Hobbit: From Childrens Story to Mythic Creation Essay -- Literature F

Hobbit: From Children's Story to Mythic Creation "Mr. Baggins began as a comic tale among conventional and inconsistent fairy-tale dwarves, and got drawn into the edge of it - so that even Sauron the terrible peeped over the edge." -J.R.R Tolkien, letter to his publisher (quoted in Carpenter 1977, 182). The Hobbit started as little more than a bedtime story for Tolkien's children. Like most of his fellow academics, Tolkien viewed fantasy as limited to childhood. The result was a book written in a chatty, informal style that contrasts sharply with that of its serious successors. The narrator makes frequent patronising and intrusive asides, such as "And what would you do, if an uninvited dwarf came and hung his things up in your hall without a word of explanation?" (H, 18). The language approximates baby-talk at times (nasty, dirty wet hole oozy smell"), and modifiers ("terribly", "lots and lots") abound. Many critics, including Tolkien himself, have viewed this as the chief weakness of the book. Although the tone does evoke the oral tradition through which myths were originally created, it detracts from the power of the book. It renders villains are more comic than truly threatening, its heroes more endearing than awe-inspiring. One commentator feels that The Hobbit "lacks a certain intellectual weight" and "deserves little serious, purely literary criticism" (Helms 1974: 53). The important words here are "purely literary". The novel cannot be studied in isolation, but must be seen against the broader backdrop of Tolkien's literary philosophy and the entire mythic tradition. For the writing of The Hobbit both influenced and was influenced by the profound intellectual change its author was undergoing, namely t... ...teaching its author the immense possibilities of fantasy. It itself does not exhaust these possibilities, but merely begins to explore them. It starts unambitiously, but in drawing from the rich store of world folklore and the author's imagination, soon develops into a myth that, like all good fantasy, speaks as clearly to the mythopoetic imagination today as it did in Tolkien's time. Bibliography: Carpenter, H. 1977. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin. Helms, R. 1974. Myth, Magic and Meaning in Tolkien's World. London: Granada Publishing. Nitshe, J.C. 1979. Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England. New York: St. Martin's. O'Neill, T.R. 1979. The Individuated Hobbit. Boston: Hougton Mifflin. Rogers, D. & Rogers, I.A. 1980. J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Twayne. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1937. The Hobbit. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Metals and Water Essay example -- Iron, steel, Corrosion, Alkalinity

Certain metals could be affected by the pH of water. This, however, could reflect on real life situations that could affect us, the environment, and also our pipe system as well. Some metals such as iron and steel oxidize when they are exposed to humidity and water thus forming corrosion known as ferric oxides (Roy, 2009). Corrosion has destructive potential if left untreated (Stahl, 2005). Knowing what metals are prone to corrosion is an important issue to take notice about because corrosion happens all around us including possessions that belong to us. It is necessary for industrialized cities to estimate the cost of such devastating nature of corrosion (Newman, 1994). Much of money are spend each year to replace equipment that are corroded, in the United States alone, corrosion causes about $276 billion each year. By using specific metals or methods such as alloying, metallic coating or organic coating can prevent or minimizing corrosion (Drigel, 2008). A specific type of corro sion is rust. Rusts are produced when iron converts to Fe 2+ ions and subsequently reacts with hydroxide ions within the water (Roy, 2009 and N/A, 2006). The physical characteristics of rust are coating of powder, scaly reddish-brown and reddish-yellow hydrated ferric oxides (Roy, 2009). The types of corrosion can be used in evaluating the performance of engineered structures (A reservoir to reduce rust, 2006). Metals are easily corroded in the sea because the salt makes the water a better conductor from the electrochemical cells (N/A, 2006). The ever-changing pH of the ocean due to planktic forminiferal abundance and other variables (Saraswat, 2007), and this could affect the rate of corrosion in metals. The pH is a measurement of the acidity or alkal... ...ltimately save many problems and health risks. It is important to note which metals to use to prevent corrosion because some may post health risks such as Chromium. Prolonged contact with Chromium may lead to lung cancer, ulcers, liver necrosis, and allergic dermatitis, so improper metals used in water distribution system could lead to a high extension in terms of risks because it could also affect the ocean and the wild lives (Chandra and Kulshreshtha, 2004). The world is changing and new technologies are emerging. Some of these technologies include micro-sized chips that are able to run a computer, and if corrosion is one of the problems, then it will post many more complications. Humans rely on technologies and equipment that are sometimes created with metals and they sometimes fail simply because they are exposed to salt water or high humidity (N/A, 2006).

How Effective Are Integrated Working and Multi-Agency Working?

