The Lord of the Rings' Interlace: From Tolkien to Tarot
2008; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Comics and Graphic Narratives
ResumoIntroduction J. R. R. Tolkien's reinvention of the medieval in The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) was complete; his famous narrative not only demonstrates that genre's markers of allegorical or archetypal characters, quest theme, and interlaced narrative structure, but like medieval narratives, has also inspired a great deal of visual art,1 including The Lord of the Rings Tarot Deck and Card Game developed by writer Terry Donaldson, artist Peter Pracownik, and game designer Mike Fitzgerald and published by US Games Systems in 1997.2 Like many contemporary adaptations of Tarot, this deck follows historical precedent in that it consists of a twenty-two card and a fifty-six card with suits of pentacles (coins), cups, swords, and wands, each with four court and ten numbered cards. The major arcana was probably invented circa 1425 in Italy as a set of for the regular playing deck available in Europe from the later half of the fourteenth century; Tarot was just a regular deck with twenty-two trumps and a Queen added to the court cards to facilitate game variety (Decker et al., 29-31). It is, however, the Rider-Waite deck (1909), directed by Golden Dawn member Arthur Waite and created by artist Pamela Smith, that has become prototypical of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Most new decks are either annotative insofar as they maintain the general Rider-Waite appearance and aesthetic, or discursive insofar as they maintain that deck's structure and general associations but also integrate one or more literary works, mythologies, and/or cultures (Auger 2002, 2004). The Lord of the Rings deck is discursive because it integrates Tarot and a single author's work, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and, to a lesser extent, The Hobbit. Contemporary Tarot is also, however, like Tolkien's narrative, a kind of reinvention of the medieval romance; thus the goal of this paper is to examine the connections between the medieval romance and Tarot in general, and The Lord of the Rings and Donaldson and Pracownik's deck in particular, with attention to archetypes, the quest theme, and interlace narrative structure. Archetypes Carl Jung defined as essentially empty forms from which the individual must derive his own meaning and experience; the archetype is simply an a priori possibility of representation (Archetypes 79) until it is articulated in dreams, mythology, life, works of art and literature, and, of course, Tarot. (3) The specific Jung identified, such as the child, the trickster, the mother, and so forth are features of medieval romance and The Lord of the Rings; virtually all of The Lord of the Rings characters are easily recognizable aligned with the forces of light or darkness, or possibly torn between the two. Tarot artists also enjoy rearticulating these archetypes, developing their own major arcana images of Strength, Temperance, Justice, and so forth; in the creative context, the allegory emphasized in the pre-modern world merges seamlessly with the archetype favored by the modern. The creators of The Lord of the Rings Tarot likewise redeveloped the major arcana cards, as well as several from the minor arcana, by dedicating them to single characters or symbols, frequently emphasizing them as archetypes by leaving out or de-emphasizing specific narrative markers. Such major arcana cards include: Fool (Gollum), Magician (Gandalf), Empress (Belladonna Took, Galadriel, and Rose Gamgee), Hierophant (Saruman), Strength (The White Tree; fig. 4), Hermit (Tom Bombadil), Wheel (Ring; fig. 5), Justice (Oathbreakers; fig. 6), Star (Galadriel's Ring), Moon (Minas Morgul/Minas Ithil), Sun (Shire), and World (Middle Earth). Similar minor arcana cards include: Nine Swords (Nine Riders), Ten Swords (Sauron's power), Ace Wands (Master Ring and Fires of Mount Doom), Eight of Wands (Gandalf riding Shadowfax), Seven of Cups (Seven Palantiri), King of Coins (Treebeard), Knight of Coins (Soldier of Gondor stands guard), Four of Coins (White Tree), and Nine of Coins (Nine Rings around the Tree of Life). …
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