Sub-creating Arda:
World-building in J.R.R. Tolkien's Works, its Precursors, and Legacies
Dimitra Fimi and Thomas Honegger (editors)
Cormarë Series No. 40
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J.R.R. Tolkien's literary cosmos may not be the most elaborate of the imaginary
worlds in existence, it is certainly the most influential. The posthumous editorial
work of Tolkien's son Christopher has also shown that Arda remains unrivalled in
its consistency and complexity. Additionally, the re-publication of Tolkien's Andrew
Lang lecture 'On Fairy-stories' (originally delivered 1939) and its interpretation
within the discourse of literary fantasy has further strengthened his position as one
of the foremost proponents of literary world-building or, as he himself preferred to
call it, (literary) subcreation.
The contributions to this volume by Tom Shippey, John Garth, Mark J.P. Wolf,
Kristine Larsen, Andrew Higgins, Allan Turner, Gergely Nagy, Renée Vink, and
a dozen other scholars, discuss not only Tolkien's theoretical concepts as well as his
literary work but also explore the relationship between Tolkien’s approach with that
of other 'literary world-builders' whose imaginary worlds have attracted readers and
scholars alike.
table of contents | abstracts | cover | announcements | more
Table of contents
Dimitra Fimi & Thomas Honegger
Introduction
Mark J.P. Wolf
Concerning the "Sub" in "Subcreation": The Act of Creating Under
(abstract)
Allan Turner
One Pair of Eyes: Focalisation and Worldbuilding
(abstract)
Massimiliano Izzo
Worldbuilding and Mythopoeia
in Tolkien and post-Tolkienian Fantasy Literature
(abstract)
Péter Kristóf Makai
Beyond Fantastic Self-indulgence: Aesthetic Limits to World-building
(abstract)
N. Trevor Brierly
Worldbuilding Design Patterns in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien
(abstract)
John Garth
Ilu's Music: The Creation of Tolkien's Creation Myth
(abstract)
Gergely Nagy
On No Magic in Tolkien:
Resisting the Representational Criteria of Realism
(abstract)
Renée Vink
Tolkien the Tinkerer: World-building versus Storytelling
(abstract)
Jonathan Nauman
Composition as Exploration:
Fictional Development in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
(abstract)
Anahit Behrooz
Temporal Topographies: Mapping the Geological
and Anthropological Effects of Time in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium
(abstract)
Robin Markus Auer
Sundering Seas and Watchers in the Water:
Water as a Subversive Element in Middle-earth
(abstract)
Michaela Hausmann
Lyrics on Lost Lands: Constructing Lost Places
through Poetry in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
(abstract)
Hamish Williams
Mountain People in Middle-earth: Ecology and the Primitive
(abstract)
Timo Lothmann, Arndt Heilmann, Sven Hintzen
Then Smaug Spoke:
On Constructing the Fantastic via Dialogue in Tolkien's Story Cosmos
(abstract)
Maureen F. Mann
Artefacts and Immersion
in the Worldbuilding of Tolkien and the Brontës
(abstract)
Bradford Lee Eden
Sub-creation by any Other Name:
The Artist and God in the Early Twentieth Century
(abstract)
Kristine Larsen
A Mythology for Poland:
Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher Fantasy Series as a Tolkienian Subcreation
(abstract)
Andrew Higgins
More than Narrative: The Role of Paratexts in the World-building
of Austin Tappan Wright, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ursula K. Le Guin
(abstract)
Tom Shippey
The Faërie World of Michael Swanwick
(abstract)
Łukasz Neubauer
Absence of gods vs. Absence of God:
The Spiritual Landscapes of J.R.R. Tolkien's
Middle-earth and George R.R. Martin’s Westeros
(abstract)
table of contents | abstracts | cover | announcements | more
Abstracts
Concerning the "Sub" in "Subcreation": The Act of Creating Under
Subcreation is the term Tolkien used to differentiate the creations of human beings to the ex nihilio creation of God. Because we exist within God's creation, we can only "create under" (or subcreate) the restrictions which it places on us and our imaginations. Whatever we do not invent in a subcreated world uses defaults from the real world; but how far can human beings subcreate a world? How many world defaults can be changed, and just how far can a subcreated world be from the real world? This essay explores and attempts to answer exactly these questions.