Integrated working is when different services join together to offer more effective care for babies and young children, where multi-agency working is when different services work together to meet particular needs of babies and young children, along with their parents and/or carers. Multi-agency teams are made up of members of the children’s workforce drawn from a range of different disciplines who met for specific reasons on a regular basis; all the professionals will have joint aims and goals.It is a way that ensures that those children and young people that need additional support will have exactly the right professionals in place for them to be supported in the correct way. The benefits of integrated and multi-agency work are that it enables early identification and intervention of any needs that the children may have, as well as ways to better support their parents and carers. It allows children and their parents to have easier and quicker access to professional’s e xpertise and the services that they offer.With the services all working together it provides a better quality of service and means that children and their parents do not need to repeat themselves to each of the professionals that they work with, instead the professionals will already have the information. Multi-agency work also allows children and their families’ needs to be addressed more appropriately. As the child’s needs are addressed sooner and the correct support is given to them to help with their needs, the child will have an improved achievement and better engagement within education.The use the Common Assessment Framework which allows an early and initial assessment of the child’s needs for any extra services and support, and once this is carried out it will be available for all the services. In practice the professionals will put the needs of the child or young person before those of any one service, and also ensure that the service is inclusive and t hat all children’s basic needs are met. Sutton Hill Children’s Centre ensures that all the professionals within the centre identify children with additional needs at an early stage.They also need to ensure that all the information that they have is shared with all the other professionals and that they work together to provide early intervention and that the child receives the necessary support from specialist services as soon as they are identified as needing it. In the Camden Children’s Fund primary school project the school gets access to additional services which go beyond what is normally available and offers preventive and early intervention approaches to children and their families.The have a best practice approaches in place regarding the identifying and assessing of the child’s needs and then designing interventions for the particular child which will help them to improve. Within the practice at Camden Children’s Fund they are currently fin ding it difficult to allocate enough time to be able to carry out the best practice approach, and are trying to resolve this issue through all the agencies coming together and discussing what the best course of action will be.In conclusion integrated and multi-agency work is very beneficial to the child and their family at identifying any needs that the child may have early and providing appropriate and sufficient support to the child and their family that will help them to deal with any needs and support them with any help they may need in the future. It also brings together a wide range of specialist services that can work together with the family so that nothing needs to be repeated, and the child and their family will get the best out of each of the services that are provided.

