Sourcing Tolkien's "Circles of the World": Speculations on The Heimskringla, The Latin Vulgate Bible, and the Hereford Mappa Mundi (original) (raw)
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 2023
This article proposes the addition of four items to “Section A” of Oronzo Cilli’s Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist (2019) and the inclusion of complementary information to two other entries after demonstrating J. R. R. Tolkien’s ownership and acquaintance with the volumes. Tolkien’s contribution to Derek J. Price’s editorial labor and possession of photostats of The Equatorie of the Planetis (c. 1393) as well as editions of Handlyng Synne (started in 1303), Ormulum (c. 1170-1180) and Heimskringla (c. 1220-1230) seem mere encyclopedic data in appearance. However, the addenda reveal strong potential for future investigations by disclosing: the reasons behind Tolkien’s personal interest in scribal corruption, an attempt to anglicize Old Norse dróttkvætt verse, the whereabouts of a batch of twenty to thirty books owned by him, further scholarly attention paid to Handlyng Synne and Ormulum, and Christopher Tolkien’s friendship with Eric Christiansen.
Tolkienian Chronotope: Some Remarks on Tolkien's Mythology for England
Hither Shore: Interdisciplinary Journal on Modern Fantasy Literature, Volume 19 “Raum und Zeit in Tolkiens Werk / Space and Time in Tolkien’s Work”, 2023
The paper seeks to examine the specifics of Tolkien’s worldbuilding from the point of view of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about the chronotope as explained in his essay Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel. Bakhtin insists on “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature”. Distinguishing the term from its other usages, he underlines that “[i]n the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, and becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope”. Moreover, according to Bakhtin, the prevailing constituent of the chronotope is time. The chronotope also defines the genre and generic distinctions, and “the image of man”, or in Tolkien’s texts, not necessarily only man, “is always intrinsically chronotopic”. Tolkien’s conscious choice to build up his world on creative re-working of the mythological and epic traditions of the European Middle Ages with some admixture of the Classical influences (such as Atlantis myth) allowed him to create his “asterisk” mythology. The paper uncovers how specific characteristics of these mythopoetic traditions, alongside the chronotropic conventions of the four main European narrative traditions: myth, epic, romance, and novel (according to Martin Simonson) inevitably shape Tolkien’s texts, taken as a complex whole. This approach also explains why Tolkien’s characters, ethics, codes of behaviour, and even the geology of his secondary world differ from our contemporary knowledge and sensibilities and cannot be different unless the chronotopic fusion is disrupted.