Reality Theory

[mindil]

This is a new theory that I am proposing. It is a new way to look at the Legendarium in the light of HoME and the History of the Hobbit. I’ve searched a bit in fandom and haven’t seen anything like it, though if I’m reinventing someone’s wheel, I’d love to see what’s been done already by others.

The idea I’m proposing is interesting in itself, but it can be made into a fascinating project, similar to the New Silmarillion, a project of weight that attracted me to the Barrow Downs in the first place.

The idea is simply this: Some scenes in HoME/HotH have a compelling immediacy; some of the “story as foreseen” sketches and furiously scribbled sections likewise have an urgent immediacy. CT’s comments on the Lost Road (LR) and the Notion Club Papers (NCP) report that JRRT indeed had vivid dreams of the sort described in those stories. The LR and NCP themselves insist that such dreams merge into some sort of reality. Tom Shippey (RtME) and CT (HoME) and Letters all document that JRRT believed to some extent that his stories were real. In fact, it tends to seem like JRRT believed quite fully in the reality of Arda, but wouldn’t risk his relationships by saying so. Further, fandom has intuited for decades that people can “fall into middle earth,” and JRRT’s works (On Fairy Stories, LR, NCP) insist that such group intuitions are often reliable.

The way JRRT sidled his dream experiences very hesitantly into the notice even of his closest friends (only briefly, through the vehicles of LR and NCP) shows how cautious he was about discussing them. It is possible that the raw material CT sifted for HoME was full of much more explicitly vivid experiences of Middle Earth, that CT left out from respect for his father’s desire not to seem crazy.

In short, I believe that many scenes or snippets of scenes in the Legendarium were experienced by JRRT personally in Arda, either through dreams or through some access to an Alternate Universe where Arda resides. In one way or another, he was sometimes (often or occasionally?) actually in contact with or even inside Arda. This is true even if Arda was only a product of lucid, vivid dreaming.

But while certain parts of the Legendarium were accessed this way, other parts were not, and were invented the way any other author does. And yet a third subset were guessed at based on the parts that were experienced directly.

What I would love to do is to tease out what “really happened” (if you believe it was a dream), or what really happened (if you believe in AU), separate from what JRRT confected, and further, figure the nature of his experiences of the “real” parts, and the authorial motivations for the concocted parts. But to do that requires a large team. I can’t do it myself.

[mindil]

But I’ll make a start. For starters, the Notion Club Papers provide an illuminating window into the limitations and possibilities of these direct experiences. Ramer, Tolkien’s alter-ego, explains that he can’t very well choose what to see, he can only aim in a direction and absorb what comes up. Further, once he has experienced a scene, he cannot experience it again; he can only remember it as best as his memory will provide, and it often evaporates, just as dreams usually do. Third, speech, in these experiences, is understood telepathically, and he cannot usually remember the actual words at all, only their content and something of their flavor. Fourth, he has an easier time entering into the experiences of inanimate objects than of conscious beings. Finally, when he did observe conscious beings, he usually was not apparent to them, and only very rarely was physically present enough to interact.

My extrapolations from these facts are as follows. First, knowing he would see a scene directly only once, JRRT endeavored to collect as much ancillary information about a scene as he could before attempting to experience directly the object of his interest. Then, when he would focus on the scene directly, he could attend much better both to the details and to the bigger picture. So, for example, he probably hung out, ghost-like, in many hobbit taverns, popping in and out over many ME decades, listening to stories, trying to puzzle out the continuation of the Baggins saga, before he put himself into the party field to see what really happened. Since he could only attend that party once, he made sure to know as much about it as he could beforehand. But making heads and tails of the snippets of tales he heard was a major labor, full of guess-work and mistakes, which accounts for the many quite different versions of the beginning of FotR in HoME.

For example, JRRT might have listened to tales told about the War of the Ring well into the Fourth Age, collecting stories from guardhouses and pubs in Minas Tirith before moving closer to the citadel. And he may have failed to see the scenes he wanted most. He probably did not manage to attend Aragorn and Arwen’s wedding, and he certainly did not see Arwen’s end in Lorien.

All this explains why, in HoME and HotH, he was so often far off the mark in his original understandings of the story he was trying to tell. It also explains the desperate rush of some drafts and the frequent “story foreseens”; when he got a vision, he had to dash it onto paper before he lost it.

[mindil]

Second, the telepathic reception of Elvish, Westron and the rest can explain everything about JRRT’s endless tinkering with the languages and the names. He had an intense, but totally elusive sense of the feel of those languages, and of the idea of how they work. He found Welsh and Finnish closest to the feel he remembered, and desperate to reconstruct the languages he longed for, he started to re-invent them, using these similar languages as models. Some phonological rules felt right, some grammatical structures felt right, but none were precisely what was at the edge of consciousness, in just the way that so many dream experiences remain just out of reach. So when he wondered what Aragorn’s name was, and tried a dozen options, he was trying to hit the one that felt closest to some slippery sense of what that name ought to be.

