tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5746173806126403959.post2120888777246572594..comments2023-11-07T06:20:12.181-08:00Comments on Tolkien: Medieval and Modern: Taking Root: Tolkien and the Land"Tolkien: Medieval and Modern"http://www.blogger.com/profile/04348913969813157482noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5746173806126403959.post-46807134774158102952014-04-25T21:27:49.436-07:002014-04-25T21:27:49.436-07:00K.,
Thanks for the post. You raise some really in...K.,<br /><br />Thanks for the post. You raise some really interesting issues and tie together some of the core issues of Tolkien’s work: myth, history, immortality, reality, and fantasy. And as you describe, they’re not easy to tease out and treat discretely.<br /><br />I think your comments—on what Tolkien might have thought the connection between the more fantastic elements (like immortal elves) and the historical continuties he seems to have elaborately cultivated upon the firm belief of the truth (representational and, in some ways, historical) of myth were—deserve some further and closer analysis.<br /><br />To pick a puckish thread at the edge of the question: Is it possible that he felt that, somewhere in the distant past, there must have <i>actually, historically</i> been something, someone <i>like</i> an “elf,” in his sense? After all, he seems to <i>derive</i> so much about them…<br /><br />Moreover, if we can take the <i>Notion Club</i> character’s words on the <i>éala éarendel</i> verse to represent Tolkien’s own view (an open question), one wonders how much and what Tolkien might have intuited were the resonant truths lost and hidden behind the few, tiny, slight ancient traces which have come down to us. One suspects his elaborate, lifelong (not to say obsessive) elaboration and discernment of them was for him a pursuit of lost truths.<br /><br />I rather suspect his private thoughts (if we don’t have them all in his work) might surprise and baffle us somewhat, as children of a positivist age, but that’s merely my intution of what was is, of course, now lost to the world of Men…<br /><br />So, just to give you some room for thought, yes, even given the landscape as an anchor of permanence, we can really wonder and examine just how real, how true, and in what sense of reality and truth, Tolkien meant to conjoin his and all our Middle-Earth–Midgard–Midden-geard–<i>oikumenë</i>–‘ecumenical’ places, times, events, and people.<br /><br />Bill the Heliotrope"Tolkien: Medieval and Modern"https://www.blogger.com/profile/04348913969813157482noreply@blogger.com