1927 Cambridge Hist. Jrnl. 2 102 Even Solon, with every possible advantage, does not escape the new learned mythopoeia or unscrupulous literary fiction of the third and second centuries. 1959 H. BLOOM Shelley's Mythmaking i. 8, I do not claim that all of Shelley's major and mature poems are mythopoeic, especially in the precise and narrow sense of mythopoeia that I insist upon here. 1970 Listener 30 July 154/2 Science is not immune to mythopoeia. 1986 Library Mar. 104 ‘Darkness echoing’: reflections on the return of mythopoeia in some recent poems. 1997 New Yorker 22 Sept. 106/1 As she stood in Jacobs' hallway..she experienced one of those momentsmuch celebrated in fashion-industry mythopoeiaof mysterious but incontrovertible revelation.

1882 C.F. KEARY Outl. Primitive Belief 320 (note) It is in keeping with the principles of mythopoesis that Calypso's land..should be in the midst of the sea. 1936 Speculum 11 42 A good dog was doubtless as important and valuable as was a destrier..; and it was probably inevitable that mythopoiesis should enhance the virtues of the one as of the other. 1949 Yale French Stud. No. 4. 35 Mature and responsible artists experience an irresistible pull towards mythopoesis. 1998 N.Y. Times 5 Apr. II. 38/3 Warren Leight's play ‘Sideman’,..doesn't have any mythopoesis to support: it's about a fictional (but believable), obscure trumpet player in the 1950's named Gene.

1846 G. GROTE Hist. Greece I. I. xvi. 472 The mythopic fertility of the Greeks. 1874 A.H. SAYCE Princ. Compar. Philol. ix. 376 The mythopic age is the period of primitive unconscious childhood and barbarism. 1909 Glasgow Herald 8 Jan. 6/4 Quite unconsciously to himself the mythopoeic, dramatising faculties set to work. 1947 D. STAUFFER in Eng. Inst. Ess. 1947 (1948) 33 His language here approximates Wordsworth at his most philosophically mythopoeic. 1993 Daily Tel. 2 Jan. 16/6 These entries are never less than full, but vary in length..: those concerning mythopoeic fish, such as the carp, conger or pike, are naturally more extensive and complex.

Well, I did read The Worm Ouroboros, & am very glad I did. It knocks the pins out from under Tolkien as far as originality goes. Its date is 1926: Tolkien has taken his [E.R. Eddison’s] war-of-light-and-darkness theme, his return-of-the-king theme, his elves-orcs etc. characterization theme (though he improves it a good deal), his mock-chronological apparatus, all straight from the earlier book. Tolkien is more intelligent, I think: there’s a silly streak in Eddison, but there’s a genuine imaginative focus that I kept missing in Tolkien.

Perhaps Eddison was forced to wing the "details" of his fantasy epic, and so exercised his imagination in ways that Tolkien would never have dreamed of.