TOLKIEN'S ALLUSIVE BACKSTORY: IMMORTALITY AND BELIEF IN THE FANTASY FRAME

DISCUSSING THE ROOTS OF THE GENRE we today call "fantasy," Michelle L. Eilers defines it as "prose fiction [...] in which an extranatural power plays a fundamental role and that [aims] to create an illusion of reality" (318). "The moment disbelief arises," J.R.R. Tolkien writes of fantasy tales (or, if you will, on fairy stories), "the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed" ("On FairyStories" 52). [...]works, or if the basic justification is sufficiently broad and/or deep, that first level may be the frame's entirety. In works that require the reader to make more than a trivial commitment (of time spent reading, of credulity required for buy-in, et ah), the frame may require the writer's building (or excavating) additional levels of explanation to enable the reader's engagement. The bulk of materials that make up the frame of The Lord of the Rings are of Tolkien's own imagining, and the realworld borrowings are sufficiently rarified or altered that they blend seamlessly with the frame's other content. Given this convincing presentation, the exposition's focal shift from the Red Book of Westmarch to "a variety probably of Nicotiana" ("Concerning Pipe-weed" 8)-an insertion of a thing real and culturally present into matters completely imaginary-does not break the narrative's spell, but instead draws the reader further into it. Nardi, Dominic J. "Political Institutions in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About the Lack of Democracy." About: The Autthors WAYNE A. CHANDLER, Associate Professor in the Department of Languages,...