56-447: The Mythopoeic Society ( MythSoc ) is a non-profit organization devoted to the study of mythopoeic literature, particularly the works of J. R. R. Tolkien , Charles Williams , and C. S. Lewis . These men were all members of The Inklings , an informal group of writers who met weekly in Lewis' rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford , from the early 1930s until late 1949. The Mythopoeic Society
112-662: A loophole in the United States Constitution at his citizenship ceremony. Self-reference occasionally occurs in the media when it is required to write about itself, for example the BBC reporting on job cuts at the BBC. Notable encyclopedias may be required to feature articles about themselves, such as Misplaced Pages's article on Misplaced Pages . Fumblerules are a list of rules of good grammar and writing, demonstrated through sentences that violate those very rules, such as "Avoid cliches like
168-566: A "work of epic mythopoeia." In fact, Greydanus argues that Star Wars is the primary example of American mythopoeia: "The Force, the Jedi knights, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan, Princess Leia, Yoda, lightsabers, and the Death Star hold a place in the collective imagination of countless Americans that can only be described as mythic. In my review of A New Hope I called Star Wars 'the quintessential American mythology', an American take on King Arthur, Tolkien, and
224-520: A compiler to compile itself is known as bootstrapping . Self-modifying code is possible to write (programs which operate on themselves), both with assembler and with functional languages such as Lisp , but is generally discouraged in real-world programming. Computing hardware makes fundamental use of self-reference in flip-flops , the basic units of digital memory, which convert potentially paradoxical logical self-relations into memory by expanding their terms over time. Thinking in terms of self-reference
280-478: A few approach the dense self-referentiality and purpose of mythopoesis. Mythopoeic authors include William Blake , H. P. Lovecraft , Lord Dunsany , J. R. R. Tolkien , C. S. Lewis , Mervyn Peake , and Robert E. Howard . Tolkien used the word as the title of one of his poems , written in 1931 and published in Tree and Leaf . Works of mythopoeia are often categorized as fantasy or science fiction but fill
336-576: A long tradition of mathematical paradoxes such as Russell's paradox and Berry's paradox , and ultimately to classical philosophical paradoxes. In game theory , undefined behaviors can occur where two players must model each other's mental states and behaviors, leading to infinite regress. In computer programming , self-reference occurs in reflection , where a program can read or modify its own instructions like any other data. Numerous programming languages support reflection to some extent with varying degrees of expressiveness. Additionally, self-reference
392-463: A long-standing curse wherein a novelist dies before completing any given work. Nova ends mid-sentence, thus lending credence to the curse and the realization that the novelist is the author of the story; likewise, throughout Dhalgren , Delany has a protagonist simply named The Kid (or Kidd, in some sections), whose life and work are mirror images of themselves and of the novel itself. In the sci-fi spoof film Spaceballs , Director Mel Brooks includes
448-499: A man's face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such "fantasy," as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator. Tolkien scholars have likened his views on the creation of myth to the Christian concept of Logos or "The Word", which
504-490: A niche for mythology in the modern world, according to Joseph Campbell , a famous student of world mythology. Campbell spoke of a Nietzschean world which has today outlived much of the mythology of the past. He claimed that new myths must be created, but he believed that present culture is changing too rapidly for society to be completely described by any such mythological framework until a later age. The philosopher Phillip Stambovsky argues that mythopoeia provides relief from
560-454: A race called the "Lizards". It is essentially a postmodern pastiche, drawing from Anastasio's interest in musicals or rock operas as much as from reading philosophy and fiction. The creation of the myth is considered by many fans the thesis statement of the group, musically and philosophically, as Gamehendge's book of lost secrets (called the "Helping Friendly Book") is summarized as an encouragement to improvisation in any part of life: "the trick
616-682: A scene wherein the evil characters are viewing a VHS copy of their own story, which shows them watching themselves "watching themselves", ad infinitum. Perhaps the earliest example is in Homer 's Iliad , where Helen of Troy laments: "for generations still unborn/we will live in song" (appearing in the song itself). Self-reference in art is closely related to the concepts of breaking the fourth wall and meta-reference , which often involve self-reference. The short stories of Jorge Luis Borges play with self-reference and related paradoxes in many ways. Samuel Beckett 's Krapp's Last Tape consists entirely of
