy letter to one potential publisher, most likely late in 1951. (The Lord of the Rings was published separately in 1954, but the other material was not published until after his death as The Silmarillion in 1978.) In that letter, he included the following description of the earlier mythological material:

[The] stories […] arose in my mind as ‘given’ things. […] Always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’. (Letters #131)

In another article in this issue, Laura discusses science and religion in Madeleine L’Engle’s Many Waters. L’Engle, an American writer best known for her young-adult fantasy novels like A Wrinkle in Time (1962), L’Engle told an anecdote along similar lines about writing The Arm of the Starfish (1965). Her ten-year-old would listen to sections of the book as they were written, until one of the characters died.

He got very excited and upset. “Change it,” he demanded. […]

“I can’t. I didn’t want [that character] to get shot, either, but that’s what happened. I couldn’t stop it.”

“But you can. You’re the writer!” […]

He was so angry with me for allowing [that character] to die that he wouldn’t read anything else I wrote for several years. […] Now he has grown up and understands that the artist cannot change the work at a whim, but can only listen, look, wait, and set down what is revealed. (Walking On Water 185-186)

This moving and highly personal anecdote demonstrates to me in a powerful way that L’Engle took this aspect of her work quite seriously.

In a previous article, I discussed 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing’s book Shikasta in terms of mythical thinking. At the beginning of Shikasta, published in 1979, Lessing included some introductory remarks:

As I wrote [Shikasta] I was invaded with ideas for other books, other stories. […] It was clear that I had made — or found — a new world for myself. (Shikasta x)

Neil Gaiman, perhaps one of the best-known authors of speculative fiction writing today, expressed something similar regarding the title character of his popular comic book series The Sandman. The series, which ran from 1989 to 1996, has subsequently been published in eleven volumes. In an afterword to the first volume, written in 1991, Gaiman wrote:

Looking back, the process of coming up with the Lord of Dreams seems less like an act of creation than one of sculpture: as if he were already waiting, grave and patient, inside a block of white marble, and all I needed to do was chip away everything that wasn’t him. (Afterword 238)

I discussed the magnificent carved columns of the Pacific Northwest and their relationships to mythic narratives in a previous article on totem poles. Bill Reid, one of the great totem pole carvers of the twentieth century, described his art with these words:

With half my mind, I know I do believe that the figures on that totem pole I’m carving […] grew inside that tree as it was growing. And all I have to do is peel away the outer layers and there they’ll be. And the other half of my mind tells me that’s complete nonsense and romantic balderdash. I can live with both points of view — and enjoy them both, actually. (Bill Reid 4:50-5:30)

Reid’s first point of view — that the figures grow inside the cedar trees — resembles the other statements by the authors. These all reflect mythical thinking (mythos), which approaches the world through intuitive means and subjective insights. They all explain their art in terms of other worlds or hidden realms, which is a common element found in many products of mythical thinking. The land of the gods above the skies or faraway places over the seas are familiar expressions of this element, but mythical thinkers also often posit an invisible reality or hidden plane of  existence within our own world. I imagine that these authors and artists did not deduce the existence of their characters or their stories from objective experiments or impersonal proofs; rather, they posited these objects to describe the very subjective — but also very real — feelings they experienced while creating their art.

But do such invisible realities exist? Did the figures Reid carved actually grow inside the trees? Could L’Engle really not have changed the story to satisfy her son? Logical thinking (logos) might look for something more objective than hidden realms to explain these subjective feelings. A logos-only thinker might perform experiments on cedar trees, looking for the hidden figures. Such experiments would (presumably) produce no objective evidence for these figures, and their existence would then be rejected. Reid’s second point of view — that this is all “complete nonsense and romantic balderdash” — reflects the conclusions of such a logos-only approach. But Reid did not think that logos offered a superior or more satisfying way to think about his art, and I think all the authors I mentioned above would have agreed with him on the complementary nature of mythos and logos in this regard. Mythical thinking provided all these authors a method to make sense of their own work and to share that sense with others.