One Pair of Eyes: Focalisation and Worldbuilding
World-building is often thought of as belonging exclusively to the elaboration of science fiction and fantasy. However, many cognitive linguists see it as the necessary basis for communication through language; every interaction relies on building a mental representation of a personal world or modifying it through dialogue. The conceptualisation of a situation which is not accessible through our own eyes is made possible by the human capability of projection, that is visualising things from a different angle, such as through the eyes of another person. That is why focalisation is such an important narrative technique to help the reader become immersed in fictional events taking place in an unfamilar setting. A different historical period can be almost as unfamiliar as a different world. In this paper I will compare the use of focalisation in Tolkien’s world-building with that of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels Waverley and Rob Roy.
Worldbuilding and Mythopoeia in Tolkien and post- Tolkienian Fantasy Literature
In his book Imaginary Worlds. The Theory and History of Sub-creation, Mark J.P. Wolf treats the terms "worldbuilding" and "sub-creation" as synonyms. The term sub-creation was first used by J.R.R. Tolkien in his seminal essay 'On fairy-stories', in relation with mythopoeia, or myth-making. Tolkien describes sub-creation as "an aspect of mythology" and as an art connected to the Elvish Enchantment, the capability to make a secondary world with an inner consistency of reality. However, mythopoetic sub-creation is often at odds, if not even in conflict, with extensive and detailed worldbuilding, especially when the latter focuses on mundane aspects such as economics, politics, and logistics. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was careful to maintain a balance between the mythological dimension and the encyclopaedic impulse of worldbuilding. Most fantasy authors who followed in Tolkien's footsteps have failed to achieve a comparable level of balance. They either use detailed worldbuilding as the foundation of their work (e.g. Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, etc.) or discard it altogether, seeing it as a constraint on imagination. These authors focus rather on myth-making (e.g. Peter S. Beagle, Neil Gaiman, Catherynne M. Valente, etc.). This paper analyses the nature of the dichotomy between mythopoeia and worldbuilding, and proposes possible ways to overcome this opposition with the aim of producing literary works that possess both.
Beyond Fantastic Self-indulgence: Aesthetic Limits to World-building
Contemporary fantasy and science-fiction construct original story-worlds to distance them from the primary world of the reader. This cognitive estrangement is supposed to perform a critical function, serving as a way to comment upon the social, economic and cultural relations of the author's primary world. This paper offers a cognitively infused criticism of the emphasis laid on world-building in today's SF/F fiction. In the contemporary media landscape, the proliferation of world-building fiction is largely due to the desperate need for the limitless expansion of successful intellectual property franchises. Rather than the plausibility of character actions and story arcs, these intellectual properties depend on the plausibility of the world for their success. Contrasting M. John Harrison's Viriconium universe and Jeff VanderMeer's The Southern Reach Trilogy with the aesthetics of world-building fiction, I employ a historico-critical approach to explore the limits of inner consistency in speculative writing and the (im)possibility of these story-worlds.
Worldbuilding Design Patterns in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien
A 'design pattern' is a formalized description of a common problem in a field
of endeavor, accompanied by a recommendation towards a solution. Design
patterns are widely used in architecture and software engineering, and there
is growing interest in discovering and identifying design patterns in other
fields of creative endeavor. The art of worldbuilding could benefit from the
discovery and identification of design patterns and a design pattern language.
Such a pattern language would be useful guidance to authors, game designers,
enthusiasts and others who are involved in the design of secondary worlds.
Design patterns are discovered or identified by a combination of the observation
of common problems and successful solutions in the Primary World,
introspection and experimentation. Examining the work of successful creators
of secondary worlds may uncover design patterns applicable to worldbuilding.
This essay will examine worldbuilding by J.R.R. Tolkien, the problems and
solutions he found and how they can be formulated into design patterns
and contribute towards a pattern language for world-building. An Appendix
includes a collection of 25 design patterns for worldbuilding, as discerned in
the works of Tolkien.
Ilu’s Music: The Creation of Tolkien's Creation Myth
This paper investigates the sources of inspiration for Tolkien's creation myth. Through a reappraisal of published evidence, it tentatively suggests that he may have composed The Music of the Ainur in 1917, rather than in Oxford after the end of the First World War. Through an examination of context and correspondence, it argues that The Music of the Ainur is a consolatory myth in response to the war, written partly for the only other survivor of Tolkien's T.C.B.S circle of friends, Christopher Wiseman. It brings evidence that an analogous story of a heavenly music and revolt, discovered by Peter Gilliver, is indeed the source for Tolkien’s myth; and it considers the implications for Tolkien’s themes.
