This article examines the function of folklore as both a reflection and a production of national and cultural identity in contemporary fantasy literature, utilising a comparative analysis of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001). Tolkien uses folklore to create a mythopoeic universe that focusses on cultural continuity, rootedness, and inherited tradition. Gaiman, on the other hand, uses folklore in a postmodern and diasporic way, where identity is broken up, mobile, and based on belief and memory. Utilising theories of cultural memory, nationalism, and myth criticism, this research contends that fantasy fiction serves as a literary domain where folklore is reinterpreted to address issues of belonging, heritage, and power across many historical settings.

folklore, fantasy fiction, cultural identity, national mythology, Tolkien, Gaiman, mythopoeia, diaspora, cultural memory.

J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Tree and Leaf (London: Harper Collins, 2001).

Neil Gaiman, American Gods (New York: William Morrow, 2001).

Alan Dundes, Sacred Narrative (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006).

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: New World Library, 2008).

Anderson, Imagined Communities.

Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

Gaiman, American Gods.

Assmann, Cultural Memory.

Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1963)