Tolkien Case

The general objectives of our paper are to contribute to the analysis of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings with a new perspective and to verify whether decadence is the main theme with respect to a triad of heroes and to certain places of Middle-Earth considered archetypal on the basis of the multiple meanings that the theme of decadence brings up in the elements analyzed. Our initial hypothesis is that, in effect, decadence is the central theme, which affects, in particular, places like The Shire, Rivendell, Lothlórien, Gondor, Isengard and Mordor, and heroes like Sam Gamgee, Frodo Baggins and Aragorn. Applying to our corpus the tenets of Jung's Analytical Psychology as our theoretical framework and the archetypal criticism as our methodology, with the contributions of narratology, it is possible to affirm that the archetypal places, or "archetypal loci", in The Lord of the Rings are divided into three groups: "locus amoenus", locus of spatial and symbolic decadence, and locus of the abuses of industrialization and destruction of the environment. Furthermore, the main characters can be identified with the mother archetype (Sam), the archetype of the double (Frodo), and the archetype of the restoring and healing king (Aragorn) in so far as each of the above faces decadence in different ways. In its entirety, The Lord of the Rings can be read as a story of decay in which the predominant meanings are related to the confrontation between the notions of the feminine and the masculine, and between triumph and defeat.