Histories of ME as literature
 

Hey all! Warning: plea for help ahead.

This coming fall, I'll be starting my undergraduate thesis, and I'm trying to get the basics of my research started before I pick my advisor. I'm an English major with History and French minors, and since the histories of Middlearth are, after all, fictional histories based upon language systems Tolkien created (and they're my favorite books ever :p), I'll probably be basing my thesis around them.

Here's the thing: where do I start? I can search JSTOR as much as I want, but until I have an idea of what I want to write about, those 10,000 article hits won't do me much good. Also, the project as I'm looking at it now is abstract, mindbogglingly huge, and terrifying, and therefore I don't even know what topic I'd take on (Middlearth as England? the gods and goddesses?). I'm sure some of you Downers have written serious academic discussions on Tolkien's works as literature: do you guys (or others) have any suggestions? Should I meta-analyze, or should I pretend that the histories are real facts, and that only Tolkien's approach to them is literature? What topics would be interesting from an academic approach? I'm grateful for any suggestions, no matter how stupid!

A good idea indeed! I'm pretty sure there aren't too many approaches like that around in the academic circles... albeit that might be the problem as well.

Pick an appropriate "French" theory of literature (Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray) and make it your own... and you'll get an A (or whatever is your highest mark) unless your professors are traditional thinkers. :D

But you might also really try to argue that the object of the story is real and the telling of it is fictious. I kinda like the idea. It's something worth pondering indeed.

Any conservative profs will turn you down with that in any case. :(

So just go back to the traditional theory and discuss the relation of the narrator to his story and characters or the laundry-list of the author during the time he wrote certain passages... You'll be applauded but will find no new ideas... :confused:

So stick to your original ideas and let's just hope you have a liberal / reasonable professor...

For a term paper ages ago I did feminist critique of Tolkien... (and yeah, it was lame, I know, but I was a freshman stuck in a higher lit class!)

Sometimes I still toy with the idea of a Marxist interpretation of the text though. Everything from the beginnings of the Sil down to the last bits of LOTR. But then, it's been done for too long... But hey, since you've had your history units, this may also prove interesting. Not parallelisms with the author's life (that'd be a very risky thing), but parallelisms with the situations of what you may consider his influences (like the Nordic myths) and perhaps his own time as well.

A great idea by Nogrod, by why not take it one step further? I too was an English major/History minor (or would that be miner?), but at the time I graduated one did not use Tolkien as material for a thesis (just as there are reasons one can't use him now in many schools, but for completely different reasons; in either case it all boils down to snobbery).

If one were to propose that Tolkien based his literature on actual history (as a bard or chronicler, let's say), would it be presumptuous to systematize his histories based on the theories of a great historian? It would be interesting to see how Tolkien's pseudo-history would compare to the conventions espoused by Burkhardt, Huizinga, Michelet or Pirenne (medieval and renaissance history being my specialization). Perhaps Arnold Toynbee with his ideas concerning the growth and disintegration of Civilizations may be appropriate in this case.

Just a thought that intrigued me.

All of your suggestions were awesome, and I'm kind of taking off on Nogrod's response, really. Tomorrow is when my topic proposal is due, so my advisor (the poor man, he's halfway through the Silm and is trying to keep all of the Noldor straight) gets to find out what I'm writing about. In a nutshell, my topic is as follows:

Tolkien's stories were created and invented, and were intended wholly to be fiction. Naturally they were influenced by other mythologies (Norse, Old English, and Finnish, for example). Yet to the characters of Lord of the Rings, the stories in the Silmarillion are histories. When Gimli recites his poem about Khazad-Dum, Sam is fascinated, and says, "I'd like to know more!" The summary Elrond gives at the council in Rivendell is received as sheer fact by those present. In a way, Tolkien has created an entirely new genre/category of fantasy/fiction, by creating mythologies that are also histories behind another standalone story.

At this point, I'm probably going to start looking at other novels/series/entities that are written as stories, then expanded upon into worlds with histories behind them. I'll end up delving into DnD at some point, I'm sure, as well as Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, Piers Anthony's Phaze/Proton books, and the immense collection of Weis/Hickman Dragonlance titles. (Of course, these had to have all been influenced by Tolkien in some way, soooo....)

I'd still love to hear suggestions from fellow English majors/history miners [sic]. ;)
And that Toynbee proposition sounds awesome, Morth. I'm sure at some point I'll have to look at the composition of primary sources and reliability.