A Jungian View of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings (original) (raw)

A literary hermeneutic model based on the theories of Carl Gustav Jung, called archetypal interpretation or Jungian interpretation, has steadily been present on the literary scene since the 1950's and, in the second half of the 20th century, rivalled even the more prominent hermeneutic models. Even though some of Jung's ideas are now considered outdated or have been met with fierce criticism by the modern critics, the popularity of archetypal interpretation has not abated much in the 21st century, in which a revival of Romantic ideas, named neoromanticism, popularized once again the interest in Jung's theory of archetypes. He was primarily interested in the images in literary works, i.e. the symbols and archetypes, and hence, a Jungian interpretation of a literary work analyses these archetypal images and insists that the archetypes define the form and the function of a literary work-the function is seen as mainly compensatory-whereas the meaning of a text is sculpted by the cultural and psychological myths. A prime example of a literary work abounding in archetypal content is the mythological creation of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. We have written extensively about the actualizations of specific archetypes in the trilogy, so for the purposes of this essay, we are going to give a more general look at the trilogy through the prism of Jung's ideas on individuation and the four psychological functions.

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