Third, JRRT’s affinity for the inanimate denizens of alternate reality (here, Arda) explains why his landscapes are the most vivid parts of his stories.

Fourth, it is likely, Smith of Wooten Major style, that at some point, JRRT stopped having dreams/visions, and had to finish his work on imagination and extrapolation alone. This would account for the radical difference of many of his later changes to the Legendarium.

Finally, I propose that JRRT was visiting Arda from childhood, and that he was a regular guest as a child at the Cottage of Lost Play. Since the stories he heard there were all heard telepathically, he heard them with the understanding of a child – which would make Thu a giant cat in BoLT I, yet later Sauron would be understood as a maia. A child would register Tinfang Warble and Goblin Feet (written up faithfully, though years later), and an adult would register the beauty of the Eldar.

And of course, he himself was Eriol/ Aelfwine. He heard the Silmarillion directly from the elves of Tol Eressea. But how many versions did he hear? And how complete were the stories? Were his dream-visions cut off sometimes? Did they start in the middle or skip essential facts (like Beren being a man/ elf)? These are the things I would love to tease out of a close reading of HoME.

[mindil]

Following this line of thinking leads to all sorts of interesting things. But I think I've posted enough for starters.

If any of you are interested, I've got another page of speculation to share (the stuff above was 2 1/2 pages) that is already written, and then - as you like it.

I hope you are as intrigued as I am.

Mindil

[mindil]

By the way, this is NOT a discussion of canon!

Whatever JRRT invented is just as much canon as what he experienced. I'm just curious to know what parts of canon he experienced or learned directly, and what parts of canon he made up for story-telling purposes.

And, if possible, what direct experiences he might have had that he left out (and are not canon), and why.

In short, I want to know two things: What really happened (both in canon and out), and what we can see of JRRT's pure authorial craft.

[Huinesoron]

Hmm. I feel like the biggest issue you'd need to address to make this stand up (whether as 'Tolkien drew inspiration from a series of connected dreams' or 'Tolkien actually dreamed of actual Arda') is Numenor. The one dream we conclusively know Tolkien actually incorporated into Middle-earth was the Great Wave - so why didn't he write down anything about Numenor until 20 years after he penned the Fall of Gondolin?

... and I can actually answer it straight away. The opening pages of HoME V include this line:

It was too long a way round to what I really wanted to make, a new version of the Atlantis legend.

In your scenario, Tolkien would have, probably after his conversation with C.S. Lewis, deliberately focussed on the Wave, and received something similar to Lowdham's dreams from the Notion Club Papers. The earliest extant Numenor (or "Numar") text already sets it into the Legendarium, by mentioning Tol Eressea, so it's clear that he made the link right from the start.

(Christopher makes mention of an 'Atlantis-haunting', which may just be the Great Wave again.)

I assume you've put together a list of times Tolkien may have implied he dreamed something? I'd be interested to see that. The Great Wave and Lowdham's Report are obvious inclusions, as is the Cottage of the Play of Sleep. The opening of the Book of Lost Tales also implies he dreamt of faery music:

Then slept Eriol, and through his dreams there came a music thinner and more pure than any he heard before, and it was full of longing. Indeed it was as if pipes of silver or flutes of shape most slender-delicate uttered crystal notes and threadlike harmonies beneath the moon upon the lawns; and Eriol longed in his sleep for he knew not what.

This is a concept that comes up a few times, notably in connection with Tinfang Warble:

"Tinfang Warble has gone heartbreaking in the Great Lands, and many a one in those far regions will hear his piping in the dusk outside tonight."

What else have you got listed? I'm inclined against attributing the Children of Hurin to dreams - there's too much resonance with Scandinavian legends - and am dubious about suggesting it of any part of the Third Age. LotR and all its related texts ring too true as an author's process, whereas the Book of Lost Tales in particular has a 'sprang full-formed' feel to it. But you, having thought longer on it, may know otherwise.

(Random thought: I say 'any part of the Third Age', but Eeriness, dated 1914, has a certain resonance with Frodo's vision in Galadriel's mirror. A fun thought experiment: what if the dreams & visions mentioned in LotR are all Tolkien had to work from - how much of the story can you reconstruct?)

~

I will say, also, that I'm glad you haven't stumbled onto the path of "It must have been a dream because nobody could create that!". Tolkien absolutely could have come up with every single idea in the Legendarium by himself; the only question is whether he did.

hS