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#1732876198090672-475: A sense of its own independent worth." In her view, Tolkien, who had read the Kalevala , "envisioned himself" doing exactly the same thing, except that the mythology would be entirely fictive . Lönnrot had travelled the backwoods of Finland for 20 years, collecting stories and songs "from unlettered peasants". Tolkien meant to invent both the collectors and the storytellers , in his case Elves: "he would be at once
728-504: A winter's night a traveler , many stories by Nikolai Gogol , Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth , Luigi Pirandello 's Six Characters in Search of an Author , Federico Fellini 's 8½ and Bryan Forbes 's The L-Shaped Room . Speculative fiction writer Samuel R. Delany makes use of this in his novels Nova and Dhalgren . In the former, Katin (a space-faring novelist) is wary of
784-425: Is a subgenre of speculative fiction , and a theme in modern literature and film , where an artificial or fictionalized mythology is created by the writer of prose , poetry , or other literary forms. The concept was widely popularised by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s, although it long preexisted him. The authors in this genre integrate traditional mythological themes and archetypes into fiction. Mythopoeia
840-472: Is a concept that involves referring to oneself or one's own attributes, characteristics, or actions. It can occur in language , logic , mathematics , philosophy , and other fields. In natural or formal languages , self-reference occurs when a sentence , idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding . In philosophy, self-reference also refers to
896-456: Is a disease of the mind. It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology. But Language cannot, all the same, be dismissed. The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it
952-400: Is a pervasive part of programmer culture, with many programs and acronyms named self-referentially as a form of humor, such as GNU ('GNU's not Unix') and PINE ('Pine is not Elm'). The GNU Hurd is named for a pair of mutually self-referential acronyms. Tupper's self-referential formula is a mathematical curiosity which plots an image of its own formula. The biology of self-replication
1008-407: Is a sesquipedalian word), but can also apply to other parts of speech, such as TLA , as a three-letter abbreviation for " three-letter abbreviation ". A sentence which inventories its own letters and punctuation marks is called an autogram . There is a special case of meta-sentence in which the content of the sentence in the metalanguage and the content of the sentence in the object language are
1064-426: Is also the act of creating a mythology. The term mythopoeia comes from Hellenistic Greek muthopoiía ( μυθοποιία ), meaning 'myth-making'; an alternative is mythopoesis ( μυθοποίησις ) of similar meaning. The definition of mythopoeia as "a creating of myth" is first recorded from 1846. In early use, it meant the making of myths in ancient times. While many literary works carry mythic themes , only
1120-498: Is given to scholarly books on other specific authors in the Inklings tradition, or to more general works on the genres of myth and fantasy. For the scholarship awards, books first published during the previous three years are eligible, including finalists for previous years. Mythopoeia Mythopoeia ( Ancient Greek : μυθοποιία , romanized : muthopoiía , lit. 'myth-making'), or mythopoesis ,
1176-565: Is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and
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#17328761980901232-652: Is linked by Dunsany's invented pantheon of deities who dwell in Pegāna . It was followed by Time and the Gods , by some stories in The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories , and by Tales of Three Hemispheres . In 1919, Dunsany told an American interviewer, "In The Gods of Pegana I tried to account for the ocean and the moon. I don't know whether anyone else has ever tried that before." Dunsany's work influenced J. R. R. Tolkien's later writings. T. S. Eliot 's The Waste Land (1922)
1288-495: Is said to act as both "the [...] language of nature" spoken into being by God, and "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM". Verlyn Flieger wrote that Elias Lönnrot intentionally created the Kalevala as a mythology for Finland, giving it "a world of magic and mystery, a heroic age of story that may never have existed in precisely the form he gave it, but nevertheless fired Finland with
1344-420: Is seen in recursion (related to the mathematical recurrence relation ) in functional programming , where a code structure refers back to itself during computation. 'Taming' self-reference from potentially paradoxical concepts into well-behaved recursions has been one of the great successes of computer science , and is now used routinely in, for example, writing compilers using the 'meta-language' ML . Using
