| The20th century just past by is an age of icons. Our lives are surrounded by all kinds of screens and the scene of daily life is replaced by all kinds of media. Everyth-ing becomes images and icons that disguise themselves as the appearance of its rep-resentation or the direct transcription of the nature of things.As omnipresent cultural phenomenon, icons elicit two different reactions, such as Frankfurt School that mercilessly criticizes consumer culture and Visual Cultural Studies that gives warm hug to the prosperity of mass culture. No matter which kind of attitude, both of them acknowledge the importance of this phenomenon in contem-porary culture.Meanwhile, mythology study also has the tendency to enjoy diversified development despite of its unidirectional approach in the18th and19th century. It combines with cultural anthropology, structural linguistics, psychoanalysis and its subsequent psych-ology and borrows ideas from each other. What’s more, mythology study spreads its theory from the beginning and then gradually exerts an influence on lots of actual ar-tistic creation, among which the most influential work is The Lord of the Rings wrote by Tolkien, a famous scholar and writer from Britain.Finally, icons and myth meet each other in the surging waves of magical fantasy movies in21st century.This paper applies the research method from iconology and icon theory and tries to discuss the problems and reflection brought by the combination of old myth and contemporary media.The first chapter briefly introduces the development course of iconology from V Aby Warburg to W. J.T. Mitchell and its basic theory and methods.The second chapter summarizes the creation background of The Lord of the Rings (both novel and movie) at first. Then, the author applies the research method in Mitchell’s Iconology to discuss mythological figures in movies from three aspects, including icons, text and ideology and tries to explain the effect on ideology exerted by the visualization of myth. |
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