The Lord Of The Rings As Metafiction

“I think I first read Lord of the Rings in fifth grade, and I’ve loved it ever since. It’s one of those books that you can get something new out of every time you revisit, and despite the fact that it inspired a whole host of less-than-stellar imitations and derivatives that dominated fantasy for decades it remains startlingly great; deeper and more complex than the stale stereotypes it gave birth to would suggest. Famously, Tolkien was a linguist and a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature who wrote fantasy as much for an excuse to create his own language as for the story. Even when not lecturing the reader on the differences between Quenya and Sindarin, Lord of the Rings retains a scholarly air to it. There’s a self-conscious archaism, a deliberate element of throwback. The books are written in the style of the ancient epics Tolkien loved, and that comes through very well. Especially in the degree of metafiction included in the text. The conceit that Tolkien retained (more or less) throughout his writings on Middle-Earth was that he was not an author, he was a translator. ‘Middle-Earth’ was not another planet or dimension, it was a lost epoch of our history that he was researching. In some ways, this was fairly perfunctory. Maps of Middle-Earth, for example, cannot be made to match maps of Europe by any real means. But Tolkien never gave up on this concept, and metatextual elements are woven throughout his novels to a degree I’m not sure people fully appreciate. At the end of both the movie and the book version of Return of the King, Frodo Baggins gives Sam Gamgee a book as a parting gift before he travels away into the Undying West. The book is, of course, Lord of the Rings, the story we’ve been watching, and Sam is told that it’s his responsibility to finish it. This isn’t an unusual trope, and it doesn’t play a huge role in the movies. What I had forgotten until my most recent rereading was the book doesn’t just end with a reference to this, it starts with a full material history of Lord of the Rings. Let me explain. The book Sam is given at the story’s end is fully entitled The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King (Together with Extracts from the Books of Lore Translated by Bilbo in Rivendell). It began as Bilbo’s private diary documenting his adventures in the east, was later expanded by Frodo into a general history of the War of the Rings and his own experiences, and was finally completed by Sam, who added many details about life in the Shire and the history of the hobbits. These volumes became known as the Red Book of the Westmarch, because it was preserved for many years by Sam’s descendants in their library after they became the hereditary Wardens of the Westmarch. It became the most important book of history the in Shire, but unfortunately, the original no longer exists. Many copies were made and can still be found in the Shire today, but most are heavily corrupted or incomplete. …”
Goldwag’s Journal on Civilization