Exploring Imaginary Worlds: Essays on Media, Structure and Subcreation

In the course of my scholarly and academic research and exploration there have been several books that I consider revelatory and have helped shaped the course of my own research and areas of interest   

In the field of Tolkien studies I would say these three books are: Dr. Verlyn Flieger's Splintered Light: Logos and Light in Tolkien's World (1983 revised 2002) Thomas A. Shippey's The Road to Middle-earth (1982 revised 2012)  and Dr. Dimitra Fimi's Tolkien, Race and Cultural History - From Fairies to Hobbits (2008) (and very lucky me Dimitra became my PhD supervisor and we went on to co-edit A Secret Vice Tolkien on Language Invention published by HarperCollins in 2016)

In the broader field of fantastic literature studies I would elect Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy (2014). Michael T. Saler's As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (2012) and Professor Mark J.P. Wolf's Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Sub-Creation (2012).  

Since reading Professor Wolf's 2012 monograph I have been a great admirer of the work he has been doing to explore the world's behind fictional texts in their broadest sense (from narratives, films, television shows to video games and amusement parks). For me this opened up a whole next vista in looking at a text and added to my thinking in my primary Tolkien research and studies which tends to focus on how Tolkien used invented languages combined with myth-making to build his world of Middle-earth.    

Professor Wolf has also gone on to bring together scholars to explore the role of world-building.  This included the volume Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Sub-creation Studies Anthology published by Routledge in 2017 which included a brilliant chapter by Dr. Dimitra Fimi on The Past as an Imaginary World: The Case of Medievalism which compares and contrasts the medieval world-building of Thomas Chatterton, Umberto Eco and J.R.R. Tolkien.  I was very excited to review both the 2012 monograph and this volume for The Journal of Tolkien Research 

I first got to work with Professor Wolf when he asked Dimitra and I to contribute a chapter on 'Invented Languages' in the 2018 The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds.   It was around this time that I heard that he was planning another collected volume of exploring world-building in fictional texts and I jumped at the chance to be a part of this one.  

I decided to contribute to this new volume with a piece not on Tolkien or invented languages but around a story-world that I had grown up with and is a very important part of my life - the world ofDark Shadows.   Ever since I ran home from school to watch the last seasons of the original episodes on ABC TV in New York City and then re-watched the original 1245 episodes that started in 1966 (the same year Star Trek first appeared) again in re-runs, on MPI Videos and (to this day) on DVD's and Amazon Prime I have been fascinated by the gothic world of Dark Shadows.  I have been very lucky to have actually attended several Dark Shadows fan conventions in New York City and meet some of the original cast including Jonathan Frid (Barnabas Collins), Lara Parker (Angelique), David Selby (Quentin) and Kathryn Leigh Scott (Maggie Evans/Josette) who to this day is involved with many Dark Shadows projects including the recent excellent recordings of the original Dark Shadows gothic novels by Marilyn Ross (I am up to number 16 Barnabas, Quentin and The Mummy's Curse) - I have explored some of the Marilyn Ross novels on past blog posts here 

Sympathetic Vampires (long before Angel and Edward), werewolves, witches, time travel, Lovecraftian leviathans, parallel time - this trans-medial story-world has it all and I wanted my chapter in this volume to be a scholarly exploration using those ideas and thoughts that I learned from Professor Wolf's excellent work to explore the gothic world-building of Dark Shadows.  It was an incredible exploration and along the way I discovered the vast and varied soup of gothic, horror, and weird stories that Dan Curtis and his team or writers dipped into to create the narratives of this world.  

This new volume has just been published and has some brilliant chapters - here is the table of contents - hope you enjoy mine and many others explorations of the world's beyond the texts we read, watch, experience and play in - and I am looking forward to more exploration! 

