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The complex social network of The Lord of Rings

Studies of social structures have been growing in the last years, because the form of sharing and creating contentes has attracted the genersl public. Such structures are observed, as an example, in literary works. A featured author is J.R.R. Tolkien, with his books that describe a fictional world and its inhabitants. These books bring a narrative of the creation of the Middle-Earth and all of its mythology. His main pieces are: The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. The main objective of this article is the analysis of the social structures emerging of the conjunction of these works, in which the social relations are described by the reference criteria, shared events and direct bonds, with some major centrality measures together with the structural entropy of first order. It is then possible to establish an analogy with the canonic ensemble of statistical mechanics, with the possibility of analyzing the degree of homogeneity of the bonds between the communities.

Keywords:
complex network; entropy; Tolkien


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