Abstract
Emmanuel Lévinas’s philosophy and J.R.R. Tolkien’s creative work both upheld the rights of the individual Other in the face of dogmatism and totalitarianism. For both Tolkien and Lévinas, who is often credited with being the originator of the concept of alterity, our relationship with the Other is necessarily an ethical relationship established through language. To respond to the Other while acknowledging his or her absolute Otherness is also to accept responsibility for him or her. The presence of many of Lévinas’s principles in the relationships between radically different characters in Tolkien’s legendarium suggests that Tolkien’s fiction was on the cutting edge of philosophical enquiry. Well before the publication of Lévinas’s major works, Tolkien had begun exploring themes related to language as the primal expression of our responsibility toward the Other.
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Dawson, D. (2017). Language and Alterity in Tolkien and Lévinas. In: Vaccaro, C., Kisor, Y. (eds) Tolkien and Alterity. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61018-4_9
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