Palacký University in Olomouc Philosophical

The Worlds

In the last part of my thesis I will focus on the worlds J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin have created for their characters to live in. Going with the theory of world building I will talk about the aspects of these worlds that are necessary for a fictional world to be believable, to seem real. For this chapter I chose Mark J.P. Wolf’s Building Imaginary Worlds as the main source of information on this topic, because I agreed with his subdivision the most.

1. Primary and Secondary Imagination

Wolf introduces the whole idea of building an imaginary world by presenting Coleridge’s idea of Primary and Secondary Imagination, with the Primary Imagination being the part of our mind which “allows us to coordinate and interpret our sensory data, turning them into perceptions with which we make sense of the world around us”, while the Secondary Imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates the concepts and elements of the world around us so as to recreate something new with them”. ⁴⁴ The conscious and deliberate use of Secondary Imagination can eventually result in the construction of an imaginary world, whether it is a city, a country or a whole planet. This idea was later developed by other authors such as George MacDonald and J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien extended the idea of Primary and Secondary Imagination to the worlds they refer to. In his concept the material intersubjective world we live in is referred to as the Primary World and the imaginary worlds created by authors as secondary worlds. The secondary worlds rely on the Primary World and exist within it. ⁴⁵

2. Subcreation

It was Tolkien as well who coined the term “subcreation”, with respect to his belief that God created man and made him a creator too, “but the creative activity by which a secondary world is made differs in both degree and kind from

⁴⁴ Mark J.P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (New York: Routledge, 2012), 21-22.
⁴⁵ Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, 23.
God’s ex nihilo (“from nothing”) creative power used to bring the Primary World into being”.⁴⁶ This makes an author who deliberately builds an imaginary world for bigger reasons than providing a background for his story a “subcreator”.
According to his theory subcreation involves new combinations of existing concepts known from the Primary World, which, in the process of building a secondary world, become the inventions that replace or reset Primary World defaults. More changes makes the secondary world more different from the Primary World. Wolf however points out that “it is not surprising, that secondary worlds will in many ways resemble the Primary World; not only because it is the source of material, but also because it is this familiarity that lets us relate to a secondary world, especially to its characters and their emotions”. ⁴⁷

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