Foreword

Scott Adams

 

Acknowledgments

　

Introduction

Mark J. P. Wolf

　

WORLDS OF WORDS

The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground by Ludvig Holberg: Subcreation and Social Criticism

Lars Konzack

‘A Little Bit of England Which I Have Myself Created’: Creating Barsetshire across Forms, Genres, Time, and Authors

Helen Conrad O’Briain

Mythopoetic Suspense, Eschatology and Misterium: World-Building Lessons from Dostoevsky

Lily Alexander

Building the Vorkosigan Universe

Edward James

　

AUDIOVISUAL WORLDS

Our World: World-Building in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town

Mark J. P. Wolf

"Suckled On Shadows": States of Decay in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Novels

Edward O’Hare

The Gothic World-Building of Dark Shadows

Andrew Higgins

Daventry and the Worlds of King’s Quest

Christopher Hanson

　

TRANSMEDIA WORLDS

The Softer Side of Dune: The Impact of Social Sciences on World-Building

Kara Kennedy

Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: Balance and Interconnectivity in the Fractured Worlds of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s The Death Gate Cycle

Jennifer Harwood-Smith

Welcome to the "Second-stage" Lynchverse – Twin Peaks: The Return and the Impossibility of Return Vs. Getting a Return

Matt Hills

The Fault in Our Star Trek: (Dis)Continuity Mapping, Textual Conservationism, and the Perils of Prequelization

William Proctor

　

Appendix: On Measuring and Comparing Imaginary Worlds

Mark J. P. Wolf

World-Building and The Mythic Origins of Ariadne

Greetings all - Dr. Wotan has just recently returned from The International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo Michigan and is now busy preparing for giving two Tolkien papers for the 2017 International Medieval Conference at Leeds in July!   Couple of items to share with you this time coming from the two areas of the life I lead!

First - just posted to the brilliant The Journal of Tolkien Research is my book review of two seminal works from Professor Mark J.P. Wolf of Concordia University Wisconsin which explores the worlds that exist and are waiting to be discovered in all forms of narratives.   As I say in this review Wolf's work here is revelatory and represents an exciting new contextual framework for exploring texts which I am using in all my research on Tolkien and other invented worlds.

These two books are:

And my review (with a special focus on the Tolkien elements in them) is here - http://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol4/iss1/10/

Secondly, I was very excited earlier this year to be asked to write an article for the 2017 Glyndebourne Festival  on 'The Mythic Origins of Ariadne' for the must see production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos which opens at Glyndebourne on the 25th of June and runs through the 27 July.    With kind permission of Glyndebourne I am posting this article which was really fun to do (an excuse to dig back into Homeric Greek!)

         ‘Sic Itur ad astra’- The Mythic Origins of Ariadne 

In constructing their Ariadne, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal drew from a rich ‘soup’ of Greek and Roman myths.  The word Ariadne itself is not a name but an epithet derived from two words in a Cretan dialect of Ancient Greek: αρι [ari] “most” and αδνος [adnos] “holy.”  This epithet originally signified a major goddess on the island of Crete during the Minoan period (c. 3650 to 1400 B.C.E.) who scholars have argued was associated with nature, snakes, orgiastic dancing and, most interestingly for the stories that would follow about her, labyrinths.  She may be signified on a tablet written in the syllabic script used by the Mycenaean Greeks known as Linear B (c. 1450 B.C.E.) in the votive offering ‘to all the gods, honey… to the mistress of the labyrinth, honey’.  This epithet would become personified in the later Greek and Roman character of Ariadne who would become bound up with the Cretan cycle of Greek and Roman myths.    

Ariadne as a personified character emerges early in Greek mythology being mentioned in both Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod’s Theogony.   She is associated with several key mythic stories; namely the slaying of the Minotaur and her abandonment of the island of Naxos.  She also is associated with several important characters in Greek mythology; especially the hero Theseus and the god of fertility, winemaking and madness Dionysus; also known as Bacchus in the Roman myths.   The trajectory of the Ariadne myth can be divided into two main strands: one her origins and life on Crete and two her fate after she leaves Crete.  

