Tolkien’s use of Metafiction

Brljak, Vladimir. “The Books of Lost Tales: Tolkien as Metafictionist.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010). An excellent, fascinating study of Tolkien’s use of metafictionist devices (his “books within books”—for example, the so-called Red Book of Westmarch upon which the LOTR is supposed to be based). Not only examines how Tolkien uses metafictionism, but also its importance in creating distance between the reader and the text and thus eliciting the kind of desire for the “untold stories” discussed in his letters and hinted at in his Beowulf essay. Highly recommended. (For a related discussion, see also Flieger, “Do the Atlantis story.”)