1400-634: Is self-referential, as embodied by DNA and RNA replication mechanisms. Models of self-replication are found in Conway's Game of Life and have inspired engineering systems such as the self-replicating 3D printer RepRap . Self-reference occurs in literature and film when an author refers to his or her own work in the context of the work itself. Examples include Miguel de Cervantes ' Don Quixote , Shakespeare 's A Midsummer Night's Dream , The Tempest and Twelfth Night , Denis Diderot 's Jacques le fataliste et son maître , Italo Calvino 's If on
1456-424: Is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened." Subsequently, his Chronicles of Narnia is regarded as mythopoeia, with storylines referencing that Christian mythology, namely the narrative of a great king who is sacrificed to save his people and is resurrected. Lewis's mythopoeic intent is often confused with allegory , where
1512-434: Is the key concept in proving limitations of many systems. Gödel's theorem uses it to show that no formal consistent system of mathematics can ever contain all possible mathematical truths, because it cannot prove some truths about its own structure. The halting problem equivalent, in computation theory, shows that there is always some task that a computer cannot perform, namely reasoning about itself. These proofs relate to
1568-646: The Arthurian mythology, adventure and action movies with the " epic world " mythologies of founding societies, and many romance movies where the hero is allegorically playing the role of a knight, with "quest" mythologies like Sir Gawain and the Quest for the Holy Grail . Filmmaker George Lucas speaks of the cinematic storyline of Star Wars as an example of modern myth-making. In 1999 he told Bill Moyers , "With Star Wars I consciously set about to re-create myths and
1624-573: The Droste effect . Various creation myths invoke self-reference to solve the problem of what created the creator. For example, the Egyptian creation myth has a god swallowing his own semen to create himself. The Ouroboros is a mythical dragon which eats itself. The Quran includes numerous instances of self-referentiality. The surrealist painter René Magritte is famous for his self-referential works. His painting The Treachery of Images , includes
1680-535: The University of California , called film another "mythmaking" art, stating: "Film and literature matter as much as they do because they are versions of mythmaking." In his view, film is a perfect vehicle for mythmaking: "FILM...strives toward the fulfillment of its own projected reality in an ideally associative, personal world." In a broad analysis, McConnell associates the American western movies and romance movies with
1736-498: The omnipotence paradox of asking if it was possible for a being to exist so powerful that it could create a stone that it could not lift. The Epimenides paradox , 'All Cretans are liars' when uttered by an ancient Greek Cretan was one of the first recorded versions. Contemporary philosophy sometimes employs the same technique to demonstrate that a supposed concept is meaningless or ill-defined. In mathematics and computability theory , self-reference (also known as impredicativity )
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1792-453: The psyche or soul from whence Man derives his "subcreative" capacity. Tolkien emphasizes the importance of language in the act of channeling "subcreation", speaking of the human linguistic faculty in general as well as the specifics of the language used in a given tradition, particularly in the form of story and song: Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become diseased. You might as well say that thinking
1848-744: The Mythopoeic Society has bestowed a series of annual awards to outstanding works. In 1991 the literary award was broken into two categories: the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature . The Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies is given to books on J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and/or Charles Williams that make significant contributions to Inklings scholarship. The Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies
1904-585: The Superheroes and the Mythos of the Saints , Thomas Roberts observes that: To the student of myth, the mythos of the comics superheroes is of unique interest." "Why do human beings want myths and how do they make them? Some of the answers to those questions can be found only sixty years back. Where did Superman and the other superheroes come from? In his Encyclopedia of the Superheroes, Jeff Rovin correctly observes, "In
