Abstract:
Tsvetan Todorov in his monograph, “Introduction à la littérature fantastique”, places fantastic on the line going from miraculous to unusual; from Todorov’s point of view, we can find fantastic as is on the borderline “dividing fantastic-unusual from fantastic-miraculous”, and it is “fully consistent with the nature of fantastic as a boundary between two neighboring genres”. The borderline between fantastic and miraculous is one of the crucial problems in studying fantastic literature. As Christopher Tolkien supposed, this theme had been actively discussed with C. Lewis in 1936, and Tolkien was evidently working on “The Lost Road” around this time. Later, in one of his letters, Tolkien wrote about “Atlantis complex”: “the terrible recurrent dream <…> of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. <…> I don’t think I have had it since I wrote the ‘Downfall of Númenor’ as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age”. C.S. Lewis in his unfinished work “The Dark Tower” (1938) calls memory a way to travel in the past. Both clairvoyance and memory are thought to be real methods to learn about the past in A.P. Sinnett’s introduction to Scott-Elliot’s “The Story of Atlantis” which was not intended by its author to be a fantastic book. What pertains to supernatural in the relevant literature becomes a fantastic method in Tolkien’s and Lewis’ early works.
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