Sauron’s Fall: The End of Hegemony: A Hegemonic Power analysis of Tolkien’s The Return of The Ring

ABSTRACT

Hegemony is a part of politics series, in which Gramsci took part. It is notably seen as a challenging issue in discussing power and conquest. Gramsci‟s theory of hegemony reflected many fields, including literature. In doing this research, hegemony used is to show that literature, in many reasons, is analyzed not only in its structure, but also in other fields including politics. Thus, a series of Tolkien‟s trilogy – the Return of the King – is analyzed through hegemony. It is possible to know how a kind of Sauron‟s hegemony is beaten. Another reason is that existed hegemony – is defeated by other supremacy (power-domination). From aforementioned explanation, the research is titled as Sauron’s Fall: the End of Hegemony (A Hegemonic Power analysis of Tolkien’s the Return of the King).

There are three statement of problems dealing with the analysis. The first is to figure out what Sauron have done in Middle-earth until he could build his hegemony. The second is to know ways used by Sauron‟s rival to defeat him. The last is to realize that there are possibly some instruments used by Sauron‟s rival to beat the existed hegemony of Sauron.

The research emphasizes readers as literary work involvement since this is a kind of literary criticism in descriptive-qualitative method. The source is taken from Tolkien‟s The Return of the King, whilst it is also important to assist with some references from other Tolkien‟s works, major analysis from previous studies, or even books related to this research.

As the result, researcher finds a model of hegemony by Sauron, consisting of the State, language, and some instruments supporting him. On the other side, Aragorn, along with other people do counter-hegemony. Another fact is that hegemony is irresistible since it could be replaced by another power. That is the most important point of the research.