1960-600: The United States. Mythcon XX was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1989. Mythcon XXIII was held at Keble College, Oxford , England, in 1992 as part of The J. R. R. Tolkien Centenary Conference , co-sponsored with The Tolkien Society . Likewise, Mythcon XXXVI in 2005 was held at Aston University , Birmingham, England, combined with Tolkien 2005 - 50 Years of The Lord of the Rings , sponsored by The Tolkien Society. Since 1971
2016-578: The ability of a subject to speak of or refer to itself, that is, to have the kind of thought expressed by the first person nominative singular pronoun "I" in English. Self-reference is studied and has applications in mathematics, philosophy, computer programming , second-order cybernetics , and linguistics , as well as in humor . Self-referential statements are sometimes paradoxical , and can also be considered recursive . In classical philosophy , paradoxes were created by self-referential concepts such as
2072-525: The characters and world of Narnia would stand in direct equivalence with concepts and events from Christian theology and history, but Lewis repeatedly emphasized that an allegorical reading misses the point (the mythopoeia) of the Narnia stories. He shares this skepticism toward allegory with Tolkien, who disliked "conscious and intentional" allegory as it stood in opposition the broad and "inevitable" allegory of themes like "Fall" and "Mortality". In The Mythos of
2128-625: The classic mythological motifs." McConnell writes that "it has passed, quicker than anyone could have imagined, from the status of film to that of legitimate and deeply embedded popular mythology." John Lyden, the Professor and Chair of the Religion Department at Dana College , argues that Star Wars does indeed reproduce religious and mythical themes; specifically, he argues that the work is apocalyptic in concept and scope. Steven D. Greydanus of The Decent Film Guide agrees, calling Star Wars
2184-497: The creative human author as "the little maker" wielding his "own small golden sceptre" and ruling his " subcreation " (understood as a creation of Man within God 's primary creation ). Tolkien's wider legendarium includes not only origin myths , creation myths , and an epic poetry cycle, but also fictive linguistics , geology and geography . He more succinctly explores the function of such myth-making, "subcreation" and " Faery " in
2240-615: The cultural criteria of myth. A work of art, or artifice, cannot be said to be the narrative of a culture's sacred tradition...[it is] at most, artificial myth." William Blake set out his mythology in his "prophetic works" such as Vala, or The Four Zoas . These name several original gods, such as Urizen , Orc , Los , Albion , Rintrah , Ahania and Enitharmon . Later in the 19th century, stories by George MacDonald and H. Rider Haggard created fictional worlds; C. S. Lewis praised both for their "mythopoeic" gifts. Lord Dunsany 's 1905 book of short stories, The Gods of Pegana ,
2296-634: The earliest days, we called them 'gods'. The 1938-debuting Superman , for example, sent from the "heavens" by his father to save humanity, is a messiah-type of character in the Biblical tradition. Furthermore, along with the rest of DC Comic 's Justice League of America , Superman watches over humanity from the Watchtower in the skies; just as the Greek gods do from Mount Olympus . Frank McConnell, author of Storytelling and Mythmaking and professor of English at
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2352-436: The existential dread that comes with a rational world, and that it can serve as a way to link different cultures and societies. Mythopoeia is sometimes called artificial mythology , which emphasizes that it did not evolve naturally and is an artifice comparable with artificial language , and therefore should not be taken seriously as mythology. For example, the noted folklorist Alan Dundes argued that "any novel cannot meet
2408-583: The legends of the Teutonic past nearly out of recognition into a new monument to the Romantic project. While ostensibly known for improvised jamming, the rock group Phish first cemented as a group while producing leading member Trey Anastasio 's senior project in college, called The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday . The song cycle features narration of major events in a mythical land called Gamehendge , containing types of imaginary creatures and primarily populated by
2464-585: The periodicals, the society formed The Mythopoeic Press to publish material by and about writers of mythopoeic and fantastic literature, especially focused on The Inklings. Works published include out-of-print materials, collections of short articles and essays, and scholarly items. The society sponsors local discussion groups throughout the United States and the Annual Mythopoeic Conference , also known as Mythcon , generally held on college or university campuses in various locations, primarily within
