The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [531]
2. This term might seem open to confusion, in that we normally identify the idea of self, with a small `s, with the ego and with selfishness; whereas the archetype of the Self represents the very opposite. But at its root is the idea that, the more fully we realise our own individual identity, the more we come into contact with that ego-transcending level of the psyche which links us to the wider world. The Self is both the core of our individual identity and that which connects us with everyone and everything outside us. A great artist, like Beethoven or Shakespeare, is not so much different from other people as someone more directly in contact with that level of the psyche which is shared by all humanity in common. Hence we speak of their `universality. It is in this sense that the `Self' is an appropriate term for this complex component of the psyche, which plays such an important role in the symbolism of storytelling.
1. This eastern European folk-tale is not to be confused with the quite different story on which Stravinsky based his ballet The Firebird (1910). Probably the best-known version, Prince Ivan, The Firebird and The Grey Wolf, is that told in Russia and first published by Alexander Afnasev (1826-1871), the Russian counterpart of the brothers Grimm. But I shall here be referring to the rather more complex Czech version, found in most collections of Czech folk tales, in which the `helpful animal' is not a wolf but a fox.
2. It was probably no accident that Tolkien should unconsciously have arranged the geography of his imaginary world of Middle Earth in this way, conceived as it was in Britain around the time of the Second World War. If `the Shire' to the western edge of the map was identified with England, it was threatened from the east and south-east by the vast, world-threatening shadow of the dark power of Sauron, centred in Mordor. This reflected the way in which, at the time, Hitler's dark empire on the continent of Europe was casting a deadly shadow over Britain from the same general direction. Tolkien denied any conscious parallel between his story and contemporary political events (in his Foreword to the second edition of the book); but others, including his brother, have suggested otherwise.
3. There are clear echoes here, as elsewhere in The Lord of the Rings, of the thrillers of John Buchan. With his stories of heroes battling across wild landscapes threatened by shadowy enemies, Buchan was one of the few modern fiction writers Tolkien admired.
4. Wagner drew the inspiration for his ring from a genuine myth, the Norse Volsunga Saga. This tells how the ring cursed by the dwarf Andvari, after being stolen by Loki, leads first to his own son Fafnir turning into a monster; then to Fafnir's death at the hand of the great hero Sigurd the Volsung (Wagner's Siegfried), who goes on to free and marry Brynhild; and finally to Sigurd's own death (we look at Wagner's Ring-cycle in Chapter 24 and the Norse myths in Chapter 34). Much of Tolkien's own story was, of course, inspired by his scholarly study of Norse sagas and Anglo-Saxon epics from the `Dark Ages.
5. A later parallel to the symbolism of these rings can be seen in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the first of the books by J. K. Rowling which enjoyed such popularity at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a story combining elements of Voyage and Return, Rags to Riches, Overcoming the Monster and Quest, the young orphan hero, persecuted by the suburban family who have adopted him after the death of his parents, suddenly finds himself transported into a mysterious `other world' governed by magic and peopled by wizards, dragons, trolls and other fabulous creatures. Here it seems he is already famous because, when he was a baby, his parents, as two distinguished wizards, had been killed by this world's chief figure of darkness,