Tolkien and Bakhtin: Chronotope, Existence, and Reality

Space (topos) as one of the main categories in modem literary criticism helps to discover and study unique aspects of the narrative such as functioning of archetypes, reflection of historical reality in the text, and different types of artistic consciousness (mythological and "realistic"). This work is a first study of time and space in Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings with the help of the chronotope concept proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin. A critic and author of an original literary concept and one of the most prominent representatives of the school of Russian formalism, Mikhail Bakhtin was also a contemporary of J. R. R. Tolkien who can be ranked among the most significant experimenters in the field of modem literature.
Using Bakhtin's classification of spatio-temporal relations in the novel, I was able to identify a type of chronotope in Tolkien's major narrative as one close to mythological and epical chronotopes. In terms of this postulate, I explored methods Tolkien used to create unique time and space of fantasy to make this experimental literary genre widely popular since the middle of the twentieth century onward.