What's "real," anyway?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

I've been reading through the thread "All made up?" (begun by davem, credit where credit etc) and it's got me to thinking about the 'reality' of Middle Earth.

Now, I know that The Lord of the Rings does not chronicle 'real' historical events, but at the same time there is a profound reality to the book. And I'm not just talking about the verisimilitude of the book, the sense that is 'feels' real thanks to the incredible detail and coherence of it all. I'm talking about the reality that all art has (or aspires to).

I mean, no piece of art is real. Hamlet is not a real person, but an actor performing a role. If he is doing a good job in an effective production, then it's more real than a bad actor in an indifferent version of the play. But that's not to say, of course, that Hamlet -- or any fictional character -- is fake or utterly divorced from reality. There is something in art that is real. To quote from Hamlet himself, "the purpose of art is, as it were, to hold a mirror up to nature."

So here's where I'm going with this. How much reality is there in the art of Tolkien's creation? When we put LotR beside something like Hamlet is it as real as Shakespeare's play? Put more accurately, is it real in the same way?

On the one hand, I think it's easy to see Tolkien's art as being less real, or further removed from reality, insofar as the mirror that he gives us does not reflect a nature that we ourselves live in. On the other hand, that seems to me a kind of honesty: it's almost as though Tolkien is admitting that art is not real, and so he's not going to try and fool us into thinking it's real (that's a trick like Sauron would play) and so the most realistic thing he can do is to create an art that is clearly artful. Its ability to announced itself as art makes it more honestly real!

Does this make any sense at all?

I suppose what I am getting at is the question of where and in what ways does the art that brings Middle Earth to life impinge upon, reflect, engage, connect with reality? What is real about Middle Earth? Is it possible to see Frodo, orcs, a magic ring, Ents and all the richness of Tolkien's fabulous world as being real in the same way that Hamlet is real, or a painting of a pond by Degas?

One last thought-fragment, that probably has nothing to do with the above, but something tells me it might -- Oscar Wilde wrote that "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written." Is the whole question of 'the real' in relation to books a red herring? The Lord of the Rings is just "well written," end of story?