James Joyce’s The Dubliners Essay

In â€Å"Araby†, â€Å"Eveline†, and â€Å"The Dead†, three short stories featured in James Joyce’s The Dubliners, the characters struggle with whether to live their lives with a structured routine or to seek opportunities, change, and adventure. These short stories center around everyday life for citizens of Dublin, Ireland in the early 20th century, when a choice between continuing the inherited tradition of routine and structure versus seeking any other form of life or adventure could be the most important decision in the peoples’ lives. With the terrible potato famine still in living memory and with Ireland seeking a new culture and identity, many of its citizens clung to their routine as means of survival. The quotidian routine of the character’s lives suppresses and dominates the characters, preventing any of the characters’ ideas and dreams of seeking adventure. In â€Å"Araby,† every aspect of the little boy’s rou tine and everyday life impedes him from his adventurous goals of visiting the annual bazaar and fulfilling his dream of a relationship with Mangan’s sister. Despite his infatuation with his friend Mangan’s sister, the boy cannot work up the courage to spark a conversation and is pleasantly surprised when she asks him if he is going to the annual bazaar, hosted in Dublin. She then says that she is unable to attend, and the boy offers to bring her an item from the bazaar. Every aspect of the boy’s routine and everyday life seems to be trying to impede the boy from his goals, from school’s boring lessons to his uncle forgetting to arrive home early enough to give him money for the train fair because he was out drinking. Despite the adversities of his everyday life attempting to ensnare him, the boy does make it to the bazaar, but his hopes about the bazaar are not fulfilled. When the boy arrives at the bazaar, he realizes that the bazaar does not live up to his expectations. The untimely distractions that caused the boy to be late to the bazaar cause the boy to show up after most of the excitement and trade has already ended. He approaches one stall that is still open, but the owner of the stall seems to be preoccupied with a conversation with several men. The woman notices him, but the boy says how â€Å"†¦the tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to [him] out of a sense of duty†. The boy buys nothing, feeling unwanted by the woman watching over the goods. With no purchase for Mangan’s sister, the narrator stands angrily in the deserted bazaar as the lights go out, with his hopes crushed as his grandiose imagination of the bazaar is disillusioned. This realization deflates the boy’s hopes and dreams of an adventurous and exotic life, ending his wishful love affair with his friend’s sister, as well as ending his ambitions for a more adventurous life, and is analogous to Joyce’s â€Å"The Dead†. In â€Å"The Dead†, the banal and reflectively melancholy party is indicative of the monotonous routine that the Dubliners live by; however, Gabriel, the protagonist, struggles with the psychological battle with his methodical approach to life versus a more acceptin g and unconventional mindset, in which he wishes to enjoy a happier outlook on life. The motif of adventure versus routine is ever-present in this short story through Joyce’s meticulous and selective diction. During a very normal routine of dinner, the food is on â€Å"rival ends† of the table, divided by â€Å"sentries of fruit†, and watched afar by â€Å"three squads of bottles†. This militaristic diction transforms a seemingly harmless dinner table into an adventurous battlefield filled with action and excitement. The â€Å"battlefield† is not the dinner table, but the story in itself. The war is not between sentries and squadrons of bottles, but between the routine of life versus the hunger for opportunity. After dinner, the guests begin to dance. The guests partake in â€Å"memorized dance steps† and fall into habit and routine, one after the other. These structured dance steps rob the dancers of their individuality and creativity as uniform seizes the dance floor. The dancers are either forced to abandon their creativity and join in on the synchronized march of the automatons or be excluded from the group. Later on in the story, Gabriel learns from his wife about a previous lover. Gabriel enters a pensive and reflective state, in which he muses on the mass snow covering all of Ireland, which most likely covers the grave of Michael, his wife’s ex-lover, as well as the graves of all future Dubliners. The snow, the culmination of millions of individual and unique snowflakes melting together to form one entity of uniformity, became a metaphor for the all-encompassing routine of the characters in Dubliners, covering them in life and in death. Gabriel’s reflections towards the end of the novel give the short s tory its name of â€Å"The Dead†, which is what all of the routine and structure does the characters in The Dubliners. Despite all of the negative occurrences that the routine of the evening and of life bring upon Gabriel, he summons the courage to change his bleak outlook on life, vowing to have a more optimistic and open view on the world. In â€Å"Eveline†, the protagonist Eveline is faced with a rare opportunity to move away from Ireland to Buenos Aires with her boyfriend, Frank, but the routines and memories of her life ensnare her and prevent her from making the choice to seek adventure and excitement. This decision is an important crossroads in Eveline’s life, to continue with a life of an abusive father or an uncertain future with her boyfriend. The story begins with Eveline reflecting upon her childhood and contemplating the difficult decision that lies before her. She first has an epiphany, realizing that she cannot stay where she is, stuck in the autonomous life of routine and then becomes sympathetic to her father, saying how he was not all that abusive to her. Soon after th is thought, Eveline hears an organ playing in the street, reminding Eveline of her mother. This recollection of her mother immediately compels Eveline to decide that she cannot live her life the way her mother did, being swallowed up and forgotten by the routines of cooking and cleaning, all but forgotten in a sad and monotonous life. Eveline decides to head to Buenos Aires with Frank. As they are about to board the ship, Eveline resorts back to her routine by praying. The familiar chanting of the prayers versus the desire to flee with Frank renders Eveline in a state of paralysis, stripped of confidence after the destructive battle raging in her head between the two waging sides of her life, fiercely battling each other for superiority of Eveline’s subconcious. Eveline is left on the docks while Frank boards the ship. Because she does not move away from her routines, she is stuck forever with them. Her momentary epiphany regarding her mother and the monotonous routines of her life will go in vain, and she will end up living the exact life that her mother did. The vicious cycle of repetitive and mundane routine leaves the Dubliners helpless and lonely. Often, the routine forces the character into a state of unrequited love. In â€Å"Araby†, the routine leaves the boy in love with Mangan’s sister, never to know whether she shared any of his feelings. In â€Å"Eveline†, Eveline is left in the abusive and vicious cycle of her life, while her love is sailing off to Buenos Aires. In â€Å"The Dead†, Michael is literally buried under the mass routine of the snow, while his lover lives on, loving someone else. These protagonists each face difficult situations, of which they are not sure how to solve. As a mechanism of coping, they seek repetition, comfort, and conformity that only the routines of their average lives can bring. Without ever taking chances, they are sure to never achieve more than an average life. The characters in The Dubliners never take a chance to succeed and triumph over mediocrity. In doing this, they never give themselves a chance to fail, but they also never give themselves a chance to succeed. These characters have an opportunity to try to lift themselves up from the routinely abusive cycle of their lives, but cannot free themselves from their shackles, simply adding a few more degrees to the circle of false hopes and adventure that defines these misfortunate and disillusioned characters. Works Cited: Joyce, James. â€Å"Dubliners.† Project Gutenberg. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2012. .

