Vol. VII · 2017

FASTITOCALON Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern Vol. VII · 2017 SUBCREATION: WORLD-BUILDING IN THE FANTASTIC Issue 1 & 2 Thomas Honegger and Fanfan Chen Editors’ in Chief Preface 1 Natalia González de la Llana, David Graziano and Patrick Schmitz Introduction 3 ARTICLES Anne Besson (Arras, France) No limits? Multiverses, alternate universes and the media franchises 5 Bettina Soller (Hanover, Germany) Fanfiction as Tertiary World-Building 13 Anahit Behrooz (Edinburgh, Scotland) Cartographic Constructions: Literary Geography and Mapping in J.R.R. Tolkienʼs The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings 27 Sophie Hintersdorf and Evelyn Koch (Jena and Bayreuth, Germany) “Up is Down and Ugly is Beautifulˮ: Zamonia as Deconstructed World-Building 43 Robin Anne Reid (College Station, USA) The Queer Phenomenology of Ann Leckieʼs World-Building in the Imperial Radch Series 61 Christopher Jones (Manchester, United Kongdom) World-Building as Narrative in Scott Westerfeldʼs Leviathan 79 Thomas Honegger and Allan Turner (Jena, Germany) Get your names right: Onomastics, Onomaturgy and Literary World-Building 93 Stephanie Dreier (Vancouver, Canada) Intertextuality as a Fantastic Effect: Locating the Supernatural 109 Dennis Wilson Wise (Murfreesboro, USA) Unraveling The Hobbitʼs Strange Publication History: A Look at Possible Worlds, Modality, and Accessibility Relations 121 ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND EDITORS 137 Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier FASTITOCALON S TUDIES IN F ANTASTICISM A NCIENT TO M ODERN www.fastitocalon.kolbitar.de Editors in Chief Prof. Dr. Thomas Honegger, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena · Anglistische Mediä- vistik / English Medieval Studies, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Ernst- Abbe-Platz 8, D-07743 Jena · E-Mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Fanfan Chen, National Dong Hwa University · Dept. of English and Doc- toral Program of Comparative Literature, 97443 Shou Feng, Hwa Lian County, Taiwan · E-Mail: [email protected] / [email protected] Publisher WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Bergstraße 27, D-54295 Trier · www.wvttrier.de Tel.: 004965141503, Fax: 004965141504, E-Mail: [email protected] ISSN: 1869-960X Cover Image: Anke Eissmann · Cover Design: Brigitta Disseldorf Board of Advisors Dieter Bachmann (University of Zurich) Roger Bozzetto (Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I) Ying-Hsiung Chou (Chung Hua University / National Chiao Tung University) Denis Mellier (Université de Poitiers) Claude Murcia (Université Paris Diderot, Paris 7) Marek Oziewicz (University of Minnesota) Helmut Pesch (independent scholar) Dieter Petzold (Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nürnberg) Elmar Schenkel (University of Leipzig) Allan Turner (Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena) Dirk Vanderbeke (Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena) Phillipe Walter (Université de Stendhal, Grenoble III) Blind Peer-Review Guidelines All articles (and, previously, all abstracts) have been subject to anonymous, external review. All required a positive judgment from the editors before being sent to reviewers, and had to receive at least one positive evaluation from an external referee to qualify for publication. In the case of articles by individuals associated with the journal in any way, each article had to receive at least two positive evaluations from two different outside reviewers. All identifying information was removed from the articles before they were sent to the reviewers, and all reviewer comments were likewise anonymously conveyed to the authors of the articles. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier Dennis Wilson Wise Unraveling The Hobbit’s Strange Publication History: A Look at Possible Worlds, Modality, and Accessibility Relations One enduring oddity of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is that the version of the story that made it famous, the 1937 first edition, has become a footnote to the more famous second edition. The latter edition, of course, substantially modifies the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter where Bilbo wagers his life in a riddle contest with Gollum. While the first edition has Gollum staking his ‘birthday present,’ a ring of invisibility, against Bilbo’s life, Tolkien realized as he wrote The Lord of the Rings that Gollum would never have willingly given up that ring. As a result, Tolkien re-wrote the chapter as an experiment, and a happy miscommunication with his publisher resulted in that new chapter transforming The Hobbit into a second edition. This new edition quickly achieved canonical status in Tolkien’s writings, and The Fellowship of the Ring clever- ly explains the ‘erroneous’ 1937 text as a ring-motivated moment of dishonesty by Bilbo. The new edition, additionally, resulted in several interpretative changes. In a classic statement on the subject, Bonniejean Christensen notes that Gollum converts “from a simply lost creature to a totally depraved one” (26). Still, it seems ironic that the first admirers of The Hobbit praised