Real and Fake History: Can it be the Same?

[MatthewM]

I'm aware theyre have been threads similiar to this, but not exactly the same.

We are all here because we share a love for J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, most notably The Lord of the Rings. I'll speak for myself for a bit---I spend countless amounts of time within the realms of Middle-earth, whether I am reading the text, watching the movies, participating in forums like this one, painting the miniatures, admiring my decked out room and all the collectibles, etc. I even find myself almost always thinking of some sort of Lord of the Rings related thought. I find myself thinking like or relating to certain characters and their decision making. Whenever I go for a bike ride or a walk I am scaling Middle-earth. Call it Tolkien syndrome or whatever you like, I am addicted, and it's been this way for years...it's here to stay and I love it!

But the thing is...kind of ironic...it is fantasy...not real, never happened (although sometimes we all think otherwise ). I spend insane amounts of time in a fantasy world, and it's not like I'm trying to escape the real one. I'm not depressed, although I've seen my share of tradegy for such a young age. I lost my mother a year ago, and the pain will never heal. Besides that, I live a life I am happy with. So I know that I am not trying to "get away" from life...I just wish things that were in Middle-earth came to our earth.

There are two kinds of history. Real and fake. As a history major, I fully appreciate both. But just how real is "real" history to us living in our age? Of course most of it really happend, it took place hundreds and thousands of years ago. But when you think about it---isn't it just as real to us as a fictional work such as The Lord of the Rings is? We have history textbooks that give us detailed accounts of what happened. We read them and study them. We find a similiar idea with The Silmarillion, a history of Middle-earth (although I haven't read it yet). We have these tales such as LotR and the Sil that give us complete knowledge of this world that came out of the mind of one man. But all history is the sequence of events coming from the decision making and the minds of one man at a time. Even as a group, the decisions that we read of and outcomes that came had to be pulled back to a starting point, or one man's idea or plan. This is what I find to mostly be the case. So to us, isn't real history just as real as Tolkien's? We can never go back in history, we can never see the grandeor that was Rome, we can never see the peoples of the Medieval ages, we can never shake hands with George Washington. The list goes on endlessly, but what I'm saying is...we can't go back in time or to Middle-earth. So doesn't that make it almost as real as history? What's the difference? We can't go to either. We can study both. Middle-earth existed in the mind of one man, but he left us a textbook to follow and to study, and to live. Just like you can do for a real textbook of documented history.

I believe that the world of Middle-earth truly has something special, and we give it life everyday by relating our time to it. It is a place of beauty and wonder, and magic. We all want to go there and walk with The Fellowship.

Do you think it's possible that by diving into Middle-earth and it's characters so much, we become it and/or them in a sense? Do you think that Middle-earth exists within us, living with us and our imaginations? I do.