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.