J. R. R. TOLKIEN’S MYTHICAL “LEAF BY NIGGLE” AS CHRISTIAN PARABLE OF EUCATASTROPHE

Abstract

An intriguing aspect of J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium is its implicit and often times explicit Catholic intertextuality as Tolkien’s entire worldview was molded by his Catholic faith. The goal of this paper is to present a novel approach in finding the ‘holy’ in his works. This manuscript sheds light on how to understand the intertextual tracings among the different ‘voices’ within Tolkien’s work presenting it in the light of the musicality of intertextuality.

The primary focus of this research is the examination of certain musical terms and their applicability to the domain of literary studies. The purpose of this research is to broaden the current knowledge about the complex dialogic relationships within the polyphonic system and the rhizomatic character of intertextuality, Tolkienian self-intertextuality and the multi-core nature of the Catholic influence on the work of the writer. And finally, by dint of different theories on the musicality of intertextuality, this paper aims at the description of an effective solution for the discovery of the Christian and authorial ‘voices’ present in the target text and at the expansion of hypertextuality where the hypotext isn’t a single textual source but Catholicism in toto taken as a multi-stranded spacious source.

Keywords: intertextuality, hypotext, polyphony, counterpoint, contrafactum, purgatorial, eucatastrophe