Mern Þonke

I've been thinking about the differences between the fictional technique Tom Shippey calls "asterisk reality" and the fictional technique we might call historical conspiracy theory. The former refers to the philological technique of reconstructing aspects of cultures of the past based on surviving linguistic and narrative materials. In philology, comparison of, say Latin pater, Sanskrit pitar, and English father (along with a few dozen other languages) enables us to suggest that each of these languages is descended from a common ancestor, called Proto-Indo-European. Further, we can conlude that the word for father in Proto-Indo-European probably began with a p-. Further reconstruction allows us to suggest that the Proto-Indo-European word was probably something like *pater, with the asterisk indicating that the word has been reconstructed rather than attested from surviving evidence. And yet still further, we can take a word like English feed and trace it to the same Indo-European root. This gives us a window into the cultural consciousness of a lost civilisation. But, like its asterisked linguistic forms, this civilisation does not exist in reality. It is an asterisk reality, reconstructed from evidence surviving in cultures (and sometimes multiple cultures) from later periods in history. Shippey's argument in The Road to Middle Earth is that J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth is a sort of asterisk reality; Tolkien has taken surviving evidence to reconstruct languages and cultures unattested by any historical record but possible given the languages and cultures that are attested.

What I mean by historical conspiracy theory is the fashioning of fictional histories (generally ones in which there are secret societies conspiring to control historical events over the course of centuries) based on a piecing together of diverse scraps of historical evidence, mythological material, and linguistic ambiguities. A perfect example is Dan Brown's, The Da Vinci Code, which I have already discussed at some length. One obvious difference between the historical conspiracy theory of this type and Tolkien's asterisk reality Middle Earth is that the one claims to represent our immediately accessible history (i.e. it concerns events taking place in the present, near future, or near past in locations we can visit) and the other takes place in a time so distant that it can only be accessed through a single (fictional) surviving manuscript and in a location unrelatable to any we can visit. But I'm not sure that this really represents a necessary generic difference; it may just be a product of the individual works I've used as examples. But what other differences might there be? The historical conspiracy story generally purports to unveil a hidden and suppressed truth about history. The asterisk reality aims at the recovery of what has been lost.

Well, I'm not really sure where this thinking is leading, but hopefully I can return to it in a future entry.