HRM Pharmaco case study Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

HRM Pharmaco case study - Assignment Example "Human issues arising from the restructuring of multinational corporations are being delegated to HR for studay and implementation" (Fitz-Enz, 2002, 4). Therefore, human resource management should be prepared to deal with such challenges. Unfortunately, empirically, it has been a common practice to cut the human resources department first to save money and resources when a company is experiencing difficulty. "And when companies were downsizing and restructuring, human resource capabilities were the first thing cut" (Losey et all, 2005, 13). Such poor leadership decisions are not forward thinking and result in an understaffed HR department that is not prepared to lead the company's restructuring. In the case of Pharmaco, inefficient human resource decisions couple with poor communication between employees hindered development. Evaluation of the management style of Pharmaco yields information about the company's core values and beliefs. The purpose of the case study was to "appreciate the range of employees and types of job that exist within pharmaceutical companies" (Sewell and Scarbrough, 2002, 182) Pharmaco is a British company, which is important to note because the "pharmaceutical industry is often highlighted as one of the few examples of British manufacturing success in high value added markets" (Sewell and Scarbrough, 2002, 115). ... Like other industries dependent upon science, pharmaceutical companies need to constantly retrain and innovate in order to achieve and continue to enjoy market competitiveness (Sewell and Scarbrough, 2002, 43). This distinguishes such businesses from other more traditional companies and creates intriguing dilemmas for human resource management. Retention of employees is key as confidentiality is a premium for the field. Temporary workers require human resource analysts to design specific policy and compensation procedure that may differ from that of permanent workers. This inherently creates uncertainty which may be compounded by ineffective implementation or the perception of favourable treatment of one group over another. The first issue to be examined is why these individuals choose to become temporary workers so that their attitudes and effectiveness may be gauged. As David Cenzo and Stephen Robbins (2005) note: If temporaries are employed solely as a cost-cutting measure, the pay and benefits offered to contingent workers might differ from those offered to other workers hired part-time as a result of restructuring HRM, then, must discover specifically what these employees want. Is it flexibility in scheduling, autonomy, or the control over one's career destiny that such situations afford that attracts them Or is it just bad luck, and they are forced into this situation (19) Conflict between temporary and permanent workers must be anticipated by human resource management. If the new workers are given more pay or significant schedule flexibility this can cause concern and anger, resulting in a loss of productivity or even employees choosing to quit. A lesson can be learned from studying the massive

Reaction paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Reaction paper - Essay Example This was an indication of interruption of person Jack’s speaking. David would then take over speaking while counting the fingers on one hand from one to five, which is a gesture that can be attributed to the intensity of the issue at hand. At some point Jack’s face looked depressed and his eyes looked wet with tears. However, this facial expression changed when David began to smile as he talked and it seemed he was raising a point of encouragement since his smile was accompanied by a pat on the back of Jack. Apart from when David pated Jack on the back, touching as a form of body language was also evident in the manner that the two people greeted each other when they met. They shook hands firmly and moved their bodies close together and patted each other’s back smiling. This demonstrated the closeness between them and also the happiness of meeting. David welcomed Jack to sit by a show of hand towards a seat as he sat on an adjacent seat. David applied proxemics by moving his seat now and then closer and further from Jack and at times he could use his walking stick to draw figures on the ground as if he was demarcating boundaries. These movements varied between one to three feet from the position that Jack initially sat. It seemed David commanded great authority over Jack by virtue of his body language with regards to the utilization of the space around him. This was augmented by the hat that he wore, which indicated status in the society. Jack on the other hand seemed to be on th e receiving end as his body language ranged from being attentive to reacting emotionally to what David was saying. The diagrams drawn on the ground by David seemed to carry a lot of meaning to Jack by virtue of the way he gazed at them without blinking and shaking his head in acknowledgement. From the sound back-up, I learnt that the

Analysis of Research Articles Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Analysis of Research Articles - Essay Example The use of likert scale response questions makes it easier for the respondents to answer the questions in addition to improving the questionnaire response rate (Crotty 1998). The researcher employed the use of questionnaire in this study in that, respondents respond according to their own opinions and are not controlled as in interviews and observations. The researcher had the questionnaire tested for reliability and validity. According to Greenfield (2002), for any research findings to gain the required scientific rigor, the research tool should be test-retested through a pilot study or through an expert’s forum to harmonize issues. This practice is done to ensure that the results from the tool can be generalized to fit the whole population. However, in terms of sampling, the researcher failed in that, different companies’ employees should have participated in the study to ensure non-biasness and rigidity in the generalization of the survey findings. Further, the researcher should have allowed the staff members to make an informed decision on whether to participate or not according to Denzin’s (1997) arguments. This practice is highly recommended in research ethics as it protects the participant from coercion and ensures justice of the participants. Another important aspect left out in the methodology is the fact that the participants had to be informed that the data collected from them was to be used confidentially and for the sole purpose of the study. This would ensure tangible, valid and reliable data is collected since if assured of confidentiality, then they may be biased to avoid victimization by the company. Further, a lesser sample would have been more economical in terms of time and resource requirements (Kaplan 2004). In this case, an un-biased sample would have resulted into the same kind of results as a complete count. Further, the sample should have had the same or nearly the same number of males as females. In the