What’s always puzzled me since I started this class was how Tolkien could call his legendarium “history”. Yes, he sets it in a timeline with our world (modern day being called the seventh age while the events of LOTR take place in the third) but to use that as a justification for it being history sounds absurd. And yet, he writes in his letters that “Mine is not an ‘imaginary’ world, but an imaginary historical moment on ‘Middle-earth’”, a Middle-earth which he believes is “the abiding place of Men, the objectively real world” (Letter 183). Tolkien, in designing his mythology for England, clearly sees it as critical that, just as the Odyssey is based in a real sea, LOTR is set in a “real” world, that is, as real as you can get with thousands of years of separation. However, he still believes that his world is historical, that the entire story is an imaginary historical moment. This seems in direct contrast to his goal of creating a mythology, and it’s in that contrast that we find Tolkien’s unique definition for what is truly “history”.
In The Notion Club Papers, night 65, the reader is treated to a discussion on history and mythology, with it being said that as one goes back, real history becomes more mythical. This is followed, on the next page, by the challenge of what real history is, namely that it requires a person of the past to tell their story from a flawed memory, then relay that to the next generation (227-28). History, then, is inherently flawed, requiring trust in a biased source’s memory, which then gets told to another person, then another, then another as these stories are passed down. We view the past through a biased lens, relying on our memory when, if you asked me, I couldn’t even tell you what I ate for dinner four days ago! From this exchange, it seems like what Tolkien is trying to establish is that history, as we see it, should be studied knowing it’s false in some regards, that one person in the chain of retellings could have easily added in a fictitious detail based on how they were feeling at the time they told it, or their perspective on the event.
Compounded over hundreds of years (thousands in the context of LOTR) and it has to be wondered how much of what we consider historical fact is truly fact, and how much is simply “from the profundity of the emotions and perceptions that begot them, and from the multiplication of them in many minds” (Notion Club, 228). From this, it seems to me that Tolkien viewed historical events and mythology to differ in degree, not kind. Take Beowulf for example, a story of a town powerless to attacks from the monster, Grendel. It seems clear to any reader that Grendel himself is a work of fiction, and yet the feeling that Grendel brings, one of helplessness and fear of attack, rings true for the people who wrote Beowulf. They lived in a society fraught with internal and external strife, and constant fear. In this way, the emotion of Beowulf preserves a sort of emotional history. Over time, with each new iteration, the emotions of the person telling the story change it, and what was once seen as an unstoppable enemy becomes an invulnerable monster. Given this perspective, if you still want to hold that history and myth are distinct, you must ask the question of at what point a story becomes too outlandish. To me, and I would imagine Tolkien as well, any answer to this question would be far too arbitrary to be taken seriously. History, then, begins to look a lot like myth.
And yet this raises several uncomfortable implications: are we to consider every tale from history as myth? Should a historian a thousand years uncover a copy of Fourth Wing or A Court of Thorns and Roses and take it to be history changed iteratively over time? Obviously, this seems absurd, but where is the distinction? Tolkien seems to have an answer: the roots of true mythology lie "in human Being; and coming down the scale, in the springs of History and in the designs of Geography — I mean, well, in the pattern of our world as it uniquely is, and of the events in it as seen from a distance" (Notion Club, 227). In other words, what separates myth-as-history from pure fiction is whether the story has roots in something real and unchanging. Fourth Wing is set in no place you can visit. The Odyssey is a different matter entirely; today, right now, you can sail the Mediterranean and traverse the same waters Odysseus was said to have crossed. The sea is still there. That geographic continuity is what makes it harder to simply dismiss. Our perspectives and emotions change constantly, distorting the same piece of information over and over again, but if there’s something constant, unchanging, that remains throughout, it gives the story truth, enough to imagine that at one point, maybe the story was true. If I can stand on the same soil in which an ancient hero once did, then maybe at some point, a version of that hero was really there too. That is history.
This, to me, is the point of labeling our time as the “seventh age” in Tolkien’s legendarium: that there be some consistent truth carried over, even in the land itself. Thousands of years removed, Tolkien crafted Middle-earth to be based on the Old World, with the Shire matching latitudes with England and the rest of the land extending outward from there. This is what makes Tolkien’s mythology an “imaginary historical moment.” The story is set on the same earth we inhabit. Yes, the land has changed over thousands of years, but it remains continuous; just as you can sail the Mediterranean today, you can imagine traversing that same space as the Fellowship once did. Tolkien, then, was not simply creating a work of fiction for England, but a kind of imagined history, one grounded enough in the physical world that a reader might feel a connection to it in the very ground beneath their feet, and through that, a sense of identity.
-MC
Image: A map of Europe overlaid over the map of Middle Earth, to scale
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