Works Cited

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
• L’Engle, Madeleine. Walking On Water. Bantam Books, 1982.
• Lessing, Doris. Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta. New York : Random House, 1979.
• Gaiman, Neil. “Afterword.” The Sandman, Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes. New York: DC Comics, 1991.
• Bill Reid. Directed by Jack Long. National Film Board of Canada, 1979. (Full documentary available online.)

Randy Hoyt: When did you first encounter the works of Tolkien? What impact did they have on you?

Ted Nasmith: My older sister gave me a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring when I was 14. It hit me really strongly, as it does so many people. I just loved it right from the start. It was set in the distant, romantic past, amid traditional English-style landscapes, and it was all very nostalgic, fairy-tale and storybook material. It really grabbed me. I was an art student at the time, and I started to draw pictures inspired by the book fairly quickly. That was a big turn for me: I had been drawing spaceships, cars, and all kinds of more mechanical stuff. Tolkien was a big new element in my artistic imagination.

RH: How did you get started publishing your Tolkien illustrations?

TN: The first Tolkien calendar came out in 1973. It contained Tolkien’s own artwork, but then calendars with other artists’ work quickly followed, which greatly impressed me, since it demonstrated that The Lord of the Rings had struck a resounding chord of artistic inspiration with others, too. I had already accumulated my own paintings and drawings through high school and into the ’70s. The calendars in theory provided a way for me to get my stuff in front of the publishers; it proved to be a process that required persistence, but that eventually bore fruit. My work started appearing in the calendars in the late ’80s, fifteen years after I first sought its publication.

RH: When did you first encounter The Silmarillion?

TN: I read The Silmarillion as soon as it came out in 1977. It was not nearly as enjoyable as The Lord of the Rings, but it was more of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. More images came to me through these ‘new’ legends. I deliberately included something of Beren and Lúthien or one of the other major stories for the calendars, in order to integrate more of Tolkien’s legendarium into my growing body of paintings.

RH: I imagine many people seeing those calendars would have been familiar with The Lord of the Rings but possibly not The Silmarillion. What did you hope your art communicated to those who did not know the story you were illustrating? Obviously you lose some elements like dialogue, and you are limited to a single, frozen moment: but what extra elements can artwork use that make it more powerful?

TN: Hopefully they convey the sense of enchantment, the otherworldliness and remoteness, or simply the romance and nostalgia, or the poignancy and sadness — all those things and more you can convey using color, mood, shadow, etc. Someone looking at these illustrations who is unfamiliar with The Silmarillion can definitely see there’s something going on. Even if you know the story depicted, a work of illustration can still speak to you at a deeper level. Images are powerful. Tolkien dealt with archetypal material, the stuff of dreams, and through visual images that material can tap into the human subconscious in ways that augment prose.

As I would start drawing a scene based on the written description, I would notice visual associations that I didn’t really intend or appreciate originally. These associations emphasize the sub-text or the background ideas a bit more, filling them out and amplifying them. They definitely seem to complement the written part of it. I’d often think, “This really has a life of its own, a separate validity to it.” Sometimes a person will get a strong reaction to a work of art and they will say, “That’s what I saw in my head. How did you know?” That’s an amazing compliment to an artist. If you received a comment like that once in a blue moon, it would be enough to make you feel like you were achieving a level of success, but I actually get comments like that fairly constantly in letters from fans; it’s really, really flattering.

RH: You mention images coming to you. Many authors, Tolkien included, describe their stories as something that they discover more than something they invent. Do you find that to be the case with your paintings?

TN: Yeah, I definitely understand why they would say things like that. There have been times where something just sort of came through me in a way. I didn’t overly deliberate on it: I just got out of the way and let it come onto the page. So yeah, I really relate to that kind of creative description of what happens. It is a bit of magic, for sure.

RH: Do you have a favorite piece of all the ones that you have done?

TN: That’s a question I get often. I could probably narrow it down to ten or fifteen or something. There are so many individually that are successful, for one reason or another.

RH: My personal favorite is The Kinslaying at Alqualondë from the 2004 illustrated version of The Silmarillion. Would you include that one in the list?