2520-474: The plague" and "Don't use no double negatives". The term was coined in a published list of such rules by William Safire . Circular definition is a type of self-reference in which the definition of a term or concept includes the term or concept itself, either explicitly or implicitly. Circular definitions are considered fallacious because they only define a term in terms of itself. This type of self-reference may be useful in argumentation , but can result in
2576-469: The protagonist listening to and making recordings of himself, mostly about other recordings. During the 1990s and 2000s filmic self-reference was a popular part of the rubber reality movement, notably in Charlie Kaufman 's films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation , the latter pushing the concept arguably to its breaking point as it attempts to portray its own creation, in a dramatized version of
2632-500: The same. Such a sentence is referring to itself. However some meta-sentences of this type can lead to paradoxes. "This is a sentence." can be considered to be a self-referential meta-sentence which is obviously true. However "This sentence is false" is a meta-sentence which leads to a self-referential paradox . Such sentences can lead to problems, for example, in law, where statements bringing laws into existence can contradict one another or themselves. Kurt Gödel claimed to have found such
2688-571: The samurai/wuxia epics of the East ;..." Roger Ebert has observed of Star Wars that "It is not by accident that George Lucas worked with Joseph Campbell, an expert on the world's basic myths, in fashioning a screenplay that owes much to man's oldest stories." The "mythical" aspects of the Star Wars franchise have been challenged by other film critics. Regarding claims by Lucas himself, Steven Hart observes that Lucas didn't mention Joseph Campbell at
2744-522: The short story Leaf by Niggle (1945) , the novella Smith of Wootton Major (1967), and the essays Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936) and On Fairy-Stories (1939). Written in 1939 for presentation by Tolkien at the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St Andrews and published in print in 1947, On Fairy-Stories explains "Faery" as both a fictitious realm and an archetypal plane in
2800-449: The singer and the compiler, the performer and the audience." At the time that Tolkien debated the usefulness of myth and mythopoeia with C. S. Lewis in 1931, Lewis was a theist and liked but was skeptical of mythology , taking the position that myths were "lies and therefore worthless, even though 'breathed through silver ' ". However Lewis later began to speak of Christianity as the one "true myth". Lewis wrote, "The story of Christ
2856-409: The still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. We may put a deadly green upon
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#17328761980902912-433: The time of the original Star Wars ; evidently they met only in the 1980s. Their mutual admiration "did wonders for [Campbell's] visibility" and obscured the tracks of Lucas in the "despised genre" science fiction; " the epics make for an infinitely classier set of influences." In classical music, Richard Wagner 's operas were a deliberate attempt to create a new kind of Gesamtkunstwerk ('total work of art'), transforming
2968-465: The words "this is not a pipe", the truth of which depends entirely on whether the word ceci (in English, "this") refers to the pipe depicted—or to the painting or the word or sentence itself. M.C. Escher 's art also contains many self-referential concepts such as hands drawing themselves. A word that describes itself is called an autological word (or autonym ). This generally applies to adjectives, for example sesquipedalian (i.e. "sesquipedalian"
3024-437: Was a deliberate attempt to model a 20th-century mythology patterned after the birth-rebirth motif described by the anthropologist and folklorist James George Frazer . J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a poem titled Mythopoeia following a discussion on the night of 19 September 1931 at Magdalen College, Oxford with C. S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson , in which he intended to explain and defend creative myth-making. The poem describes
3080-515: Was founded in 1967 by Glen H. GoodKnight . Originally composed of discussion groups based in the Los Angeles area, it expanded to include organized branches across North America; in 1972 it assimilated the Tolkien Society of America. Membership is open to those who read, study, or write in the genres of myth and fantasy. Three periodical publications are produced by the society: In addition to
3136-560: Was to surrender to the flow." The black metal band Immortal's lyricist Harald Nævdal has created a mythological realm called Blashyrkh filled with demons, battles, winter landscapes, woods, and darkness, described by the band as a northern "Frostdemon" realm. The Mythopoeic Society exists to promote mythopoeic literature, with conferences, books, periodicals, and the Mythopoeic Awards . Tolkien: C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: Lucas: Self-reference Self-reference
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