The sources for the first strand are fairly consistent over the many versions and variations of her story.     Ariadne is one of two daughters of King Minos of Crete and his wife Pasiphaë, daughter of the sun god Helios.   By offering an unfavourable sacrifice Minos offends the sea God Poseidon who in punishment causes Pasiphaë to fall in love with one of Minos’s prize bulls.  Pasiphaë enlists the help of the artificer Daedalus to build a wooden cow.   Pasiphaë insert’s herself into the cow so she can copulate with the bull.  The result of this union is the monstrous Minotaur, half man half bull who is kept by Minos in a labyrinth also constructed by Daedalus.  The hero Theseus is sent by his father Aegus, King of Athens to Crete to slay the Minotaur.   The princess Ariadne falls in love with Theseus, and gives him the golden thread which she had received from the god Hephaestos, explaining to Theseus that he should use it to find his way back out of the labyrinth after he kills the Minotaur who is by the way Ariadne’s step-brother.  Theseus in return promises to marry Ariadne.  When the Minotaur is slain they both sail to the island of Naxos, an island that is under the protection of the god Dionysus, where she is subsequently for various reasons abandoned by Theseus.   

When we come to the second strand of Ariadne’s story – her departure from Crete the story gets quite complicated.   In the many versions of what happened next to Ariadne there are two types of fate she endures for leaving Crete with the hero Theseus.  One type is just plain tragic while the other starts off tragic but results in a  ‘eucatastrophic’ ending; a term coined by the author J R.R. Tolkien to describe a sudden turn of events in a story that ensures the protagonist does not meet some terrible end    

The very tragic ending was perhaps the earliest version of the Ariadne story.  In book eleven of the Odyssey Homer states that Theseus ‘had no joy of Ariadne because she was slain by Artemis on the isle of Dia because of the witness of Dionysus’ (Odyssey Book 11, 320ff).  Dia is the Homeric name for the island of Naxos.  The Greek word for ‘witness’ μαρτυρίῃσιν has been taken by scholars to mean that Ariadne actually had been married to Dionysus before meeting and falling in love with Theseus on Crete.   When Dionysus saw both Ariadne and Theseus on Naxos, an island under his protection, he was enraged and called on the chaste goddess Artemis to punish this desecration of their marriage by slaying Ariadne.  Homer’s statement that Theseus ‘had no joy of Ariadne’ seems to indicate that Ariadne was slain before she consummated her love with Theseus.  Alternative versions of this strand paint an even bleaker picture for Ariadne.  In one version, there is no betrayal of Dionysus and Ariadne is slain by Artemis just to put her out of her misery of being abandoned by Theseus.  In another version Ariadne just hangs herself out of grief.   

Then there is the ‘eucatastrophic’ type of Ariadne’s fate which Strauss and Hofmannstahl clearly drew from.  This strand first appears in Hesiod’s account of the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods, the Theogony composed in c. 700 B.C.E. In this poem, Hesiod’s relates how ‘gold haired Dionysus made blonde-haired Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, his wife, and Zeus made her deathless and un-ageing for him’ (Theogony, l. 947).  In later versions of this strand of the myth the two ideas of Ariadne being abandoned by Theseus is combined with the idea of Dionysus finding and wedding Ariadne.   Hesiod’s idea of Ariadne being made ‘deathless’ and ‘unageing’ is further developed in later Greek and Roman versions of the story with the actual apotheosis of Ariadne   In the Greek epic poem the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, from the 3^rd century B.C.E., Ariadne is not only made an immortal goddess but she is given a wedding present by Dionysus; a jewelled crown which in some versions of this story Dionysus later hurls into the sky where it becomes the constellation Corona Borealis which still can be seen in the northern celestial hemisphere.   In the Roman poet Ovid’s poem on mythic transformations Metamorphoses (c. 1^st century C.E.) the different strands of Ariadne’s fate are woven together: she is abandoned by Theseus on Naxos, she finds comfort in the arms of the god Bacchus who marks their love by taking her crown and setting in heaven as a star which shone ‘as a gem which turned to gleaming fires’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses, l. 177). 

 

It is this Ariadne that we can see in the final scene of Strauss’s opera – the Cretan princess first abandoned by a hero and then rescued by a god who raises her to heaven and the stars - sic itur ad astra! 

This article first appeared in the 2017 edition of Glyndebourne's Festival Programme Book, and is reproduced with permission.  Check www.glyndebourne.com for ticket availability for Glyndebourne Festival 2017 performances of Ariadne auf Naxos.  


That's it for now - back to paper writing!