The Kinslaying at Alqualondë. 2004. View larger image »

TN: Yeah, that came to mind. There are a couple of things I wanted to show there. Firstly, it’s an opportunity to show a glimpse of the lost city of Alqualondë and the wonderful culture of the Teleri. The ships are described as the Teleri’s greatest work (Tolkien 86). I imagine they would have been so beautiful that no artist could truly have captured this accurately — but it’s my job and fascination as an artist to approximate it as best I can. I couldn’t imagine them any other way than each having its own character, for instance. Compositionally, the curving wharf portrays a more feminine and dynamic setting. The battle taking place was difficult; scenes with many figures interacting are not my strong suit. But you just get down and you work on it much more to make sure that it’s up to the standard level of the other parts. I used to work mainly as an architectural renderer, so I have a facility for architecture; it was interesting to try to envision Elven architecture of the First Age. What would that be? Certainly it would be exotic, all carved, elegant and otherworldly.

Then there’s the problem of lighting; the scene is under starlight with no sun and moon. The text mentions lamps on the quays and piers (Tolkien 77), so that gives you something. I played a bit with the color of the water to make it almost luminous. When you try to do as realistic art as I do, you get caught sometimes thinking you have to do it according to all the laws of physics. But this is fantasy. I have learned to take liberties to convey more than just the hard facts and the surface of things, and not to worry about someone saying, “Hey, that isn’t real.” None of it is ‘real’, although it is famously realistic to a high degree, and thus presents tantalizing dilemmas.

RH: I saw on your web site an earlier image you did of this scene, which you called a “sketch.” I thought that sketch was excellent. What’s the relationship between that sketch and the image from the book?

The Kinslaying at Alqualondë. Sketch. Source »

TN: That first color sketch was based on a thumbnail drawing of a raw impression of the wharfs, ships, and the battle. Christopher Tolkien worked with me in choosing illustrations, and I was encouraged that he expressed great praise for this initial rough image. I tried to preserve what was good about the sketch but make it more sophisticated.

RH: The scene in the sketch felt like it took place at night, but in the final illustration it really feels like it took place before the sun and the moon, before day and night existed. I often forget that the sun and moon hadn’t appeared yet, and I often picture these scenes as if they were in daylight. This illustration really drives that home.

TN: I’m glad. It’s difficult. That’s often the way you draw a scene, with that daylight impression. It may make for a nice picture, but isn’t accurately illustrating it. I used to wonder why there weren’t more great illustrations of the Fellowship traveling through the countryside as they came south to Moria, but it’s because they traveled mostly at night! The Peter Jackson movies showed the Fellowship against these wonderful landscape shots — but in the daytime. The Tolkien illustrator is often left with a serious limitation. Take Bilbo and Gollum and the riddle game: it’s pitch black except for Gollum’s eyes — not too great for an illustrator! You’ve got to take a little license on some of these things.

RH: A big theme I see in Tolkien is the interaction of beauty and sorrow, which this illustration captures really well: the beauty of the ships on the left and the sorrow of the battle here on the right.

TN: Right. That was an important part of it for sure. Somehow you’ve got to underscore this terrible kinslaying scene, the violence and obscenity of it. Paradoxically, the beautiful is that much more tragic because of the incongruity of something terrible and violent juxtaposed with it.

RH: What new projects are you working on and what new artwork should we expect to see from you in the near future?

TN: I provided all the artwork for the 2009 Tolkien Calendar, featuring landscape images from the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth from The Silmarillion. I’m also doing various commissions, mostly new Tolkien paintings; projects done recently or upcoming. Last year, I did the scene with Frodo, Sam, and Pippin meeting Gildor and the Elves in the Woody End. I always loved that scene, right from the first time I started imagining and creating the illustrations. I never found a chance to illustrate it earlier, though; I never felt I was in the right moment or something. Yet it was an immediate hit, and I was commissioned to do another version of that same piece because the first one sold quite quickly at the exhibition!

Elves in the Woody End. 2006. View larger image »

I’ve also been fortunate enough to get involved with George R.R. Martin, another amazing fantasy author. I’ve done a lot of new work in ‘Westeros,’ his imaginary universe, for an upcoming big-format reference book on his fantasy novels [see examples]. I’ve also recently accepted an offer for the 2010 Tolkien Calendar, which will feature landscapes of the Third Ages.

