The author's myth of J.R.R. Tolkien as a language-game-text

This article aims at identifying the author’s myth of J.R.R. Tolkien as a language-game-text. The goal of the study is to substantiate a language-game-related nature of Tolkien’s secondary world through the analysis of his epic novel “The Lord of the Rings” as an example of a language game. The scientific novelty of the work lies with examining Tolkien’s mythology through the lens of J. Huizinga’s philosophical ideas (“Homo ludens. Man playing”), L. Wittgenstein’s (“Philosophical studies”) and J. Derrida’s (“On grammatology. De la grammatologie”) conceptions. The secondary world of fantasy was first theoretically justified by Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy Tales” and called “The Magic Land”. A language-game-related nature of the work is revealed upon the creation of a secondary world as the basis for the implementation of the author’s linguistic experiments, the latter being analyzed as an example of Wittgenstein’s language games in this work. The main principle of the construction of the Magic Land is the concept of “Familienähnlichkeit” (family resemblance), thanks to which the chronotope of the work “The Lord of the Rings” can be interpreted as a synthesis of mythological and biblical images. A network of similarities is created on the basis of the interactions of a certain group of people with a common socio-cultural background and specific conditions of communication. Thus, the connection between linguistic constructions is not an example of logical sequences, but an example of a language game. The result of the research is the definition of linguistic techniques used by the author as the basis of a mythopoetic model of the world and the creation of artificial languages of Middle-earth in the context of a language game.