On No Magic in Tolkien: Resisting the Representational Criteria of Realism
Although in theoretical and generic criticism of ‘fantasy’, magic has always been a very prominent term, in both J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and his own theoretical work relatively little is made of it. While developing his legendarium, Tolkien gradually got rid of most of his earlier ‘magical’ ideas and transformed them into manifestations of the theological hierarchy of Middle-earth in the literary texts and the fascination of art in ‘On Fairy- Stories’. Tolkien’s finished Middle-earth texts and the 1977 Silmarillion therefore contain no magic at all in traditional cultural historical sense. This is an aspect of Tolkien’s specific brand of systematic mythopoetic practice as opposed to the ideologically charged representational criteria of realism: an opposition to the ideology of realism is something that makes the literary fantastic, certainly Tolkien’s variety of it, possible.
Tolkien the Tinkerer: World-building versus Storytelling
That J.R.R. Tolkien was a storyteller is obvious, given his authorship of books like The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. He has also, and rightly so, been hailed as a great world-builder. His world of Arda is full of details existing in their own right, regardless of their use in his various narratives. But simultaneously, it is not just any fantasy setting: it is our own world, only with a different past and history and seen from a specific angle. What happens when primary world realities enter the fantasy world of Arda through a back door? Does Tolkien’s desire for realism never get in the way of his stories, his mythology? The tension developing over time between Tolkien's world-building with everything this entailed on the one hand, and his storytelling with its (often religious) symbolism on the other, needs to be discussed more thoroughly, as does the balance between these two. In the later volumes of History of Middle-earth Tolkien is shown tinkering with his sub-created world, and occasionally backpedalling. He appears to have had second thoughts about several of his earlier concepts, such as, for instance, the cosmology of Arda and the concept of Death as the Gift of Men. Was Tolkien the storyteller and mythmaker in the process of disappearing behind Tolkien the world-builder during his later years?
Composition as Exploration: Fictional Development in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
Tolkien's remarks about the composition of The Lord of the Rings often seem to imply that he experienced the writing of his heroic romance as exploration, encountering important figures and aspects of Middle-earth rather than intentionally inventing them. This paper compares these authorial contentions with evidence available in Christopher Tolkien's manuscript histories, focusing especially on the emergences of Treebeard and of Aragorn King Elessar, characters whose natures changed considerably as the narrative developed. The details of Tolkien's production and revision indicate a dynamic and revelatory approach to worldbuilding, the author accepting cues from his developing characters and their narratives in a manner analogous and relevant to his practices in linguistic invention.
The many maps that J.R.R. Tolkien designed for his Middle-earth texts have been frequently considered in the context of worldbuilding and as tools for articulating the landscape, but their status as objects embedded with historical narratives has been largely overlooked. This paper positions Tolkien's maps as storytellers: as vehicles for depicting and negotiating Middle-earth's past ages. The ability of maps to record historical change becomes particularly important considering the unique relationship between the landscape and time in Tolkien's subcreation. Drawing on a catastrophic geological framework, each Age of Middle-earth is characterised by a cataclysmic change which entirely reconfigures the physical landscape. By considering the ways in which maps represent the passage of time and its effects on the physical landscape, and are thereby rendered historical documents, I aim to demonstrate how Tolkien exposes cartography'’s paradoxical attempt to fix a momentary interpretation of a world that is subject to the ravages of time, and how this works to articulate broader questions surrounding time, change, and loss.
Sundering Seas and Watchers in the Water: Water as a Subversive Element in Middle-earth
With Tolkien's extensive production of maps and the intricate detail of geology, flora, and fauna he provides, the basic elements of nature express not only the very physicality of the sub-created 'Middle-Earth' which makes it come to life in such depth of detail, but also an underlying network of motifs and ideas that often pervade story and action through what might be described as 'structural landscapes'. What is lacking, however, is a detailed and structured study of the natural elements, taking into account their immediate and constitutive physicality, their impact on, and role within the stories of Middle-earth, and the conceptual framework within which these elements manifest themselves in more abstract ways. This essay is a first step to fill this gap by providing an analysis of the role water plays in the creation of Middle-earth and its history. By taking a closer look at specific occurrences of water within the narratives as well as more subtle underlying motifs in The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s other works, I will reveal how water works as the most subversive element of Tolkien's sub-creation through its often corrupted and corrupting qualities, and is essential to the unfolding of the story by adding ambiguity to an underlying meta-narrative of the elements.
