File:The Lord of the Rings as a Framed Text.svg

English: The Lord of the Rings has a complex structure, both in the main text and outside it. The text contains embedded poems, images, maps, and a frame story (as Bilbo shows his memoirs and Frodo writes his). The frame story is accompanied by a found manuscript conceit, that the Red Book of Westmarch has survived for thousands of years and has been translated to the main text of the printed book. The printed book contains a complex set of additional texts, including a prologue and many appendices. The additional texts effectively frame the main text, elaborate upon it, and support it with many details which tend to confirm it as real and possessing depth. The discussion of supposed translation by an editor-translator implies a process of pseudotranslation. The editor-translator has some resemblance to Tolkien, a linguist and philologist familiar with documents in ancient languages edited and annotated by many hands. The overall structure creates a strong impression that the secondary world of the book is real, and supports Tolkien's desire that England should have a mythology of its own.