The little Creator of great art. An intermedial character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s short story “Leaf by Niggle”

Abstract

The article attempts to consider J.R.R. Tolkien’s story “Leaf by Niggle” through an intermediate optics, since the figure of the artist Niggle and created by him Creations created by him turns out to be in the center of the narrative, and to outline methodological principles for identifying the type of an intermediate character in the structure of a literary text. First, the paper briefly outlines the methodological vector of research and problematizes the situation of verbal “depiction” in the literature of works of other arts, preliminarily defines the category of an intermediate character and describes a consistent scheme for its identification in the text, and then analyzes the selected work from the proposed point of view.