Prosimetric Traditions in the Medieval Storyworlds of Tolkien and Jin Yong

Abstract

The use of prosimetrum in the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien has attracted brief scholarly attention, most notably in the form of Carl Phelpstead’s study of Tolkien’s debt to the prosimetric tradition of Norse saga literature, via his medievalist forebear, William Morris. Tolkien’s employment of the prosimetric form was far more extensive than any of his forebears’, however, in a manner not dissimilar to that of the legendary Hong Kong author Louis Cha (pen-name Jin Yong). Cha, popularly called ‘China’s Tolkien’ by Anglophone media — an apt comparison often made for the wrong reasons — was a modern pioneer of the genre of martial-chivalric romances known as wuxia. He distinguished himself from his peers through his novels’ deeper engagement with traditional Chinese culture, most notably history and literature; essentially, he revolutionised the historical-romance aspect of the wuxia genre. One of his major innovations was, like Tolkien, an extensive use of prosimetrum; his novels contain regularly interpolated poetry which is sometimes contemporary to the specific historical setting, and sometimes earlier than it. The proposed paper would explore the role of prosimetrum in the construction of the medieval aesthetic in selected works of Tolkien and Jin Yong. With reference to the history and development of the long prosimetric traditions of the authors’ respective literary cultures, the paper would specifically seek to examine the effect of interpolated poetry — including its genre, age and prosimetric context — on the temporal dimension of the medieval storyworld. It would demonstrate that both authors were influenced by medieval literary traditions which themselves employed prosimetrum to add historical veracity through temporal depth, and that both authors’ independent-yet-parallel replications and expansions of those impulses speak to the universal and timeless value of prosimetrum in the literary reconstruction of the past.