Genres
Legendarium
A literary collection of legends; the word Tolkien used for his own mythology, the body of tales behind The Lord of the Rings.
A legendarium is a literary collection of legends. The word is a medieval Latin noun that originally referred mainly to texts recounting the lives of saints; a 14th-century Anjou Legendarium survives. Its modern sense comes from J. R. R. Tolkien, who applied it to his own mythology in four letters written between 1951 and 1955, while trying to get his unfinished Silmarillion published. "This legendarium ends with a vision of the end of the world, its breaking and remaking", he wrote to Milton Waldman in 1951, and in a 1955 letter he described his trilogy as part of that whole, its conclusion. Tolkien's later scholars still use the word for the phases and layers of the Middle-earth writings at large.
For writers it names the deep structure of mythopoeia: not a single invented myth but the interconnected shelf of them behind a setting, the project Tolkien defended as sub-creation.