Issue #27

Abstract: Tolkien’s creative legacy offers to mere readers as well as critical explorers a wide range for possible interpretations and personal intuitions – just because of its ideological and aesthetical complexity. Yet for now there are fewer works concerning the inner logic and interconnection of Tolkien’s basic motives than the outer parallels of what he wrote to the well-known cultural, historical and even political discourses. This article tends to improve the situation. The author, analyzing Tolkien’s fundamental trilogy (“The Hobbit”, “The Lord of the Rings”, “The Silmarillion”) along with some lesser and incomplete stories, comes to the conclusion that there is a kind of an “absent hero”, an empty form of some never-really-existent member in the list of Tolkien’s dramatis personae which makes clearer a lot of strange hints and images throughout his groundbreaking texts.