“The Red Book and The Red Book: Jung, Tolkien, and the Convergence of Images“

In 1913 two men in Western Europe, of different age and unknown to each other, began to undergo a highly unusual experience: C.G. Jung and . Tolkien both stepped across a threshold and entered into a realm of imagination, into the realm of fantasy. For Jung this process, which he called active imagination, took the eventual form of the Liber Novus, also known as The Red Book, that became the seed from which nearly all his subsequent work flowered. For Tolkien this imaginal journey revealed to him the w