a version of events that would eventually become ‘false’—and Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond make more than clear the overwhelmingly positive reception of the 1937 text. As they say, most “reviews of The Hobbit on its first publication welcomed it enthusiastically, not a few even immediate- ly to the ranks of classic children’s books” (Scull and Hammond, 398). Yet today critics and readers unanimously prefer the later edition over the earlier one. For my part, I tend to favor the second edition as well. Still, motivated by The Hob- bit’s unusual publishing history, I would like to offer one major caveat. Let me intro- duce the caveat with a question: what should be done with the fictional world created by the 1937 text? Bilbo admits in Fellowship that his earlier memoirs were false, but that does not quite seem to exhaust the issue. After all, the 1937 text was construed by its readers as ‘true’ for seventeen years before a new generation of readers began to construe it as ‘false.’ It seems inappropriate to suggest that a fictional world, which is nothing but a mental construction by its readers, simply disappears in light of seriously delinquent new information, especially since the first edition textual world led di- rectly to the more expansive The Lord of the Rings textual world. I would like to suggest in this case that the fictional world created by the first edition enjoys an ontologi- cal status on a par with the world created by the later edition. That we tend to privilege the later edition is a point of preference and history, not of logic or modality. As such, 122 Dennis Wilson Wise the first edition world deserves a reading and an interpretation in its own right. This essay then is an attempt to make my caveat plausible—and my proposed solution has, I hope, some intriguing implications for the processes of world-creation. I will begin by looking at the publication history of The Hobbit in more depth, where I pinpoint three main ‘fictional worlds’ created by that book. These worlds each carry their own sets of qualities and attributes, all of which affect interpretation. Following that, I turn to possible-worlds semantics, a relatively recent outgrowth of narrative the- ory underemployed within the literature on world-construction. My main contention, following narrative theorist Marie-Laure Ryan, will be that readers construct a new fictional world every time they encounter a text. Following Ryan’s typology of textual semantics and her concept of accessibility relations, we can begin to differentiate between the logical and modal differences between the three Hobbit worlds. While the textual history of The Hobbit is already well-known within the secondary literature, highlighting how this textual history affects world-construction can nonetheless shed some light, not only on how readers encounter fictional worlds, but also on how seem- ingly slight textual changes can produce wide-ranging differences in the construction of those worlds. The Three Stages of The Hobbit Although clearly a classic of children’s literature, The Hobbit is a book that presents a conundrum for critics and scholars. While some, such as William H. Green, treat the book as a stand-alone text (as Tolkien largely intended it to be), most nonetheless see it as a prelude or prequel to The Lord of the Rings. C. S. Lewis set the stage for this sort of view. Despite calling The Hobbit a ‘classic’ upon first publication, he later— following publication of The Fellowship of the Ring—called it “merely a fragment torn from the author’s huge myth and adapted for children; inevitably losing something by the adaptation” (Lewis, 84). Brian Rosebury, for example, bluntly calls The Hobbit a “transitional work” without “emotional or moral depth” (114), and Anne Petty, while kinder, similarly remarks that any “serious study of the fictive world of Tolkien must cast a discerning eye upon the original tale of the hobbits as an interesting and neces- sary prelude to the grander work of LOTR” (17). The irony of the prelude position, of course, is that there would never have been a Lord of the Rings without The Hobbit. Even so, when critics do tackle the earlier book, they invariably do so from a post- 1954 lens—meaning that they read The Hobbit through the interpretative guide pro- vided Bilbo’s admissions to Gandalf. Needless to say, such an interpretation could hardly have been available to the book’s first readers. Among the first to take the first edition seriously as a work in its own right is Thomas Honegger. Tellingly, though, not even Honegger looks at The Hobbit from a pre-1954 perspective. Instead, he suggests that the post-Lord of the Rings explanation of Bilbo’s diary actually offers a stronger interpretation of events as described in the first edition. Fastitocalon VII,1&2 · 2017 Unraveling The Hobbit’s Strange Publication History 123 To my knowledge, the only critic to attempt emancipating himself from the post-Lord perspective is Cory Olsen. In fact, he helpfully divides the publishing history of The Hobbit into three stages (see Olsen, 9): (1) The Solo Stage (1937-1951)—the first edition text.

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