Acrchtypal Theory

8 Pages 2060 Words

ing friends to enjoy life. The journey home is filled with cheers and praise for Frodo, whom his surviving friends have now dubbed hero. But what is a hero? (I, II, III)
In the midst of creating this entirely new, self-containing world with seven intelligent races, Tolkien still prevailed in capturing the essence of the archetypal hero in both Frodo and Aragorn . Larger than life heroes are rare in twentieth century literature; they do not fit comfortable in an age, which seems preoccupied with the ordinary (Flieger 41). With this in mind, Tolkein has still managed to create the extraordinary hero along with the ordinary hero.
The term archetype has been documented back as far as Plato, but not until the early part of the twenty-first century in the works of Carl Jung, the founder of modern analytical psychology did the term gain academic respect. Jung’s work is largely influenced through J.G. Frazer whose work, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, is cited in Jung’s Psycology of the Unconscious (Rupprecht 1).
Jung’s original definition of Archetype is “term to describe the universal figures arising from the deep structures of the psyche; a psychological and mythological motif common to all peoples at all times, which manifests itself recurrently in dreams, mythology, religion, and mass culture” (Potts 4). He later added that “while the conscious representations of archetypes may vary from culture to culture, and individual to individual, the basic template remains the same” (Potts 4). While Jung su...