J.R.R. Tolkien by Peter Hunt;

Author:Peter Hunt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK (Minor Textbooks)

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Tolkien and Worldbuilding

Catherine Butler

What is worldbuilding?

One of Tolkien’s distinctive contributions to fantasy writing lies in the example he set as a builder of worlds. 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. Tolkien may be known as the builder of only one world – Middle-earth1 – but 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.

The labour of creating Middle-earth, in its various phases, revisions and versions, has become a subject of study in its own right, to which much academic attention has been devoted. It is no part of my present purpose to compete with the work of such scholars as Douglas A. Anderson, John Rateliff, Christina Scull, Wayne G. Hammond, and above all Tolkien’s son Christopher, whose editions of his father’s unpublished work, starting with The Silmarillion in 1977, have done much to enlarge and enhance our understanding of Middle-earth’s evolution. Rather, I wish to explore the implications and ramifications of the act of worldbuilding, especially as it was conceived and practised by Tolkien. In particular, this essay will consider the ways in which considerations of audience may have affected the representation of Middle-earth. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set in the ‘same’ world, yet it looks quite different in important respects. How far should these differences be understood as reflecting the 17 years of development between their publication, and how far are they attributable to considerations of genre and of the capacities and interests of their respective audiences?

Worldbuilding and sub-creation

Tolkien’s most extensive statement on the art of making worlds comes in his 1939 essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’, and this seems to the obvious place to begin our investigation. It is here that he introduces the concept of the writer as a ‘sub-creator’, a position analogous in some ways to that of God as the creator of our own world. For Tolkien, sub-creation arises from the imaginative ability of humans to recombine elements of reality (the ‘Primary World’) in new ways. When these recombined elements are arranged and expressed through art, they result in a new, Secondary World, which may in turn induce in readers the kind of imaginative absorption Tolkien refers to as Secondary Belief, and it is on the ability to evoke Secondary Belief that the Secondary World’s claim to be a successful sub-creation depends.

Given the nature of Tolkien’s own fiction, it is important to stress that the creation of a Secondary World in this sense is not in itself to be identified with the making of a world such as Middle-earth. Rather, a Secondary World may be an imaginative space of any kind, as long as that space is sufficiently well rendered to enable Secondary Belief. The world Thackeray conjures in Vanity Fair, for

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