How metaphors describe them all

Abstract

In almost every culture, evil deeds happen in darkness and they are usually made by ugly people. This also happens the other way around: good deeds happen in light and they are made by beautiful people. These aspects are vital to carry out this project, as this paper presents four cultural metaphors that are found in The Lord of the Rings trilogy written by J.R.R. Tolkien, which are good is light, good is beauty, evil is dark and evil is ugly. The aim of this paper is to explore these cultural metaphors in The Lord of the Rings books and movies. More concretely, the paper endeavours to illustrate some of their most outstanding realisations across the lines of the novel that provide descriptions of main characters and setting, and the scenic representations of these characters and settings in the film. The results of our analysis yielded a continuum with two extremes, good and evil, in which characters and settings are arranged according to the analysed verbal and visual characterisations or representations. We take into account that there are characters and settings who are always represented by light and beauty, others who represent evil through their appearance which is dark and ugly, and other characters and settings represent the middle ground, that is, they are not entirely good nor evil.