Since the very first published appearance of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, contained within the adventure-filled pages of The Hobbit (1937), readers have been drawn into the fantastical, wondrous...Show moreSince the very first published appearance of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, contained within the adventure-filled pages of The Hobbit (1937), readers have been drawn into the fantastical, wondrous world so masterfully crafted by this Oxford philologist. Such an extensive collection of stories, unfinished tales, and background information garners much opportunity for study, both casual and academic. Academic interest in particular has come so far as to spawn its own field of ‘Tolkien Studies’, entirely dedicated to the study of Tolkien and his oeuvre. Perhaps the most heated debate within Tolkien Studies considers whether Tolkien’s legendarium is essentially Christian or Pagan in nature. What has not yet been offered is an examination of Arda’s religion that would suit the wishes of its author: a discussion of religion in Tolkien’s works from inside Middle-earth. This thesis will consider the signs and instances of reverence and religion from an ‘in-world’ perspective, in the same fashion that a wanderer of Middle-earth would encounter them, and in doing so, brings a new and valuable approach to the Christian/Pagan debate, namely the approach of the writer and the sub-creator.Show less
Words have some power to change our reality, but it is limited. We cannot use speech to directly physically affect the world around us. One could order a rock to move, and it would not move. Even...Show moreWords have some power to change our reality, but it is limited. We cannot use speech to directly physically affect the world around us. One could order a rock to move, and it would not move. Even those things we can do through speech are limited. One could tell that same rock “I take you, rock, to be my lawfully wedded rock”, and fail to be part of the first ever rock-human marriage. There are conditions that must be met for the act to be successful. Austen states: “The uttering of the words is, indeed, usually a, or even the, leading incident in the performance of the act ... but it is far from being usually, even if it is ever, the sole thing necessary if the act is to be deemed to have been performed” (8). Neither of these limitations are the case in Arda (the name of the world that contains Middle-earth). In Arda, speech acts can effect entirely physical outcomes. To name one well-known example: Gandalf utters the word “friend” in Elvish, and the Doors of Durin open to him. These days this may seem less magical than it did a decade ago, given the advent of voice-recognition and voice assistants, but there are still not many people who would go up to a stone door that does not contain any electronics and expect it to open at the sound of the correct password. That Gandalf does expect this suggests that the world in which he lives operates differently from ours on a fundamental level.Show less