You can learn more about Ted’s work by visiting his web site, tednasmith.com. The 2009 Tolkien Calendar featuring Ted’s paintings of landscapes of the First Age of Middle-earth is available from HarperCollins at Amazon.com and other booksellers.

References

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion. Christopher Tolkien, editor. Ted Nasmith, illustrator. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Randy Hoyt: Why did you think The Lord of the Rings has been so popular?

Verlyn Flieger: I think it’s been so popular because it is an extraordinarily good book: a remarkable achievement in terms of fantasy. I wouldn’t call it unique because I don’t think many things are unique; but I think it is almost sui generis in its complexity, in its craftmanship, and in the power of the story. I just think it’s a really good book.

RH: When did you first encounter the works of Tolkien? What impact did they have on you?

VF: I first read The Lord of the Rings in the winter of 1956/1957. It was a very new book at that time. Not very many people had read it. One of my co-workers at the time was from England, and her brother had sent her the first English edition. We all passed it around and read it. Even then, I recognized that Tolkien was drawing on a vast body of mythological material: there was Beowulfian material, Arthurian material, Celtic material — all of which he had reconfigured into his own secondary world.

RH: And the published Silmarillion?

VF: I first read that in 1977, when it came out. I guess we were all sort of waiting for it to appear.

RH: You now teach courses in Tolkien at the University of Maryland. Did you play a role in getting these courses into the curriculum there?

VF: Single-handed.

RH: Why would you say that Tolkien deserves courses in the curriculum alongside such greats as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton?

VF: Why not? They were writing about the human condition, as they saw it in their own time. Certainly Chaucer and Shakespeare were writing about the human condition, though I’m not sure Milton was. Tolkien is writing about the same thing.

RH: What do you cover in these courses?

VF: I teach Tolkien in a number of different ways. I teach an Honors Seminar in Tolkien as “Author of Century” (to borrow from the title of Tom Shippey’s book on Tolkien). There we cover the two big essays, “On Fairy-stories” and “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” and then we read, right the way through, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings — more or less in order of the chronology of Tolkien’s secondary world — in order to get an overview of Tolkien’s whole corpus of major fiction, to get some notion of the continuity and the discontinuities among them.

I started out, however, back when I myself was in graduate school, teaching a course in fantasy, which was really just an excuse to get The Lord of the Rings into the curriculum. I very soon realized that it overbalanced the course, that it was too big for everything else. Another faculty member and I pulled out Tolkien and introduced another course called “Tolkien, Myth, and Medieval Tradition,” which consisted of the Beowulf essay, Beowulf, some aspects of the Arthurian story, and then The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. With some modifications, I’ve been teaching that course ever since.

This fall, I’m teaching what I think is going to be a very exciting course called “Tolkien On War.” Our whole campus has devoted the fall semester to courses on war, new courses on war or existing courses adapted to war. I thought that to cover Tolkien, an author in whom you have a secondary mythology, a children’s book, and a fantasy that all focus on war, would be an interesting angle from which to look at it.

RH: Do you find that students taking your courses expect it to be easy because it is about a “fantasy” book and not about “real literature”?

VF: Not any more. They did to start with, yes, but they don’t now.

RH: I guess word gets around.

VF: I think so, yes.

RH: A lot of professional academics, critics, and journalists have been surprised by the popularity of The Lord of the Rings.

VF: I think most of those who are surprised — or who express surprise — either haven’t read it or find it not to be to their taste. If it’s not to their taste, that’s fine: then they shouldn’t read it.

RH: Some go even further, showing disdain towards Tolkien and horror at its success. What do you think drives that disdain?

VF: Snobbery.

RH: Did you encounter any of this disdain or snobbery as you were working to get Tolkien into the curriculum?

VF: Oh yeah, I still do. I got teased horribly when the movies came out. I was known for some time as “the fantasy lady.” My colleagues — not all of them but many of them — do not take the material I teach seriously. And that’s OK. My students do, and it’s my students that I’m really concerned about.

