Upon commencing my journey to create a corpus serviceable for the purpose of literary, yet empirical, investigation, I decided to look into a topic that seemed to be just mysterious to the writers as it seemed to the readers. By doing this I hoped to be able to discover facts or ideas about the text that certain authors had not thought to even include, ones possibly mired in their subconscious. To this end I immediately thought of J.R.R Tolkien, who admitted to having complex mythology and history created, feasibly that is what one does in the trenches of France during WWI, before even pen to paper. He wrote about a fictional world with fictional characters, so rich and deep that those who find it’s pages, often find themselves engrossed in its totality. How then, a scholar might ask, could this world relate or be derived from his experiences? The metaphors are rampart throughout the novel, Tolkien even stating; ““My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war”. What then is the relationship between the God of Middle Earth, Eru Illuvatar, and Tolkien’s Catholicism?
In order to offer a point of reference, I decided to look into the religious metaphors of a contemporary, compatriot, and friend to Tolkien, C.S. Lewis. Lewis was far more blunt regarding his faith, and as a generally known Apologist, the only people unable to understand the references to Christianity in his books The Chronicles of Narnia, were their intended readers, children. How though does Lewis display this character, Aslan, and how is his representation of a God different from Tolkien’s?
The next step was to find a set of texts I thought encompassed their respective writings on a whole. Upon online investigation I found some PDF’s of certain texts from both authors, being that they seemed to be out of copyright in Canada. I also received help for a large chunk of text from a former student of professor Faull’s. Upon completion and satisfaction with what I had gathered, I found myself with 5 bodies from each author. They are as follows:
Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, a series of letters to various recipients, and Unfinished Tales: The Lost Lore of Middle Earth.
Lewis: The Space Trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, Letters to Malcolm, and a series of unpublished letters.
In selecting these texts, I hoped to embody the works of each author not only in their famous fiction, but also in their less well known texts.
The difficult section of my task is the cleaning of corpus, as I am dealing with a huge amount of writing. Luckily enough for me, the copy of LOTR I received has already been cleaned and is ready to use, but that is merely the tip of the iceberg. The Chronicles of Narnia is of similar length and will need to be parsed in order to be readied for analysis. There is much work to be done in this department.
Finally, my I will discuss my search parameters for the actual analysis. Firstly, I will simply search for religious terms and adjectives used to describe said terms. Next I will repeat, but instead searching for the fictional characters that represent higher powers within the novels. I hope that this will provide some good insight into each authors representations of their beliefs.