This paper analyses selected poems from The Lord of the Rings in which 'lost places' like Valinor or Beleriand are depicted in order to show how these places are constructed by means of poetic techniques of world-building. On the one hand, those lyrics on lost lands therefore contribute to the overall subcreation of Arda as a complex Secondary World, but, on the other hand, they also have an impact on the immediate diegetic context and the characters in The Lord of the Rings because the representation of such lost places is always filtered through the personal and cultural perspective of the singer and mediated to an unknowing audience. The following paper will therefore look at the worldbuilding potential as well as the performance contexts of these lyrics on lost lands in The Lord of the Rings.
Mountain People in Middle-earth: Ecology and the Primitive
This paper identifies and interprets the relationship between mountains and the various ethnicities who originate from this space in Tolkien's Middle-earth. My analysis is divided into four sections: the first gives a background of exemplary ethno-topographic theories in antiquity; the second revises relevant Tolkien scholarship on worldbuilding (particularly, the relationship between the natural world and its inhabitants); the third illustrates how mountains in Middle-earth provide a coherent pool of common racial characteristics for those inhabitants who originate from these spaces; and the fourth searches for functions behind this close structural relationship.
Then Smaug Spoke:
On Constructing the Fantastic via Dialogue in
Tolkien's Story Cosmos
In this study, we have a closer look at dialogue in a representative set of texts from the Middle-earth legendarium in order to inspect the functional potential of dialogue and its world-building capacity. We combine corpus-analytical tools from linguistics with a cognitive approach. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of prominent linguistic features of selected examples of dialogic interaction (e.g. the Smaug–Bilbo colloquy from The Hobbit) points to salient differences in the setup and the function of the dialogues. The detected patterns eventually lead to a function-based classification into four main dialogue types in the Tolkien corpus under investigation, namely the bantering, personalising, story-propelling, and historicizing types. These types are modelled to cover the range of styles and topic dimensions from a micro- to a macro-level of systematic foregrounding, thus representing their complementary impact on world-building density and coherence. In this respect, there is a high potential for follow-up studies using eye-tracking methodology. Ultimately, our presented model is meant to offer opportunities for the study of dialogue as a versatile and strategic device in fictional literature beyond Tolkien.
Artefacts and Immersion in the Worldbuilding of Tolkien and the Brontës
This paper provides a preliminary study of worldbuilding theory in the imaginary world of the four Brontë siblings – Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne – and compares it with that of J.R.R. Tolkien. Despite the differences of age and historical period, the delight of these writers for worldbuilding begins in their adolescence and involves play with script and language. Glass Town and Angria share many similarities with Middle-earth as these worldbuilders authenticate their worlds and establish artefacts for it. However, the two worlds have very different ethos, with Tolkien's being theorised by Mark J.P. Wolf as the definitive example of a fully realised world with consistent and plausible verisimitude. In contrast, the Brontës create an imaginary space for literary exploration and apprenticeship which challenges early nineteenth century realism. The paper concludes with a study of how deeply immersive their imaginary worlds became for Tolkien and all the Brontës.
Sub-creation by any Other Name:
The Artist and God in the Early Twentieth Century
This contribution will examine other writers and philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries who wrote or discussed various ideas and thoughts around man’s role as a sub-creator and inventor. Many of these individuals were Tolkien's contemporaries or were influences on Tolkien: Francis Thompson (1859-1907), James Joyce (1882-1941), Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), and David Jones (1895-1974). All wrote about their views regarding man in relation to God, especially as imitators, artists, writers, and sub-creators. This paper will provide more information on what each of these individuals felt and said, and what influence they may/may not have had on Tolkien and his theory of sub-creation.
A Mythology for Poland: Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher Fantasy Series as a Tolkienian Subcreation
Andrzej Sapkowski's (1948 - ) Witcher fantasy series featuring the adventures of the chemically-modified monster killer for hire (or "Witcher") Geralt, his sorceress lover Yennifer, and Ciri, the eugenically-engineered child of destiny, is an award-winning best seller in his native Poland and has a devoted audience across the globe. Featuring a bestiary of fantastical creatures from classical mythology, and, more importantly, mythological creatures from Polish and Slavic mythology, Sapkowski also interweaves Arthurian legend with Polish folktales, magic with genetic engineering, and environmentalism with court intrigue. The result is a detailed, self-contained Secondary World (to use Tolkien’s terminology) crafted especially for the author's Polish audience. But it will be argued that Sapkowski's work nearly succeeds as a subcreated mythology for modern Poland (similar to Tolkien's original desire for his legendarium to serve as a mythology for England).