RH: You said that in your Tolkien as “Author of the Century” seminar you cover two of Tolkien’s essays, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and “On Fairy-stories.” Why would you say these two essays are important? What impact did they have on myth scholarship and fantasy literature?

VF: The essay “Beowulf: Monsters and the Critics” was originally a lecture given to the British Academy on Beowulf. It changed the direction of Beowulf scholarship. Up until that time, scholars had acknowledged the poem’s importance, but had only studied it for philology, for social customs, for all kinds of things — never as a work of art. Tolkien said, “Hey guys. This is a poem. Why don’t we look at it as if it were a poem and see what we can get out of it in terms of its art?” That really did open up a whole new avenue in the way of looking at the poem. There are Beowulf scholars who disagree with him, but since that lecture nobody has been able to ignore what he said. You go to the library and look at any anthology of Beowulf criticism, and Tolkien’s essay will be there.

The essay “On Fairy-stories” also was originally given as a lecture, this one as the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. This essay is not as well-known in general scholarly circles, but I think it is Tolkien’s most important essay. It reveals more about his art and his own feelings about his art than any other essay. It looks at philology, it looks at where mythology comes from and its importance, it looks at fantasy and fairy story. He really pulls together a lot of strands.

RH: How does this essay about his art relate chronologically to his own works of fiction?

VF: He had been working on “The Silmarillion” since 1917, when he came back from World War I. Sometime in the early 1930s, he began work on The Hobbit, which started as a story for his children and then turned into something a little more formal. That was published in September 1937 and was a great success. The publisher said, “People are going to want more. Can you write a sequel?” After several false starts, he did begin a sequel which was very clearly imitative of The Hobbit in its tone. As early as December 1937 he was thinking about what he called “the new hobbit” but which became over time The Lord of the Rings. So he started in let’s say 1938/1939 and he finished it in ten or eleven years, and then he had trouble getting it published. In the meantime, in a sense à propos his publication of The Hobbit, he was giving the Andrew Lang lecture in March 1939. He began to codify a lot of what he had been working toward instinctively in The Hobbit and realized that he had made some mistakes in it: there were lapses in tone, places where it didn’t hang together. His thoughts on these mistakes found their way into the lecture, particularly in the section on fantasy, and in turn affected The Lord of the Rings. So the chronology goes The Hobbit, “On Fairy-stories,” and then The Lord of the Rings.

RH: You have edited a new edition of the “On Fairy-stories” essay that came out this summer.

VF: Yes, with Doug Anderson. The book is called Tolkien On Fairy-stories.

RH: What is in this new edition, beyond just the essay itself?

VF: A huge amount of previously unpublished material. Doug and I were given access to all the manuscripts pertaining to “On Fairy-stories” and to all of the draft materials. It was first the lecture, then it was greatly expanded and turned into a published essay, and then Tolkien further edited and tweaked the published essay. Doug and I were able to trace the way that certain ideas began, developed, grew, moved into this or that category. You can see the growth of his thought. It’s a fascinating thing to read.

RH: What would you say has been Tolkien’s impact on fantasy literature as a whole?

VF: Huge. Enormous. And not altogether positive. He casts a very long shadow. It’s very difficult to get out from under Tolkien. I published Pig Tale in 2002, a fantasy novel that I had been working on for quite some time. It was a struggle to get away from Tolkien and to write something that I thought could really be just my own. It was hard to do. I’d be typing along, and I’d think, “Uh-oh. I know where that comes from!” And then I had to back up. Most of the fantasy that has come after The Lord of the Rings has either imitated it or reacted strongly against — which is also in a sense a form of imitation.

You can learn more about Verlyn’s work by visiting her web site, mythus.com. The book Tolkien On Fairy-stories that she edited with Douglas A. Anderson is available from HarperCollins at Amazon.co.uk and other booksellers. Mythlore 103/104, the current issue of the scholarly journal of the Mythopoeic Society, contains a review of this book; this review is available online at the society’s web site.

References

• Flieger, Verlyn and Douglas A. Anderson. Tolkien On Fairy-stories. HarperCollins: 2008.

