tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5746173806126403959.post1503858814744278525..comments2023-11-07T06:20:12.181-08:00Comments on Tolkien: Medieval and Modern: All I Have to Do is Dre-e-e-e-eam, Dream, Dream, Dream, Dre-e-e-e-eam…."Tolkien: Medieval and Modern"http://www.blogger.com/profile/04348913969813157482noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5746173806126403959.post-10923555059355520032011-04-23T13:33:42.257-07:002011-04-23T13:33:42.257-07:00Tolkien really is much more concerned with the pas...Tolkien really is much more concerned with the past than the future, or even the present, in his stories; with “going back,” as you quite accurately put it, to experience times and places now lost. This theme seems to continue through all of Tolkien’s work, actually: as a philologist, he often focused on tracing words back to their very earliest origins; as a translator, he focused primarily on mythologies of different nations, some of the earliest stories of their people. And the languages and myths of other nations (and his own) were, of course, the inspiration for Tolkien to create his own mythology for England.<br /><br />With regard to dreams, have you considered the significance of some of the more ambiguous dreams in LotR? Most of them seem to be premonitions of future events, but some of them are difficult to interpret. For example, at Tom Bombadil’s house, Frodo dreams of Gandalf’s rescue from Orthanc, but Pippin dreams of the close winding willow branches and Merry dreams of water rushing to drown him and then of a soggy bog. Are these past events (Old Man Willow?), future events (the cleansing of Isengard?), or something else entirely? And of the four Hobbits, why is Sam the only one that night who doesn’t dream at all?<br /><br />You make a good point about Tolkien’s work being ‘true’ in different ways, even though the ultimate, complete universe was Tolkien’s sub-creation. By using elements of languages, myths, characters, episodes, and, of course, Dreams, Tolkien used fact to put together a mythology so thorough, so complex, and so profound as to be ‘real.’<br /><br />Courtney Jacobson"Tolkien: Medieval and Modern"https://www.blogger.com/profile/04348913969813157482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5746173806126403959.post-74385265252330669112011-04-10T15:18:28.120-07:002011-04-10T15:18:28.120-07:00Nicely put. And yet, what if we did try to unders...Nicely put. And yet, what if we did try to understand, following Flieger's suggestion to look to Tolkien's use of Dunne? This is the real question that I asked at the end of class on Wednesday and which you pose here: what if the things that Tolkien's characters learned from their dreams are not "invented" but "real"--what would that mean for us as readers who ourselves want them to be "real"? Or, perhaps, as you suggest, it is in fact more satisfying *not* to try to answer this question, leaving it a deep mystery.<br /><br />RLFB"Tolkien: Medieval and Modern"https://www.blogger.com/profile/04348913969813157482noreply@blogger.com