The Cauldron of Story: : Mythic Bricolage and Sub-Creation and the Making of Middle-Earth in Tolkien’s Legendarium

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how J.R.R. Tolkien’s On Fairy-stories functions as a foundational poetics of Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Silmarillion and shapes the narrative’s mythopoetic structure, symbolism and moral vision. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of bricolage within deconstruction theory, the study argues that Tolkien’s theories of sub-creation, Secondary Belief and eucatastrophe are not merely theoretical ideas but active narrative principles realised within the text itself. Through close textual analysis of key elements such as Gandalf, Lothlórien and the One Ring, the thesis demonstrates how Tolkien transforms inherited Norse, Celtic and classical mythological traditions into a coherent Secondary World with its own ethical and symbolic framework. In doing so, Tolkien embodies the role of bricoleur, working on pre-existing mythic linguistic and cultural materials and recombining them into a new literary structure that simultaneously preserves traces of its origins while generating new meanings. Rather than reproducing mythic materials directly, Tolkien reinterprets and reshapes it to explore the themes of power, loss, hope, morality and transcendence. The study concludes that The Lord of the Rings trilogy represents the practical realisation of Tolkien’s fairy-story theory and that fantasy in Tolkien’s conception, functions as a serious literary mode capable of engaging with fundamental human concerns.