It seemed to [Tuor] that a great wave rose far off and rolled towards the land, but wonder held him. […] The wave came towards him, and upon it lay a mist of shadow. Then suddenly as it drew near it curled, and broke, and rushed forward in long arms of foam; but where it had broken there stood dark against the rising storm a living shape of great height and majesty. (Unfinished Tales 30)

Tuor’s encounter with Ulmo made quite an impression on me, an impression that was deepened after seeing some awe-inspiring works of art illustrating the scene:

While reflecting on the story, I coined the phrase “journey to the sea” to summarize the story and its effect on me. As I continued to contemplate the phrase and study other myths, my affinity for it grew. The two nouns, journey and sea, contain such rich mythic meanings! Let me look briefly at what each of these words means to me.

“Sea”

Sextus Empiricus, a second-century Roman doctor and philosopher, made this observation:

How great is the astonishment the sea causes in a man who beholds it for the first time! (69)

Myth and the sea impact me in similar ways. I have spent most of my life living in landlocked areas, and I still feel this astonishment every time I stand on the shoreline and experience the vastness of the sea, the impressive power of the crashing waves, the delightful sounds of seagulls, and the refreshment of the cool sea breeze. Since childhood, myth has delighted me, instructed me, strengthened me, and taken my breath away. Sometimes these stories fill me with hope and joy; other times, they move me to tears.

In an influential lecture, Tolkien described Beowulf with this analogy:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone. […] Of the [stone] he took some and built a tower. […] From the top of the tower the man [was] able to look out upon the sea. (“Monsters” 105-106)

The tower here refers to the poem itself, the old stone to ancient themes and images the poet incorporated into it. The sea represents the experience myth can produce in its readers, the same experience I described above.

“Journey”

Many myths contain a common pattern of events referred to as the hero’s journey. Scholars have detailed the many different stages and variations in this pattern, but the important stages of this journey for me are these:

1. The hero leaves the ordinary world, often prompted by a call to adventure.
2. The hero reaches another realm, often with some magical aid, where he completes a set of tasks and achieves some boon.
3. The hero returns to the ordinary world, where he uses the boon to benefit others.

This pattern appears in the two stories that had the strongest impact on me in my childhood. In Redwall, the young mouse Matthias recovers the lost sword of ancient lore to save his abbey from the invading rat Cluny the Scourge; in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker learns the ways of a Jedi Knight to rescue his father from the Dark Side and save the galaxy from the tyranny of the evil Empire. These stories resonated with me in ways that I did not fully understand at the time.

Much later, Joseph Campbell’s work introduced me to the power these stories possess for transforming our lives. They can serve as inspiration and models for us to achieve our full potential. Campbell spoke often of a feeling he called “bliss,” a deep satisfaction that comes from “doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself” (xxii). He described life as a hero’s journey to discover what produces this bliss in us, to overcome any trial in our effort to pursue it, and then to benefit others in that pursuit. For me, that pursuit involves myth.

All these thoughts came to my mind when I chose the name Journey to the Sea. This site exists as a way for me to pursue my bliss in myth and to share what I achieve on the journey with others. Through researching and writing articles, I should continue to experience astonishment at myth; I look to other contributors for articles and comments as the magic helpers to aid me in my own journey; and with any luck, the articles I write and my replies to comments will in turn benefit others. I hope that through this site we can all achieve a richer experience of wonder and delight in myths and learn to apply their instruction and wisdom to our everyday lives.

References

• Tolkien, J. R., and Christopher Tolkien. Unfinished Tales. Westminster: Del Rey, 1988.
• Tolkien, J. R.R. The Silmarillion. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
• Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Pyrrhonism. In Selections from the Major Writings. Trans. Sanford G.  Etheridge. Ed. Phillip P. Hallie. Boston: Hackett, 1985.
• Tolkien, J.R.R. “Monsters and Critics.” Beowulf : A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Daniel Donoghue. Boston: W. W. Norton, 2002.
• Jacques, Brian. Redwall. New York: Penguin, 1987.
• Star Wars. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 1977.
• Campbell, Joseph. Pathways to Bliss. “Introduction” (xv-xxii) and “The Self as Hero” (111-134). Chicago: New World Library, 2004.

Image modified and used with permission of John Howe