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Old 01-14-2013, 09:54 AM   #79
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming

Quote:
Originally Posted by David Johnston2 View Post
But Tolkien didn't go with that secondary universe junk. Really nobody did back then.
Tolkien explicitly used the phrase "Secondary World" in his essay "On Fairy Stories." But he didn't mean an alternate history or a parallel world or even an alternate universe such as Narnia. He meant a fictional world that existed in the imagination of a human being. That's why it was "secondary" and not "parallel."

But he also used the fictional device of saying, "This story is taken from a historical document left by participants in its events." This was a common framing device in fiction of many sorts; Mary Shelley used it in Frankenstein, for example, and epistolary novels such as Les liaisons dangéreuses were effectively doing the same thing. And a lot of fantasy, in the days when archaeological knowledge was less advanced, used the device of setting a story in the remote past to suspend disbelief in magic and monsters.

Bill Stoddard
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