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Chapter II reconstructs the complex frame narrative underlying The Lord of the Rings, according to which Tolkien came into possession of an old book, which allegedly included stories from an ancient past of the world and was written by three authors of Hobbit race; the book was soon supplemented by a large bulk of miscellaneous material, and was later heavily edited, through a process whose last stage was Tolkien’s own compilation and translation. The second part investigates the theoretical implications of this meta-textual frame. Some of these are related to Tolkien’s mythopoetic ambition and urgency for narrative ‘realism’; others reflect important aspects of the literary fabric of the novel, including its Hobbito-centrism, as regards both focalisation and themes. More deeply, the meta-textual frame allows Tolkien to express and self-reflect on his own experience as a writer, who perceived his stories as something ‘other’ from him, ‘given’ or ‘discovered’, and free from the control of his rational mind.
How do stories change the way we see both ourselves and the world? That question is the starting-point of this accomplished new contribution to narrative theology. Dr Shamel addresses what he calls mythopoieic fantasy: the fictionalised myth-making occupying those twilight borderlands between contemporary secularity and a religious worldview. Exploring key writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, and J. K. Rowling, the author argues that the mythic turn of popular culture signals an ongoing hunger for something 'more': more dense, more present, more 'real'. For Dr Shamel, mythopoieic fantasy and Christian theology represent the same human impulse: a desire to participate in the divine. Despite the avowed secularity of many authors of fantasy literature, the creativity of their mythic fictions reveals something of the theological character of all human making. The stories we tell in order to encounter the world as meaningful, argues Dr Shamel, in fact emerge within a theological horizon.
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