In his work Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Gerard Genette defined paratexts as any thing external to the text itself that influences the way a reader interacts with it. Genette called this 'a transaction'. In his monograph Building Imaginary Worlds (2012), Mark J.P. Wolf explored several types of invented paratexts, including maps, timelines, genealogies, invented artifacts and lexicons and grammars of invented languages, which authors utilize in their world-building to both imbue their diegetic world with a greater sense of reality, while also creating a point of interaction and 'transaction' between the author and the reader. This paper will explore these two aspects of paratexts in three related narratives. In the 1930's the American legal author and philosopher Austin Tappan Wright utilized a combination of narrative and paratexts to privately invent a world which, after his tragic death, his wife would publish in the novel Islandia (1940). At roughly the same time, J.R.R. Tolkien was using a similar process to continue building his world of Arda, which readers would first experience in his masterworks The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). Then in the 1980's the science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin would build upon both the tradition of Tappan Wright and Tolkien to invent a world for the Kesh people in her unique novel Always Coming Home (1985). This paper will investigate how each of these authors invented and used paratexts as part of the gestalt of their world-building. It will explore how each author used similar paratextual elements, including maps, charts, genealogies and both lexicons and grammars of invented languages, to both construct their diegetic worlds and also encourage Genette's process of interaction and transaction between the author and reader.
The Faërie World of Michael Swanwick
This paper suggests that Michael Swanwick’s 'Industrialised Faerie' fantasies perhaps use The Denham Tracts, a set of folklore pamphlets which are also a putative source for Tolkien's hobbits. It argues further that Swanwick combines 'immersive' and 'portal' strategies in creating his imagined world, centering his works on 'changeling' characters who belong in a sense to both the real and the faerie worlds, while also exploiting reader-awareness of traditional folklore motifs.
At first glance, the worlds (sub)created by Tolkien and Martin may seem to have a number of crucial features in common. Both are meticulously crafted, with various, often deeply incompatible, layers of cultural identity and ethics (Gondor vs Mordor, Starks vs Lannisters etc.). Likewise, despite sometimes markedly different approaches in their worldbuilding strategies, the writers' indebtedness to medieval literature, history and values has been repeatedly examined by many a scholar, providing fertile grounds for cross-cultural explorations and evaluations. There are, however, certain vital, perhaps even fundamental, issues where the worlds of The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire are as distinct from one another as the proverbial chalk and cheese. One such issue – clearly discernible to every Christian (or, at least, Christian-raised) reader of Tolkien – is the intriguing spiritual disparity between the characters living in Middle-earth and those that inhabit Martin's Westeros. The world of the former is almost practically devoid of any explicit manifestations of the divine (at the time of its first publication the readers were not yet aware of the (pre) existence of Eru Illúvatar), yet, at the same time, it is suffused with numerous Christian values and underpinnings which cannot be ignored if one seeks to get a fuller (and thus more meaningful) picture of Tolkien's fiction. The latter, on the other hand, appears to be resplendent with all sorts of gods – greater and lesser, "real" and imaginary, more or less merciful and forgiving – yet in the long run it fails (in most cases it seems to fail all along the line) to even partly comply with the Christian (or, as for that matter, any religion-based) ethics, perhaps in some ways implying that all religions (or theologically-based systems of beliefs) are equal, and therefore equally false (or, at least, uncertain) in their nature and moral direction. The following paper seeks to examine some of these differences, juxtaposing Tolkien’s Catholic worldview with that of evidently agnostic (or even atheist) Martin.
table of contents | abstracts | cover | announcements | more
Cover
Cover design by Jay Johnstone
table of contents | abstracts | cover | announcements | more
Announcements
Many book reviews (12th April 2023)
Sub-creating Arda shortlisted for Mythopoeic Award (10th December 2020)
Many reviews (17th July 2020)
Three book reviews in Journal of Tolkien Research (10th July 2019)
Sub-creating Arda published (25th February 2019)
Announcing forthcoming publication: Sub-creating Arda (21st January 2019)
Forthcoming and planned publications (21st July 2017)
Call for Papers: Tolkien and Literary Wordbuilding (23rd February 2017)
464 pages, Walking Tree Publishers 2019, Cormarë Series No. 40, Editors: Dimitra Fimi and Thomas Honegger
, ISBN: 978-3-905703-40-5.
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