Quote:
Originally Posted by David Johnston2
But Tolkien didn't go with that secondary universe junk. Really nobody did back then.
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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But he also used the fictional device of saying, "This story is taken from a historical document left by participants in its events."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