Tolkien and antiquarianism

• 1. Antiquarian Tradition Roots

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  J. R. R. Tolkien (1892, 1973) was an English Roman Catholic writer, poet, philologist, and academic who spent much of his career as a professor of medieval English at the University of Oxford. He stated that whenever he read a medieval work, he wanted to write a modern one in the same tradition. Christina Fawcett writes that by creating his fantasy world of Middle-earth in the way that he did, giving it a history as well as a narrative, Tolkien was following in a tradition that interwove history with literature. She notes that antiquarianism flourished in the 18th century, and that 19th century neo-medieval literature grew out of the Gothic. Jamie Williamson identifies antiquarianism as an ancestor of modern fantasy. Tolkien was in Williamson's view following earlier authors like William Morris, who in turn was following antiquarians like James Macpherson in the use of devices like a prose style incorporating archaisms and elegy and historical appendices to create a feeling of realism. Carl Phelpstead writes that Tolkien's prolific creation of the languages, peoples, genealogies, and history that give Middle-earth an unprecedented sense of reality is calculated to prevent disbelief by providing the kind of inner consistency which commands Secondary Belief. Nick Groom places Tolkien in the tradition of English antiquarianism where 18th century authors like Thomas Chatterton wrote in medieval style, creating a variety of non-narrative materials much as Tolkien did. Finding a lack of suitable material, Chatterton invented his own archaic language and calligraphy and produced his own complex medieval manuscripts, maps, sketches, and heraldry. Andrew Higgins comments that Tolkien, like the antiquarians, invented legends and myths but not simply as fantasy; he and they felt they were recording a past that was already there.

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• 2. Forged Manuscripts Aesthetics

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  Catherine McIlwaine writes that Tolkien used his pipe to burn the edges of the Book of Mazarbul pages, pierced holes along one side to resemble the holes where the parchment would have been stitched to the binding, and washed them with red paint to resemble bloodstains. The set of forged and invented non-narrative elements took their place alongside the frame story that Bilbo and later Hobbits had edited, transcribed and annotated the text of the ancient Red Book of Westmarch which Tolkien supposedly found and edited as The Lord of the Rings. Groom notes that Tolkien was not a literary forger like Chatterton, but that his facsimile pages of the Book of Mazarbul enlisted the aesthetics of antiquarianism and adopted the techniques of literary forgery. Sherwood adds that these forgery methods were much like Chatterton's ways of making his documents look realistic. The first page from The Book of Mazarbul is a facsimile artefact that Tolkien carefully created in the style of a forgery to support the story and bring readers into his fantasy. He had hoped to include it in the first edition of The Lord of the Rings despite his best efforts failing to get publishers to accept it. The book contains over 60 pieces of verse of many kinds including for wandering, marching to war, drinking, and having a bath; narrating ancient myths, riddles, prophecies, and magical incantations; of praise and lament.

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• 3. Graphic World Building Elements

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  Tolkien made maps depicting Middle-earth to help him with plot development, to guide the reader through his often complex stories, and to contribute to the impression of depth and realistic worldbuilding in his writings. Shippey comments that the maps contribute an air of solidity and extent both in space and time which its successors so conspicuously lack. He suggests that readers take maps and the names on them as labels with a very close one-to-one relationship with whatever they label. That in turn makes maps extraordinarily useful to fantasy, as they constantly assure the reader that the places depicted exist and have history and cultures behind them. Tolkien stated that he began with maps and developed his plots from them, but that he also wanted his maps to be picturesque. He painstakingly constructed his characters' intersecting movements to get each of them to the right places at the right times. He drew his maps such as the one of Gondor and Mordor to scale on graph paper and plotted the protagonists' tracks, annotating these with dates to ensure that the chronology fitted exactly. Tolkien's artwork was a key element of his creativity from the time when he began to write fiction. He prepared illustrations for his Middle-earth fantasy books, facsimile artefacts such as the Book of Mazarbul, more or less picturesque maps, and calligraphy including the iconic Black Speech inscription on the One Ring.

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• 4. Philological Language Foundations

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  Tolkien was fascinated by language in his childhood, and professionally interested in it as a philologist. Philology strongly influenced his Middle-earth fantasy world. He constructed languages throughout his life, starting in his teens, describing this as A Secret Vice. The most developed of his glossopoeic projects was his family of Elvish languages including Quenya and Sindarin. He stated that I am a philologist and all my work is philological; he explained to his American publisher Houghton Mifflin that this was meant to imply that his work was all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. The invention of languages is the foundation. The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows. Tolkien made daring use of untranslated Elvish, as when the Hobbits reach Elrond's house at Rivendell and hear the poem A Elbereth Gilthoniel sung in full: A Elbereth Gilthoniel / silivren penna míriel / o menel aglar elenath! The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey comments that readers were not expected to know the song's literal meaning, but were meant to make something of it: it was clearly something from an unfamiliar language, and announced that there is more to Middle-earth than can immediately be communicated.

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• 5. Chronologies And Genealogies

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  The appendices to The Lord of the Rings contain precisely worked-out chronologies of Middle-earth, supporting the narrative with background detail of many aspects of the nations and characters. Appendix A: Annals of the Kings and Rulers gives background to the larger world of Middle-earth, with brief overviews of the events of the first two Ages of the world, and then more detailed histories of the nations of Men in Gondor and Rohan, as well as a history of the royal Dwarvish line of Durin during the Third Age. Appendix B: The Tale of Years (Chronology of the Westlands) is a timeline of events throughout The Lord of the Rings, and ancient events affecting the narrative; in lesser detail, it gives the stories' context in the fictional chronology of the larger mythology. Tolkien used the timeline, in conjunction with his maps of Middle-earth, to align the interlaced threads of the narrative as the different characters progress in different directions through the landscape. Family trees contribute to the impression of depth and realism in the stories set in his fantasy world by showing that each character is rooted in history with a rich network of relationships. Tolkien included multiple family trees in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings; they are variously for Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, and Men. The family trees gave Tolkien a way of exploring and developing the etymologies of characters' names, and their genealogical relationships.

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• 6. Paratextual Editorial Frames

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  Tolkien framed his narratives with a mass of paratexts, elements which stand beside the main text, in The Lord of the Rings and some in The Hobbit. The Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft comments that these resonate or collaborate with the main text to amplify its effect, making it more believable. Tolkien's paratexts include prefaces, notes, and appendices of all kinds; scholars including Croft have stated that his maps, too, serve as paratextual amplifiers of his narratives. The paratexts contribute to constructing an editorial frame for the work. This places him not as author but as the last of a line of philological editors of a surviving ancient manuscript originally written by the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, whose memoirs, in the book's frame story, supposedly survived as the Red Book of Westmarch. Allan Turner writes that Tolkien presents The Lord of the Rings as a pseudotranslation, with a found manuscript conceit in the tradition of Miguel de Cervantes's 1605 epic novel Don Quixote. Tolkien thus placed himself as having come across an ancient document, edited and annotated by many hands. Again, Turner notes, Tolkien had not invented this idea, as Walter Scott had done the same in the introduction to his 1820 novel Ivanhoe.

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