Tolkien's Middle-Earth. A Myth in a Test Tube

When dealing with myth, the intuitive question to ask is: 'What is myth?' The sheer variety and scope of possible answers, however, has rendered this question impractical, and as hoping to find a concise definition for a phenomenon so widely discussed seems undue, one may find that asking what 'constitutes' myth is a more humble, yet perhaps also more rewarding pursuit, as it asks for aspects rather than consistent concepts. There is a huge variety of aspects that might be studied when engaging with myth and in the course of this paper we will try to cover those that seem to us indispensable: essential components, workings, and functions. Unlike most research, however, we will approach these aspects of myth from yet another perspective and ask: 'How is myth made?' In order to do this, we will take a look at a mod­ ern myth the creation of which might be the most well-documented process of myth-making: J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth mythology. 'The construction of elaborate and consistent mythology (and two languages) rather occupies the mind' writes Tolkien in a let­ ter to his publisher Stanley Unwin in 1937.1 And indeed Tolkien's mind seems to have been occupied with this act of constructing Middle-Earth for most of his life, while his professional career was spent studying and lecturing on philology and the medieval myths of (Northern) Europe at Oxford University. We will therefore start by problematising existing concepts and conceptions of myth and developing our own linguistic ap­ proach, followed by a discussion of the ways in which Tolkien as a scholar was influenced by myth and in turn went on to influence myth with his literary work. The final part will then deal with Tolkien's mythical world and its languages in detail, and how a characterisation of myth as an inherently linguistic phe­ nomenon can be derived from Tolkien's synthetic myth.