Sharing the Psychosis?

[Bill Ferny]

Middle Earth has been the hot topic in my house for the last couple of months. Spurred by the movies, my purchase a few months of ago of UT, and my wife’s re-reading of LotRs (she read it when she was seven! but forgot most of it). My wife is a C.S. Lewis and fairy tale fanatic with a passing interest in the LotRs. However, she’s been reading this forum lately, perhaps curious about what’s been absorbing so much of my time this past month and a half.

A couple of nights ago, she read a passage by Tolkien from the UT: “Who was ‘Gandalf’?… I do not (of course) know the truth of the matter, and if I did it would be a mistake to be more explicit than Gandalf was.” She said that Tolkien wrote like he actually believed that Gandalf and Middle Earth really existed. She then pointed out a number of posts from this forum, and said, its like all of you really believe that Middle Earth existed. I have to admit that a thread I recently started is a rather serious discussion about the biological and ontological nature of half-orcs and the uruk-hai.

I replied: “Well, Tolkien did create a world that had a history, a background, a feeling of reality. He was one of the first, if not the very first, to take fairy tale to fantasy world. What he created sometimes feels like you could actually walk into it. Could you create something like that if part of you didn’t believe in what you were writing?”

She asked: “Then he did believe in it?”

I replied: “Maybe. At least a part of him. And for me to feel like I could walk into that world, maybe a part of me believes in it too, or at least wants to.”

She responded: “Then what you are telling me is, is that all of you have adopted JRR Tolkien’s psychosis.”

I answered: “Well… ok… Yeah! So what?”

She just raised her eyebrow and gave me that too familiar skeptical look (not that I don’t deserve that look most of the time). So, I suppose that on some level Tolkien was a bit crazy, at least in regard to Middle Earth, and so, maybe, am I.

I can’t think of any other work of literature that has absorbed so much of my time, spurred so much curiosity and imagination, or made me think as much as LotRs has, except the bible or perhaps the Summa Theologia (though the later is probably only a close runner with LotRs). Only one other modern writer, Etienne Gilson, inspires as much devotion from me as Tolkien does. I’ve only read one other series of fantasy novels in the past ten years or so, and that was Harry Potter, and aside from Beowulf and Jane Austin, I don’t think I’ve read much fiction of my own choosing, outside of college courses, during my whole adult life. Of course, I read all kinds of stuff during my high school years, like Lewis and others (and I admit that I read most of Louis Lamour’s corpus back then [img]smilies/eek.gif[/img] ), but pretty much my fiction yen and yang has been Tolkien ever since seventh grade when my best friend suggested that I buy the LotRs paperbacks.

So am I a helpless Tolkien psychotic? [img]smilies/confused.gif[/img]