Tolkien and Worldbuilding

Tolkien and Worldbuilding
Catherine Butler
[For the full published version of this essay see Peter Hunt, ed.,
J. R. R. Tolkien (New Casebooks) (Palgrave, 2013), pp. 106-20.]

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"Fantasy and science-fiction novelists, game designers, and role-play enthusiasts all acknowledge Tolkien as a master in the art of constructing a universe with its own history and geography, flora and fauna, cultures and languages, magic and physics." pg1

" it is a world almost six decades in the making, and has a depth and detail to which other writers, whether for adults or children, can only aspire." pg 1

"considerations of audience may have affected the representation of Middle-earth." pg 1-2

"For Tolkien, sub-creation arises from the imaginative ability of humans to recombine elements of reality (the ‘Primary World’) in new ways. " pg2

"a Secondary World may be an imaginative space of any kind, as long as that space is sufficiently well rendered to enable Secondary Belief."pg 3

"create a world that has been ‘thought through’ to a far greater extent than is required by the plot" pg 3

"Tolkien’s greatest achievement, […] in retrospect, was in normalizing the idea of a
secondary world. Although [Tolkien] retains the hint that the action of LOTR
takes place in the prehistory of our own world, that is not sustained, and to all intents and purposes Middle-earth is a separate creation, operating totally outside the world of our experience." ph 12

"One purpose of Tolkien’s work seems to have been to create, in Humphrey Carpenter’s
resounding phrase, ‘a mythology for England'"pg 13

LOTR is " a reconstruction of what an English mythology might have looked like had it survived." PG 13

"Tolkien makes repeated use of English placenames in his work, with a substantial number deriving from the countryside near Birmingham (where he grew up) and Oxford (where he lived as an adult)." pg 16


"world caters directly to this taste. Other readers (or the same readers in other moods) valueMiddle-earth as a place to which we are geographically and temporally connected, which we can hear echoed in familiar names and landscapes, and which lends an enchantment(sometimes melancholy) to the contemplation of our own world, presenting us with vistas of a deep past from which we are nevertheless irrevocably exiled." pg 17