Tolkien the Metafictionist - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

NogrodtheGreat · 09-08-2013, 04:41 AM

Hey, first time poster here!

As my first post I thought I'd start a pretentious thread about Tolkien and the notion of 'meta-fiction'. If anyone follows the journal 'Tolkien Studies' you may have noticed that over the last few years they've been running quite a few papers on the question of Tolkien's meta-fictional conceits. Brljak's article (2011) for instance argued that the overall conceit of the Lord of the Rings - that it is ultimately a translation of an unknown number of 'manuscripts' (only the initial manuscripts in the tradition having been actually written by Bilbo, Frodo and Sam) - is actually its defining characteristics and should be granted far more attention.

For example Brljak argues that we cannot 'view' the story contained within the pages of LoTR without some degree of readerly skepticism, given that Tolkien alerts us to the manuscript conceit in the Prologue (indeed explains it in considerable depth). He therefore argues for a new approach to Tolkien that "problematizes", to use that hideous piece of Po-Mo jargon, the novel's claim to authenticity. Furthermore, he argues that the prevalence of novelistic technique argues against the status of the work as a straightforward translation of 'Frodo's memoir' - instead we should see it as a 'history' that has been 'novelised' by successive generations of scholars.

But if we view the work in this way, what are we to make of its claims to verisimilitude? We treat the LoTR as though it were an unproblematic window into this 'Secondary World' - but what if (just bear with me!) it is nothing of the sort, and instead is an artistic compilation from out of that secondary world, but which represents it only fictionally.

This is perhaps all very ridiculous, but Brljak and Gergely Nagy have been arguing for some years that some kind of meta-fictional approach to Tolkien's work is essential. It both creates, and possibly distorts and undercuts, that familiar sense of 'depth' that Shippey and others have commented on.

Your thoughts about this?

09-08-2013, 04:41 AM	#1
NogrodtheGreat Pile O'Bones Join Date: Sep 2013 Location: Canberra, Australia Posts: 20	Tolkien the Metafictionist Hey, first time poster here! As my first post I thought I'd start a pretentious thread about Tolkien and the notion of 'meta-fiction'. If anyone follows the journal 'Tolkien Studies' you may have noticed that over the last few years they've been running quite a few papers on the question of Tolkien's meta-fictional conceits. Brljak's article (2011) for instance argued that the overall conceit of the Lord of the Rings - that it is ultimately a translation of an unknown number of 'manuscripts' (only the initial manuscripts in the tradition having been actually written by Bilbo, Frodo and Sam) - is actually its defining characteristics and should be granted far more attention. For example Brljak argues that we cannot 'view' the story contained within the pages of LoTR without some degree of readerly skepticism, given that Tolkien alerts us to the manuscript conceit in the Prologue (indeed explains it in considerable depth). He therefore argues for a new approach to Tolkien that "problematizes", to use that hideous piece of Po-Mo jargon, the novel's claim to authenticity. Furthermore, he argues that the prevalence of novelistic technique argues against the status of the work as a straightforward translation of 'Frodo's memoir' - instead we should see it as a 'history' that has been 'novelised' by successive generations of scholars. But if we view the work in this way, what are we to make of its claims to verisimilitude? We treat the LoTR as though it were an unproblematic window into this 'Secondary World' - but what if (just bear with me!) it is nothing of the sort, and instead is an artistic compilation from out of that secondary world, but which represents it only fictionally. This is perhaps all very ridiculous, but Brljak and Gergely Nagy have been arguing for some years that some kind of meta-fictional approach to Tolkien's work is essential. It both creates, and possibly distorts and undercuts, that familiar sense of 'depth' that Shippey and others have commented on. Your thoughts about this? Last edited by NogrodtheGreat; 09-08-2013 at 04:55 AM.